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 God 
 
 and the Soul 
 
 An Essay towards Fundamental Religion 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD A. ARMSTRONG, B.A. 
 
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GOD AND THE SOUL 
 
 An Essay towards Fundamental Religion 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD A. ARMSTRONG, B.A. 
 
 Author of ' The Trinity and The Incarnation^' 
 ^ Back to Jesus,' dr^c. 
 
 PEOPLE'S EDITION 
 
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 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 XonDon 
 
 BRITISH & FOREIGN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 ESSEX HALL, ESSEX STREET, STRAND 
 
 1904 
 
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PREFACE. 
 
 The Essay here presented was originally pub- 
 lished in the year 1896, and then had the happy 
 fortune to win the good opinion of writers in various 
 quarters of the religious world. It is now offered in 
 a humbler dress in view of the widely extended 
 interest in religious problems shown by those to 
 whom it is of importance that books should be cheap. 
 The standpoint is that of one who heartily and 
 and without after-thought rejoices in every advance 
 of knowledge in every field, and desires to retain in 
 his thought no opinions whatever that clash with or 
 are contradicted by the newer knowledge ; one who, 
 nevertheless, believes that the religious element in 
 man is primary and permanent^ and that God has 
 direct messages for the human soul, and that the 
 human soul has direct access to the living God. 
 
 In one section the argument might have been 
 made much stronger had the book been written a 
 few years later. In the chapter on The Problem of 
 Evil there is a paragraph on the sufferings of the 
 animals, comprising an attempt to meet the view 
 which sees in the animal kingdom only a 
 
 Nature red in tooth and claw 
 With ravine. 
 
 Let that paragraph stand for what it is worth. 
 But a wonderful light has recently been cast 
 on the life of the wood and the plain, the moun- 
 
 15435G 
 
Preface. 
 
 tain and the stream, by such writers as Prince 
 Krapotkin in his Mutual Aid^ and such close, patient, 
 and loving observers as Mr. W. J. Long in his 
 School of the Woods and other delightful and 
 illuminating works. It is not too much to say 
 that these writers, and such as these, have in the 
 last half-dozen years lifted a night-mare from the 
 heart of religious men, revealing the tribes of living 
 things as dwelling in an habitual atmosphere of 
 happiness and innocent joy. The fear of death or 
 ill, the pangs of hunger, the conflict for life have no 
 such part in the daily consciousness of the beasts of 
 the field and the fowls of the air as we had 
 learned to suppose ; and the newest natural history 
 endorses the sentiment of the maker of the ancient 
 mythic poem who conceived that after breathing the 
 breath of life into each fresh manner of living thing, 
 ^ God saw that it was good.' 
 
 A reader who knows anything of the writings 
 of the late Dr. Martineau will recognise my deep 
 indebtedness to him. Of the three fundamental 
 arguments of this Essay, presented respectively in 
 the second, third, and fourth chapters, the first two 
 are in the main drawn from him, and especially from 
 his Study of Religion, Of that work I have pub- 
 lished a short analysis and exposition for readers not 
 deeply trained in philosophy, in Messrs. James Clarke 
 • and Go's Small Books on Great Subjects^ No. XVII. 
 
 R. A. A. 
 Liverpool, April ^ 1904. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 €HAP AG-E 
 
 I. ON TRUSTING OUR FACULTIES , , * I 
 
 II. ON GOD REVEALED AS POWER • . • - ^S 
 
 III. ON GOD REVEALED AS RIGHTEOUSNESS . 55 
 
 IV. ON GOD REVEALED AS LOVE . . .80 
 V. ON THE PROBLEM OF EVIL . . . . I06 
 
 VI. ON MYSTICS AND MYSTICISM . . . '137 
 
 VII. WHAT THEN OF THE BIBLE? , . . • 158 
 
GOD AND THE SOUL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON TRUSTING OUR FACULTIES. 
 
 T REMEMBER, some years ago, hearing a sermon 
 -^ by a very brilliant and noble preacher in which 
 he described the main verities of Theism as not 
 being 'subject to the understanding at all.' 'They 
 never can be disproved or proved,' he said; but 
 they 'can be believed and loved.' . And then he 
 proceeded : ' These are the mysteries of the Christian 
 faith. None of them come under the decision of the 
 critical reason. If they are to be held, it is only by 
 faith that we can hold them ; for, in fact, the under- 
 standing is more against them than for them, and 
 experience seems rather to contradict them than to 
 support them.' 
 
 Now I dare say that the great preacher whose 
 words I have quoted would not care to be held 
 
2 On Tm sling our Faculties 
 
 exactly to these forms of expression ; but the 
 general view put forward of the grounds of religious 
 belief affords me an apposite point of departure for 
 the argument which I desire to state. If it be in- 
 deed the case that the understanding is more against 
 the leading affirmations of Theism than for them, 
 still more if experience rather contradicts them than 
 supports them, then all arguments in support of 
 the belief in God and his love and goodness are 
 a terrible mistake, misleading so far as they affect 
 thought at all, and, like all misleading utterances, 
 pernicious and perverse. But my contention from 
 first to last will be that the critical reason, the 
 understanding, so long as you do not put too great a 
 strain upon it, and expect it to do work for you out- 
 side the limits of its proper territory, is for the trust 
 and love of God, and not against it, and still more 
 that experience — the true scientific foundation of all 
 real knowledge — experience, which is prior to the 
 exercise of the critical reason or understanding 
 — the experience of the mind and soul — is the true 
 foundation of religious belief; that from a man's 
 inward experience the understanding has to take 
 its facts, and thence to reason out the justification 
 of belief in a God whom we may love and trust. 
 
 I go further. I say that if understanding and 
 experience were against belief in God, it would be 
 a positive immorality to nurse and foster in us that 
 belief. Understanding and experience are the 
 instruments of our nature for the creation nrd 
 
What Faith is 3 
 
 consolidation of belief, and we have no right to 
 set our minds to think and believe in contradiction 
 to them. That is to make against all human 
 progress and emancipation. And the great word 
 * faith ' is used in a wrong or degenerate sense, 
 when we are told by faith to hold beliefs which 
 critical reason and experience make against. Super- 
 stition, that mother of multiform evil, is nothing 
 else than the clinging to some belief in the misused 
 name of faith in despite of experience and reason. 
 Let us rescue the great word from that degradation. 
 The real faith which is a power for truth and good 
 is not the opponent, but the helper of understanding 
 and experience. Both the critical reason and the 
 experience of the inward man have their times of 
 dulness, inactivity, torpidity, non-illumination. Faith 
 is the unswerving trust, at such seasons, in the 
 enduring verity of those things, which in their 
 moments of power and illumination the critical 
 reason and the experience of the soul have taught 
 us. Faith is trust in our own highest and purest 
 self To reason and experience then, I shall 
 throughout this argument make my appeal. 
 
 To proceed, then, to the main topic of this 
 book : — 
 
 All those of us who have from time to time 
 been drawn into a discussion of our religion with 
 persons who have given up religious belief have, 
 I suppose, sometimes been thrown in upon ourselves, 
 quite baffled for a reply, by an antagonist who 
 
4 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 has roundly told us that we can know nothing at 
 all about God or the soul, that he never believes 
 what cannot be proved, and that as no one has ever 
 seen God or the soul it is useless to try to prove 
 their existence. 
 
 And our opponent is only expressing roughly a 
 kind of scepticism, a certain fundamental distrust of 
 our own faculties, which has pervaded a great deal 
 of powerful philosophical writing in many countries 
 and in all times. So that before we begin to try to 
 build up the argument for believing in God and his 
 Power and Goodness and Love, we find ourselves 
 bound at the outset to discuss whether we really 
 have any faculties which are capable of dealing with 
 such matters at all. 
 
 There is a wide-spread and still spreading 
 despair of any real religious knowledge whatever. 
 This despair, says Dr. Martineau, he who invites 
 men to trust their spiritual faculties must meet and 
 refute at the very beginning. * For if it be well 
 founded, every step of advance can only take us 
 further astray ; and if it be unfounded, it leaves us, 
 like a victim of the black art, imprisoned within a 
 magic circle, which, though needing but a breath 
 to blow it away, we cannot pass.* *We cannot 
 afford either to enter a paradise of fools or to 
 miss any Heaven of the wise, and must pause and 
 guard our steps where the ways divide. 
 
 Can we then really know anything about sacred 
 things ? Have we any real grounds for believing 
 
Is it all a Dream ? S 
 
 that our spiritual and intellectual impressions 
 represent anything more than our own feelings? 
 Is there any reason to believe that they come from 
 any power outside ourselves, or correspond to any 
 object or fact or truth outside ourselves ? 
 
 You know how vivid a dream may be, especially 
 in cases of fever. A dream dreamt in fever some- 
 times produces such an overwhelming sense of 
 reality that we remember it for years and years, 
 and can hardly believe that it was not real. Yet it 
 was all nothing more than a kaleidoscope, as it 
 were, within our own consciousness. There was 
 nothing whatever outside ourselves corresponding 
 to it. The horrible beast, or the dark pit, or the 
 terrific struggle, the supernatural being, or the 
 heavenly plains, or the ecstatic bliss, were nothing 
 whatever but dream, dream, dream, — the tumult 
 and fever of our own irresponsible brain. We 
 were certain at the time that it was all true. We 
 are certain now that there was not a rag or scrap 
 of truth about it. I have sometimes, in a series 
 of dreams, following swiftly one after another, said 
 to myself at each successive stage, *Now I know 
 that I was indeed dreaming just now, when I thought 
 that I was awake ; but this time I really know that 
 I am awake/ And yet, presently, it has turned out 
 that that * knowing ' was nothing but dream either, 
 just like that which went before it. 
 
 Well, then, may not all religious belief be a 
 dream after the same fashion ? Can any one prove 
 
6^ On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 that the prickings of conscience are anything more 
 than a phenomenon of which the beginning and the 
 end are in our own fancy ? Can any one prove that 
 the peace that comes in answer to earnest prayer 
 or the consolation that fell like dew on the spirit of 
 Jesus in Gethsemane, is anything more than a 
 reaction within the personal consciousness ? What 
 argument can there possibly be by which we can 
 confute a person who says that our intellectual and 
 moral and spiritual impressions are all dreams 
 without any objects answering to them outside our 
 own minds ? 
 
 Now in trying to meet this difficulty the first 
 thing to be observed is this : it i^not a difficulty 
 affecting our knowledge of religious matters only, 
 but it affects our knowledge all round, our know- 
 ledge of the physical world just as much as our 
 knowledge of the spiritual world. You say to me : 
 
 * How do you know that your religious impressions 
 are not all fancy ? ' I answer by saying to you, 
 
 * How do you know that your physical impressions 
 are not all fancy ? ' In our common arguments in 
 the street or in the parlour we meet plenty of people 
 who say, * Oh, your talk about hearing God's voice, 
 or feeling his presence, is all fancy;* but our friends 
 do not say, * Oh, your talk about seeing the houses 
 opposite, and hearing the railway-whistle, and feel- 
 ing the hardness of the pavement is all fancy.' Our 
 friends — even when religiously they are the most 
 complete Agnostics — are never agnostic about these 
 
Se77se Evidence y 
 
 things They are as sure that there is a draper's 
 shop opposite, and a tobacconist's round the corner, 
 or that the birds are singing in the wood, or that the 
 ice feels cold and the hearth feels hot, as we are. 
 That sort of scepticism does not turn up in practical 
 life as religious scepticism does. Nevertheless, the 
 argument for it is exactly the same. There arc 
 precisely analogous reasons for doubting whether 
 there is an}^ external world at all — whether there 
 are any tables or chairs, any great cities and green 
 fields, any wide waters and mighty mountains, any 
 stars or moon or sun — to those for doubting whether 
 there is any God. In both cases the doubt is 
 simply a doubt whether our own natural faculties 
 are instruments that tell the truth, whether our own 
 apparent experiences may be trusted as real and 
 actual. And so, though in the street and in the^ 
 parlour it is only the spiritual and not the physical 
 existences that are commonly doubted, in the specu- 
 lations of philosophers, in the reasonings of mighty 
 reasoners, the one set of beliefs is challenged just 
 as much as the other. 
 
 *Well, but,' you say, * we have the evidence of 
 our senses for the outward world and the things 
 that are in it. We see that table, and seeing is 
 believing. Or if we could imagine that our eyes are 
 deceiving us, we can come to it and give it a thump, 
 and the stinging of our fingers will tell us that it is 
 a real table. If we doubt whether that is a real wall, 
 we can try to walk through it, and we shall very 
 
8 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 quickly learn the truth.' But are you not going a 
 little too fast ? What is it that you really experi - 
 ence ? Simply certain sensations — all in yourself ! 
 You never get outside yourself. These experiences 
 all proceed from so many nerve-thrills of different 
 sorts. If I choose to say that it is all action and re- 
 action in your own nervous system, how can you 
 prove that there is anything more? Have you never 
 had * a singing in your ears ' which really was 
 nothing more ? Are you so very lucky as never to 
 have had a sudden sharp blow just between your 
 eyes, and did you not see a sudden flash of light, and 
 yet know that there was not any flash of light at all? 
 And in those fever-dreams, were not the physical 
 things which you seemed to see and hear and touch, 
 intensely real to you at the time ? And yet you 
 know now that they were less than thin air, the mere 
 dance and riot of your own disordered fancies, with- 
 out any external realities corresponding to them 
 Whatsoever. How are you going to prove then that 
 your senses of sight and touch and hearing are not 
 lying to you in like manner all the while, deluding 
 you with trick after trick, or rather with one long 
 treacl(ferous plot, from the day you are born to the 
 day you die ? 
 
 I have said all this, not because I expect to make 
 you doubt for a single moment the reality of the 
 visible, tangible world, not that I have ever doubted 
 it myself, not that I believe a single philosopher all 
 down the ages, however acutely he argued that it 
 
Our Assumptions 9 
 
 was all illusion, has ever really for a single instant 
 doubted it ; but merely to suggest to you that, 
 exactly the same kind of difficulties which trouble so 
 man}^ people about religious truths may in fact be 
 advanced, with just as great a show of reason, 
 against physical truths concerning which no sane 
 man was ever really in doubt. 
 
 The fact is that there is no knowledge of a'^y 
 sort or kind in any sphere, great or small, which we 
 can acquire without making vast assumptions to be- 
 gin with. It is a very hollow science that says that 
 it will believe nothing which it cannot prove, for of 
 the fifty thousand things which it does believe there 
 is not one which it can prove without making several 
 unprovable assumptions at the outset. The man of 
 science is very peremptory — and quite rightly so— 
 in saying that he will believe nothing except on 
 evidence ; that experiment or experience must give 
 its testimony before he will believe any newly 
 alleged scientific fact. He is perfectly right — with 
 this proviso, that before there can be any evidence 
 at all, or any experience or any experiment whatso- 
 ever, he must of very necessity make some of the 
 most tremendous unproven assumptions it is possible 
 to conceive. For he must assume the veracity and 
 trustworthiness of his own faculties, of his sight, for 
 example, and his hearing and his touch — which he 
 uses continually in his experiments and which play 
 their part in making up all his experiences — and 
 also of his strict reasoning powers, and also of his 
 memory. 
 
lO On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 Let us glance for a moment at this last faculty of 
 ours which we call * memory.' For if we examine it 
 carefully, we shall see that it plays an exceeding 
 great part in the structure of all our belief and all 
 our knowledge, and further that our trust in it is a 
 vast and extraordinary assumption, and that we can 
 never by any possibility logically prove that assump- 
 tion just. 
 
 What is memory ? It is an impression in your 
 mind at the present time that at some past time you 
 had some particular experience. You are impressed 
 with the belief at the present moment that an hour 
 ago you were walking across Regent's Park, or that 
 this time last night you were having, at a friend's 
 house, much better entertainment than reading this 
 book, or that this time last month you were in the 
 agonies of Russian influenza. The impression of 
 it all at this moment is as clear as the impression of 
 your friend's face before you. But after all it is 
 only a present impression that you have, and there 
 is no possibility of proving that anything in the past 
 corresponds with it. How do you know that the 
 present impression answers to any past fact ? The 
 geologists chip the fossils out of the rock and say 
 that they have in them a proof that the rock was 
 formed long ago, and that the fish or the Crustacea 
 were embedded in it in such and such a geologic 
 age. When geology was being resisted by the 
 theologians, some of the theologians said, * How can 
 you possibly tell that God did not make it all just 
 
Our Trust in Memory 1 1 
 
 as it stands 6,000 years ago and put what you 
 take to be fossils in it ? ' Well, how can you tell 
 that your present impression of what you felt an 
 hour or a day or a month ago has not come into 
 your mind of itself? You cannot really recall the 
 past to test the witness of what you call your 
 memory. Suppose it is all illusion and deception. 
 What proof can you give me that it is not ? 
 
 * Oh,' you say, ' I trust my memory because it 
 has always proved reliable. I have constantly acted 
 on it from my earliest years, and it has not led me 
 wrong.' Indeed I How do you know that ? Because 
 you remember, do you say? But, in saying that, 
 you are taking the very point I ask you to prove, 
 for granted. You say that memory is trustworthy 
 because memory tells you that memory always has 
 been trustworthy. But this is arguing in a hopeless 
 circle, nay, in a down-right spiral, and you cannot 
 get out of it, do what you will. You cannot prove 
 that the faculty of memory is the register of the past 
 which it seems to be, and not a mere delusion ; you 
 cannot prove it from any amount of past experience, 
 because you have to start by assuming that you 
 really do remember truly before you can begin to 
 talk about past experience at all. 
 
 But if we may not assume that memory is a real 
 faculty preserving to us the consciousness of the 
 past, where are we? We cannot reason at all. 
 For what is reasoning ? It is taking one fact or 
 thought into consideration and then inferring: from 
 
12 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 it another which follows from it. But if at the 
 moment of making the inference we cannot be sure 
 that we really remember the thought or fact which 
 was in our minds just before, the inference falls to 
 pieces and cannot be held together. Nay, without 
 assuming the veracit}^ of memory, we cannot think 
 or speak at all. If I say three words to you, by the 
 time I am saying the second, you have no know- 
 ledge what the first was, — neither indeed have I. 
 Unless we assume that we have a faculty which, in 
 the present, truly represents to us our past, we 
 cease to be human beings at all, cease to have 
 minds ; we are mere surfaces reflecting whatever 
 colour in earth or sky happens to flit past us at 
 the moment. 
 
 Now all this about memory I have said, not to 
 make you doubt memory. Our trust in the veracity 
 of memory is ineradicably welded into our nature ; 
 and let philosophers reason against it as they will, 
 neither you nor I nor the philosophers can for one 
 moment get away from our belief in our own 
 memory any more than we can walk away from 
 own own shadows, or sit down outside our own 
 bodies. But I have said all this about memory to 
 make you realise that we do and must, in all 
 our thinking, assume as true an enormous amount 
 which we cannot possibly prove ; and even if we 
 try to argue about it, we assume it again in the 
 very first sentence of our arguing. It is quite a 
 mistake to think that we can possibly found our 
 
77?^ Fallacy of the Agnostics 1 3 
 
 beliefs in pure reasoning alone ; for we cannot 
 begin to reason without assuming the truth of 
 some of our beliefs. 
 
 The late Professor Huxley, however, tried to 
 warn us of the danger of trusting even necessary 
 assumptions. 'It is conceivable/ said he, 'that some 
 powerful and malicious being may find his pleasure 
 in deluding us, and in making us believe the thing 
 which is not, every moment of our lives.* Yes, that 
 is conceivable. But we can none of us really take 
 the warning, nor could even Huxley himself 
 Whether it be a good being or a bad being that has 
 created our nature, here it is, and we cannot get out 
 of it. We are made to believe memory. We are 
 made to believe other primary faculties of our minds, 
 before any proof And being made to believe them, 
 we do believe them — and Huxley did so as much 
 as any of us. 
 
 Every act of reasoning that the mind of man 
 has ever performed has proceeded from premises 
 which, for the purpose of that act of reasoning, have 
 been assumed as basis. It may be that in the great 
 majority of cases those premises have themselves 
 been reached by a prior act of reasoning. But if so, 
 that prior act of reasoning must itself have starte-d 
 from other premises assumed. And so, though you 
 go back and back indefinitely, there are always prior 
 premises behind every act of reasoning. And so it 
 follows that at the start of the chain of reasoning, 
 there must have been some initial premises assumed 
 
14 
 
 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 prior to the very first piece of reasoning. Else 
 there could never have been any reasoning at all. 
 
 So that the ground taken up by those Agnostics 
 who say that we must believe nothing which we 
 cannot prove is hopelessly untenable. They them- 
 selves transgress their own rule every waking 
 moment of their lives. We all have principles 
 of belief implanted in us from which we cannot 
 escape ; and the only real question is how many 
 and what these primary principles are which pre- 
 cede reason, and while it is impossible to prove 
 their right to be trusted, yet are trusted always by 
 every sane man. 
 
 What, then, is our proper way of meeting the 
 absolute sceptics, the thorough-going Agnostics, who 
 point out to us that we cannot prove the veracity of 
 our own faculties, and urge us therefore not to put 
 our trust in them ? Our proper answer is to say to 
 them : ^ Why, good friends, you put your trust in 
 them yourselves.' Yes, sceptic, you who tell us that 
 we can know nothing at all about an outward world, 
 you act on the belief in an outward world all the 
 time. You assume in every step you take that the 
 ground is soHd. You assume every time you sit 
 down to dinner that there is meat and drink before 
 you. Act for a single hour as if you were not 
 absolutely certain that there is this outward world ; 
 and we will begin to believe that there may be 
 something in your doubts. No, we shall not believe 
 that they have any reality even then ; we shall only 
 know that you are insane. 
 
A Mysterious Machine 1 5 
 
 We must give up the idea that we are to decide 
 whether to believe a thing by considering whether 
 it can be proved or not. For no truth whatever can 
 be proved except by first making assumptions which 
 cannot be proved. But we are not left without 
 practical tests of truth which serve our purpose. 
 What are these practical tests ? 
 
 The chief of them is: *does it work?* If a 
 certain belief will not work, try it how we will, the 
 presumption is that it is not true. Suppose a man 
 cays that the sea is solid. The test is, does the 
 doctrine work ? He steps down from the ship's 
 side and sets his foot upon the wave. In a moment 
 he is submerged ; and he has more conclusive 
 evidence that the waters are not solid than he 
 could have got by arguing the matter with a philo- 
 sopher for a year and a day. Suppose a man says 
 that the granite road is solid ; every step he makes 
 upon it day after day, and year after year, more and 
 more confirms his conviction. The doctrine w^orks : 
 and in the long run that will be the surest ground 
 of his belief. 
 
 Suppose you receive as a Christmas present 
 from an anonymous donor a machine packed in a 
 packing-case of two feet cube. But there are no 
 directions. What is it for ? It strikes you it may 
 be a new sort of roasting-jack. You put it in front 
 of the kitchen fire, hang your sirloin on it, and set 
 the cook to wind it up. But nothing happens except 
 a purposeless buzzing and whirring of wheels. It 
 
I^ On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 does not work. Perhaps it is a clock, with the face 
 left out. You make a cardboard face and fix it on, 
 and fasten hands at a likely place. But no ; though 
 you wind it up, and the wheels start off again, the 
 hands stop where they are, or jerk round spasmodi- 
 cally an hour or more at a time. Then someone 
 suggests that it is a sewing-machine, which you can 
 wind up and leave to work without treadle or 
 personal attention. What a godsend I You fix 
 the end of a sheet into a, holder that just grips it 
 neatly, wind the machine up, leave it, and coming 
 back in ten minutes find the sheet hemmed all 
 round. Then you begin to believe that the machine 
 is a sewing-machine of surpassing excellence. So 
 far, that is the only belief that works. It is true 
 there is a little group of wheels and levers in one 
 part which seem no use- at all. They do not move, 
 or they move without apparent effect. And this 
 causes a doubt to haunt you whether, after all, 
 the machine may not be for something else and 
 only accidentally applicable for hemming. But one 
 day, in the middle of the work, the thread snaps 
 at a weak place. You expect the machine to go 
 on drilling useless needle-holes all round but to 
 drop the thread ; when, lo ! that little group of bars 
 and wheels is suddenly all agog, the severed ends 
 are re-united with a tiny knot, and the machine 
 proceeds undisturbed to complete the job. Then 
 you believe your doctrine without a shadow of 
 doubt — the doctrine that this is a sewing-machine — 
 
A Mysterious Volume 17 
 
 because it works not only in an ordinary way, 
 but also and with special emphasis in exceptional 
 circumstances or emergency. Using the machine 
 in this way elevates it from a useless tangle of cogs 
 and bars to an exquisite substitute for human 
 muscles and intelligence. You are therefore con- 
 vinced that this is the way in which it was meant 
 to be used. 
 
 Or perliaps a better illustration is this : There 
 is placed before you a volume in a language of 
 which you are wholly ignorant. Long words and 
 short words seem a hopeless jumble. But presently ^ 
 you see that a certain very short word — one letter 
 if it is Spanish, two if it is French or Danish or 
 Dutch, three if it is Greek or German — appears very 
 often, and that it is a frequent occurrence that the 
 words on either side of it bear some resemblance 
 to one another in form. Accordingly you guess 
 that that small but common word is the conjunction 
 answering to our English ^ and.' Next you observe 
 that another very short word is still more common 
 and is generally followed by a longer word, and 
 that the short word often begins a sentence. 
 Accordingly you guess that it is the article, our 
 English * the.' In the next place you see two 
 words beginning with capitals, and though rather 
 oddly spelt, still pretty manifestly Cain and Abel. 
 Between them stands one word. What does it 
 mean ? You guess it means either * hated ' or 
 * killed.' How can you tell which ? Why, see 
 
1 8 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 here, just at the foot of the page is the same word, 
 and again two proper names which it divides, and 
 these two names are manifestly Saul and David. 
 Well, you know that Saul hated David at one 
 time, but he did not kill him ; so you believe that 
 this word means ^ hated.' But see, there are at 
 least fifty words on the page ending with the same 
 two letters as that word which means ' hated.' So 
 you surmise that they also are the past tense of 
 verbs. And in this way, step by step, you may 
 go on till you have solved the mystery of the lan- 
 guage. If it is some dead and forgotten language, 
 you may not be able to pronounce a single syllable 
 of it. But bit by bit, catching a hint here and a 
 hint there, you have pieced it together, and now 
 you can fairly interpret other books composed in it 
 which fall into your hands. In the gradual process 
 you get a wrong clue now and then. A certain 
 interpretation seems to work well twice, three times, 
 six times, twelve times. But then comes a case in 
 which it fails, producing only confusion and contra- 
 diction. Your hypothesis does not work. And so 
 you go patiently back and begin again, till you hit 
 upon a theory which covers all the cases. And 
 at last you have your theory of the language so 
 complete that you can translate the book, on the 
 hypothesis that your clue is right, from beginning 
 to end, and lo ! it is a complete treatise self- 
 consistent, lucid, eloquent. Then comes some one 
 and says to you, 'Why, you can't prove that you 
 
I 
 
 That our Faculties * work^ ig 
 
 have got the real English of a single phrase or 
 word. You can't prove that this means *' and " and 
 this ''the'' and this ''hated." It is all mere con- 
 jecture in the air. As for me, I am Agnostic, and 
 I refuse to believe that you know anything about 
 this strange tongue.' Then what will you say? 
 You will say, ' My dear fellow, be as Agnostic as 
 you please. Don't let me interfere with your 
 judgment. But as for me, I am perfectly sure that 
 I have gripped the truth. I refuse to believe that 
 the correspondence I have discovered is all chance. 
 I believe that I have the true theory of this unknown 
 language, because in every page and line and word 
 and syllable and letter my theory works^ and I 
 discover in the book a significant and rational whole. 
 And just so with the belief in an outward world, 
 just so with the belief in the veracity of memory, just 
 so with the belief in other primary principles of 
 our nature; these beliefs are justified in that 
 they work, they never land us in confusion, they 
 never break down ; as the daily haps of life turn 
 up, a myriad an hour, in infinite diversity, these 
 beliefs fit into them all without a jar or a contra- 
 diction, while if for a moment we attempt to depart 
 from them, we fall into utter confusion. This is 
 the highest evidence we can have. And therefore 
 the critical philosopher, though he argue ever so 
 cunningly, though he demonstrate that we are piling 
 assumption on assumption, cannot really shake our 
 belief. Nay, he cannot really shake his own. And 
 
20 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 to apply the principle in the widest sphere and 
 on the largest scale, that interpretation of the 
 problems of the universe which makes a rational 
 whole and gives the highest significance to human 
 life, will have in its favour a presumption practically 
 overwhelming. 
 
 Now the main argument of this book will be that 
 we have other primary faculties besides those which 
 I have spoken of, primary faculties of a spiritual 
 order which speak to us of a Living, Loving God ; 
 and that a distrust of these faculties is unreasonable 
 and foolish in the same way as a distrust of the 
 faculty of memory or of the reality of an outside 
 world would be unreasonable and foolish. And 
 further, I shall argue that just as all the experience 
 of life fits into the belief in the veracity of memory 
 and the senses, and the reality of the external world, 
 so also the experience of life fits into the belief in 
 a God who is Power, Righteousness, and Love ; 
 that as the belief in the veracity of memory and the 
 senses, and in the reality of the external world works 
 and never breaks down in the varied experiences of 
 life, so the belief in a God who is Power, Righteous- 
 ness, and Love works and never breaks down in the 
 varied experiences of life. And so as we trust in 
 memory and the senses and the external world, 
 though it is quite clear that we cannot prove their 
 truth without making immense assumptions to begin 
 with ; it is reasonable also to trust in the God who is 
 Power, Righteousnesss, and Love, though it is quite 
 
The Faith that works ^^ 
 
 clear that we cannot prove the truth of this faith 
 without making immense assumptions to begin with. 
 
 If it is seen that the machine or organism which 
 we call a human being is comparatively useless, 
 feeble, and inefficient while it is without God, but 
 becomes useful, strong, and efficient when the love 
 of God is in it, then that is an immeasurably strong 
 argument for the reality of God, — for the love of 
 him being founded in truth, not in illusion. If it is 
 seen that the belief in God gives meaning and force 
 and coherence to the language of life, whereas 
 without it, it is a mere jumble of letters, then that 
 is a stupendously powerful reason for believing in 
 God. My main contention is going to be that the 
 belief in God works, and that therefore we do well 
 to believe. 
 
 But there are certain degrees of religious Agnos- 
 ticism which seem to me quite just and right in spite 
 of all that I have said. When Zophar says to Job : 
 * Canst thou find out the depth of God ? Canst 
 thou find out the end of the Almighty?' 1 believe 
 that he expresses a sense of the limitations of our 
 knowledge of God which is characteristic not only 
 of the wisest, but of the devoutest minds. All that 
 we can possibly know about God is how he affects 
 us, at what points he touches our consciousness, 
 and how he modifies it, moving us to joy or to 
 deep peace oi to bitter remorse or to great longing 
 for a higher holiness. The Agnostics, from Zophar 
 to Spencer, are absolutely right in telling us that we 
 
22 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 can never know anything of what God is in himself 
 apart from his effect upon us. The philosophical 
 way of expressing this is to say that we can never 
 know him absolutely, only relatively. And this is 
 indubitably true. But then the like thing is true 
 of every other object of our knowledge whatever ; 
 and it is inherently impossible that it should be 
 otherwise. You know nothing and can know no- 
 thing of your brother, or of the table at which you 
 are sitting, or of a loaf of bread, or of the moon, 
 except how each one of these affects your con- 
 sciousness. You know each object in its relation 
 to you, but you do not and cannot know it in 
 itself I have five avenues through which know- 
 ledge of the outer world and the things in it 
 come to me. I call them sight, hearing, touch, 
 taste, and smell. But I meet a man who is 
 blind and always has been. It seems to him 
 that he knows all about the world, except that 
 he hears some unmeaning talk about light and 
 dark, red and blue and yellow. The words have 
 no sense to him at all. And if he lived among 
 a set of men all of whom were blind like him and 
 always had been, and never came across or heard 
 of any one who was not blind, he would suppose 
 that with ears and nose and tongue and touch he 
 knew all that the world had to reveal about it- 
 self He never could possibly so much as imagine 
 a whole set of qualities inherent in every bird and 
 butterfly and flower outside the cognisance of his 
 
The Limits of Knoiv ledge 2 3 
 
 four senses. And so, for all I know, there may 
 be in the apple I eat at dinner, or the bed I lie 
 on at night, or any other physical object whatever, 
 a whole range of qualities which I can neither 
 perceive nor even begin to imagine, because I have 
 no sense for them ; there is no avenue to my mind 
 which admits that kind of quality. And there may 
 be races of beings in some other planet with six, 
 ten, twenty, a hundred senses, even without any 
 one of the five senses which we possess, — who 
 yet through those senses which they have, get a 
 knowledge of physical nature just as true, and just 
 as limited as ours, — a knowledge, that is, that the 
 world affects their consciousness in such and such 
 ways, but no knowledge at all of what that world 
 is in its own essence. 
 
 And so of God : I shall speak in this book of 
 three chief faculties through which we apprehend 
 him ; three avenues in our nature through which 
 he touches our consciousness. But I do not for 
 one moment suppose that this which I perceive is 
 all of God. It is only such effects of his as I, 
 a mere man, am capable of becoming conscious of 
 And I am persuaded that there are infinitudes of 
 being and an untold wealth of attributes in God, 
 which this poor, feeble, limited human nature is 
 unable to perceive. 
 
 But I believe in God. I believe in the reality of 
 the physical objects round me, because 1 cannot 
 but believe that there is something outside of me 
 
^4 On Trusting our Faculties 
 
 which gives me these sensations of hardness or 
 softness, of blue or green, of sweet or bitter, of 
 fragrant or malodorous. In like manner, I believe 
 in the* reality of God, because I cannot but believe 
 that there is some one other than myself, who gives 
 me these feelings of aspiration or repentance, in- 
 effable peace or black remorse, of a divine protection 
 or inflowing moral strength. 
 
 My whole argument in this book then will be a 
 reference to various intellectual, moral, and spiritual 
 experiences of yours and mine, and an appeal to 
 you to trust in the faculties through which they 
 come and believe the truths they seem to teach. 
 I shall put forward first experience, and then reason 
 starting from experience, as the basis of religious 
 knowledge; and then I shall appeal to you to have 
 faith in that experience and that reason and the 
 verities which they declare. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 ON GOD REVEALED AS POWER. 
 
 TN the preceding chapter I tried to show that there 
 -^ are certainly some primary mental faculties 
 of ours which we are obliged to believe and do 
 well to believe, and some primary convictions 
 which we are obliged to entertain and do well to 
 entertain, although it is utterly impossible that 
 we can ever prove that they are trustworthy. 
 Among these primary faculties is memory, and 
 among the primary convictions is our persuasion 
 that there is an outside world. We can never 
 prove that memory really represents the past, and 
 we can never prove that there really is an out- 
 side world. Yet we do well quietly to accept the 
 necessity of our nature which makes us believe 
 these things ; and we are daily confirmed in our 
 trust by finding that these beliefs work, that they 
 fit into life at every point and never seem to land 
 us in error or mistake. If, indeed, we do now and 
 then declare, ' My memory has deceived me,' what 
 has deceived us is not, strictly speaking, memory, 
 
26 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 but a defect of memory, or an impression counter- 
 feiting memory. The true memory deceives no man 
 ever. And I said that there were also faculties in 
 us which in like manner bore witness to spiritual 
 things, and that the main argument of this book 
 would be that these also ought to be believer^ 
 because they also work. 
 
 In this chapter I propose to deal with certain 
 faculties which though they belong to what we call 
 our intellectual nature, yet lead us in the direction 
 of spiritual truths. They do not actually carry us 
 into the palace of religion ; but. they take us to the 
 porch and lead us to knock at the door. 
 
 I have to call your attention to something else 
 which, by your mental constitution, you cannot help 
 believing, although it cannot be proved ; and it is 
 this : — * Every event, occurrence, or happening has 
 a cause.' Do you not believe that ? I do not know 
 that I can make it much clearer by dwelling on it 
 or labouring over it. Think of anything that ever 
 happened, no matter what it is — the death of Julius 
 Caesar, the falling of an avalanche, the burning of 
 Chicago, the aching of your little finger — and try 
 to fancy that it happened entirely of itself without 
 any cause at all. You cannot do it. Push the 
 idea of cause out at the front door : it will 
 sneak in again at the back gate. Sometimes, it 
 is true, it is impossible to discover the cause 
 of an event. Then we say, *What an extra- 
 ordinary thing ! How in the world did it happen ? 
 
The Belief in Cause 27 
 
 I can^t imagine what caused it.' But if some- 
 one were to say, * Well, really, I doubt whether 
 it had any cause at all; Fm inclined to think 
 it happened of itself/ we should put him down 
 for a fool, and rightly so. It is true, again, that 
 we sometimes hear folk pleading as if there really 
 were no cause at all of some disaster. * It just 
 broke in my hand,* says the maid of the shivered 
 tumbler or the smashed plate. But neither she 
 nor we really believe that it broke without a cause. 
 
 * Accidents will happen,' you say. Yes, accidents 
 will happen ; but an accident is not an event without 
 a cause. ^ How came Thomas to break his leg ? ' 
 
 * Oh, it was a pure accident.' The most that that 
 means is that neither Thomas nor anyone who was 
 with Thomas could have foreseen that such and 
 such a thing would cause his leg to get broken, 
 or it may possibly imply that even now, after 
 the event, we cannot make out what caused it. 
 But we all know that something caused it ; and 
 we have not escaped out of that ring-fence which 
 is planted round our minds and compels us, 
 whenever we think of any event whatever, to 
 thirhk of it as having a cause. 
 
 But what do we mean by a cause? What 
 is this idea, from which we cannot escape ? 
 
 John Stuart Mill, taking up and extending an 
 old argument of Hume's, tried very hard to per- 
 suade us that it really meant nothing more than 
 
 * always coming before.' He said that if one thing 
 
28 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 always happened just before another, they got so 
 closely associated in our minds that we began to 
 think of the first as the cause of the second. 
 But Monday always comes before Tuesday ; yet I 
 never heard anyone call Monday the cause of 
 Tuesday. Meat always comes before pudding in 
 well regulated families; but I never heard any- 
 one call meat the cause of pudding. Darkness 
 always comes before sunrise ; yet darkness is not 
 the cause of sunrise. When we say that this is 
 the cause of that, we mean something more than 
 that this always comes before that. A very able 
 Catholic philosopher, writing in answer to Mr. 
 Mill, and wishing to give a very forcible example 
 of what we mean by cause, says : ' I am urgently 
 in need of some article contained in a closet of 
 which I cannot find the key, and accordingly I 
 break open the cupboard with my fist.' He says 
 that the relation which exists between his will 
 and the blow he struck is certainly something 
 considerably more than that he willed first and 
 the blow happened afterwards. The willing had 
 something much more direct to do with the 
 striking than that. The willing was the cause of 
 the striking. And so this Dr. Ward gives us as 
 the very best and clearest example of cause that 
 we can have : — * the influx of a man's mental 
 volitions into his bodily acts.' When we exercise 
 our will, power goes out — we know not how — 
 and flows into our muscles, and the lifting of 
 
The Power in Cause 29 
 
 the arm, or the beckoning of the finger, or the 
 tramp of the foot, or the blow of the fist, or the 
 bending of the knee and the bowing of the head, 
 is something more than what follows after the act 
 of will. It not only follows after) it follows /row. It 
 is its result, its effect. The act of will is its cause. 
 
 So that when we say that we cannot help 
 believing that every event has its cause, we do 
 not mean only that we cannot help believing that 
 every event was preceded by something else, but 
 that we cannot help believing that every event 
 is preceded by something from which power flows 
 forth, shaping and making and controlling that 
 event, as our act of will shapes and makes and 
 controls the blow of the fist or the tramp of the 
 foot. We conceive all the events that ever happen 
 or ever have happened to be made and shaped 
 by the flowing of some power into them like the 
 flow of the power of our wills into the movements 
 of our fist or our foot. And, though we may some- 
 times argue and bewilder and confuse ourselves 
 into doubting it, it is a fundamental and primary 
 fact of our nature that we cannot help thinking 
 of all phenomena — which means all happenings, 
 everything which happens — as controlled by power 
 of this kind coming from some source or other. 
 
 But unfortunately we have got into the habit 
 of using the word * cause' in a very loose way. 
 And loose speaking is only too sure to make loose 
 thinking. And so we have got into the habit of 
 
^O On God Revealed as Power 
 
 thinking about cause in a very loose way. And this 
 leads to no end of trouble. Indeed, I sometinies 
 think that it lies at the bottom of the whole con- 
 troversy between Theists and Atheists so far as 
 that is a merely intellectual controversy. 
 
 And chiefly we make confusion by talking of 
 the laws of nature themselves as if they were 
 causes. We ask why the gas-escape makes itself 
 smelt so quickly all over the room ; and we reply 
 that it is caused by the law of the diffusion of 
 gases. We ask why the cannon-ball that is fired 
 off with a decided slope upwards curves round and 
 in a few hundred yards actually strikes the ground ; 
 and we reply that it is caused by the law of gravi- 
 tation. But that is altogether a confused and 
 confusing use of the word ^ cause.' The phenome- 
 non is explained by the law ; it is duly classified 
 when it is referred to the particular law under which 
 it falls ; but it is not caused by the law. For what 
 is a law of nature ? It is simply the fact that 
 certain phenomena always happen in a certain way. 
 It is a law of grammar that weak verbs make their 
 past in ' ed ' or * t.' But that is not the cause of 
 the past of * to walk ' being * walked.' It is only a 
 statement of the fact that all verbs of that sort are 
 modified in that way. And it is a law of nature 
 that any two masses tend to approach each other 
 with a force which varies inversely as the squares of 
 their distances. But that is not the cause of the 
 apple falling to the ground or the sea following the 
 
r 
 
 The Laws of Nature 31 
 
 rising and setting of the moon ; it is only the ex- 
 planation of these things. Each dropping of an 
 apple and each rise or fall of the tide is just one 
 more fact going to make up the boundless mass of 
 facts which we gather up and bind together, purely 
 and solely for convenience of thought, under one law. 
 
 What we want to know is the cause of this 
 very wide spread fact that bodies do move towards 
 one another in the way stated in the law of gravita- 
 tion ; and stating the law, which is only stating 
 that they always do, does not bring us a hair's 
 breadth nearer to the cause. My nurse, I re- 
 member, used to answer my intelligent questions 
 in that way. * Why does so and so happen ? ' I 
 would ask. *Why,' for instance, Moes the lid of 
 the kettle bob up and down when the w^ater boils? * 
 'Because it always does,' was the reply, — a response 
 precisely as scientific and philosophical and wise 
 as reeling off the enunciation of a law of nature 
 when asked for the cause of some natural phenome- 
 non. No ; we want something more than that. 
 
 There must be something or other like the influx 
 of our will-power into our muscles, when the surface 
 of the sea moves towards the moon and when the 
 apple moves towards the ground and when two 
 drops of water close together on a perfectly smooth 
 horizontal sheet of glass are unable to rest close 
 together and actually move up to each other and 
 coalesce in one big drop instead of two small ones. 
 There is a pull somewhere like the pull we giye 
 
32 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 when we ring the door-bell. Who or what pnlls 
 then ? Does the moon pull the sea, the earth the 
 apple, one drop the other drop ? No ; moon and 
 earth and drop are simply masses of matter. The 
 mind cannot form the idea of their pulling, without 
 for the moment thinking of them as alive and ex- 
 ercising will-power. But they are not, so far as 
 we know, alive. They have, as far as we can 
 judge, no will-power. Who or what pulls then? 
 We are compelled to believe that, apart from the 
 big or minute masses of matter themselves, there 
 is in every case what we call a ' force,' that is, 
 a power like our will-power, which does the pulling, 
 — only that it always does the pulling according to 
 the same rules, whether with big masses or little 
 ones, whether on earth or in the sun or through 
 the vast spaces, which seem so empty, lying 
 between the world-masses which are scattered 
 through the heavens. 
 
 It sounds an extraordinary thing to say that 
 whenever science tries to leave the one universal, 
 all-penetrating force or will-power out of considera- 
 tion, it slips into the old superstition of polytheism. 
 But it is so. The human mind by its constitution 
 can never rest till it has recognised a living force 
 like will-power acting in all the motions of the 
 universe ; and if it is determined that it will not 
 acknowledge one such force always and everywhere 
 in action, then it simply breaks up that one force 
 into a multitude of little powers — like the gods and 
 
Scientific Polytheism 33 
 
 demons of .he ancient peoples. It may give scien- 
 tific names to these, and try to make out that they 
 have no Hfe, no power like the will-power of man 
 in them. But every time its thought begins to 
 clear, these scientific abstractions begin to take the 
 shape of so many living agents who carry on the 
 worlds amongst them. 
 
 So that the real choice, if we are not to fight 
 against the necessary laws of thought, not to try 
 to get outside of our own thinking constitution, 
 is between regarding the whole universe as a re- 
 public of multitudinous will-forces scrambling and 
 clashing against one another, and regarding it as 
 the sphere of one supreme, self-consistent will- 
 force which penetrates every atom of the whole, 
 and governs every motion, every thrill and vibration 
 from the wheeling of the comet on the outskirts of 
 the heavens to the tremor of a gossamer or the 
 pulsing of a molecule in the breast-feather of a 
 robin or the stamen of a violet. 
 
 But the conception of such a Will- force, uniform, 
 enduring, all-potent, is of unutterable majesty and 
 grandeur, and fills the mind with wonder and 
 awe, even though nothing else be yet realised con- 
 cerning this Will-force save that it is the source 
 I of all the phenomena which make up the history 
 
 of the universe. 
 
 And this conception of one Divine Will-force 
 dominating the w^hole and every part simplifies all 
 scientific and philosophical thought in the most 
 
34 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 beautiful manner. Nor need we hesitate at once 
 to call this divine Will-force by the simple name 
 of God. It may be a God intelligent or unintelli- 
 gent. It may be a good God or a bad God. 
 But the conception of one universal Will-force 
 everywhere and always is the conception of God. 
 Mr. Fiske, a very noble American writer, says : 
 * Once really adopt the conception of an ever- 
 present God, without w^hom not a sparrow falls 
 to the ground, and it becomes self-evident that 
 the law of gravitation is but an expression of a 
 particular mode of divine action. And what is thus 
 true of one law is true of all laws.' 
 
 This leads us to the consideration of two very 
 different ways of believing in God which belong 
 to two different types of mind. The Deists of 
 the eighteenth century, both English and French, 
 took what may be called a mechanical view of 
 God's relation to the universe ; and not only did 
 these men take that view, but it has been largely 
 taken by the Christian Church, and in spite of 
 deeper and more luminous thinking here and there, 
 it has on the whole predominated from very early 
 times, and does still predominate, throughout the 
 Latin and the Teutonic sections of Christendom, 
 including ourselves. 
 
 Of course this mechanical view of God is held 
 with varying distinctness and varying modifications, 
 but broadly speaking, it may be stated thus : ^ God 
 is a Being apart from the universe. The universe is 
 
Mechanical Deism 2 S 
 
 an immense and wonderful machine which he made 
 a long time ago. He imparted to it sundry qualities 
 and properties by which it works. All the ordinary 
 events in nature were thus arranged for at the 
 start. But God still watches the machine, and 
 now and then, when he sees occasion, he interferes 
 by a special act of divine power overcoming or 
 suspending the action of natural forces by the intro- 
 duction for the emergency of his own •divine force. 
 This intervention it is that constitutes miracles and 
 special providences which are outside of the regular 
 working of the machine.' Carlyle is satirising this 
 way of thinking of God when he speaks of * an 
 absentee God sitting idle ever since the first Sab- 
 bath, at the outside of his universe, and seeing 
 it go.' 
 
 Now it is this way of thinking of God which is 
 responsible for much of that miserable and senseless 
 squabble which we call * the conflict between re- 
 ligion and science.' There is and can be no real 
 conflict or shadow of a conflict between religion 
 and science. Each is the complement and sup- 
 plement, the natural friend and ally of the other. 
 But there is and always must be a fierce and 
 bitter conflict between science and this kind of 
 conception of God. Neither can afford to give the 
 other any quarter. For just reflect what it is that 
 science is always doing. The whole occupation 
 of science, ever since there has been any science 
 at all, has been gathering up the happenings in 
 
3" On God Revealed as Power 
 
 the universe, showing that they are not irregular^ 
 but regular, classifying them, doing them up in neat 
 bundles each with its label bearing the name of 
 some law of nature. That is what true science 
 always is at, and it is never at anything else at 
 all. It does a perpetual tidying up of our observa- 
 tions of natural phenomena, and it cannot bear 
 to leave any of them lying about unclassified and 
 undocketed. 'First of all it laid its hands on the 
 motions of the planets and showed that they were 
 all regular. But comets and meteors it left alone 
 for a long while ; and the kind of religion I have 
 been speaking of could say and did say : * Yes, the 
 motions of the planets are part of the constitution of 
 the universe and do not need God ; but look at the 
 comet's tail sweeping across the skies, and look at 
 the vshower of falling stars. God does not leave the 
 universe alone, you see ; here is his hand scattering 
 these irregular lights about.' But science presently 
 stretched our her hand and swept these also into 
 the drawers of her cabinet, — did them up in bundles, 
 labelled them, and showed that they, too, were part 
 of the regular order and not special interferences 
 at all. And that has been the procedure of science 
 all along. Religion (of the sort I have described) 
 has based the evidence of God on exceptional 
 events which she has called miraculous. These 
 she used to find plentiful enough. She could point 
 to them in every department. But science keeps 
 steadily filching away these evidences, one after 
 
Science intervenes 2i7 
 
 another, and arranging them in her own territory 
 as regular, orderly parts of the universe, till it 
 looks as if the reHgion which relies on the special 
 interferences of God would ere long have nothing 
 left at all, for science will have parcelled out 
 the whole area of phenomena as belonging to 
 her domain. 
 
 This is why such religion as is commonly con- 
 sidered orthodox cries out in angry protest at every 
 fresh advance of science. Every such advance seems 
 to this sort of religion to be the substituting of natural 
 forces for the action of God in some fresh sphere. 
 So that the progress of science necessarily seems to 
 be a progress towards atheism. As science shows 
 that natural law covers the history of the heavenly 
 bodies, of the earth, of organic life, each of these 
 seems to be taken away from God. And so a false 
 theology has successively fought against the as- 
 tronomy of Copernicus and Galileo, the geology of 
 Lyell, and the biology of Darwin, and execrated 
 each of these men as the enemy of God. 
 
 But the other way of regarding God's relation 
 to the universe is that to which all that I have 
 said in the earlier part of this chapter conducts us. 
 The philosophical name for this conception is the 
 ' Immanence of God'; and it looks on God not as 
 outside the universe, but ever operating within it ; 
 not as having once for all created, and then confined 
 his action to occasional interference, but as con- 
 tinuously creative from the first till now ; not as 
 
28 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 having set up certain laws of nature as substitutes 
 for his own action, or certain forces other than his 
 own will-force, but as himself energising in all 
 the forces of nature so that the laws of nature 
 are only the habits of his own activity. This 
 conception thus does away absolutely with all 
 distinctions between the immediate action of God 
 and natural forces. Natural forces are the action of 
 God. Whereas the former conception of God leaves 
 the universe empty of God, this conception finds the 
 universe full of God. Between this conception and 
 physical science there never can by any possibility 
 be any conflict. Science says, ^ This is the way the 
 heavenly bodies move.' ^ Yes,* says religion, ^ that 
 is the way in which God moves them.' Science 
 says, * That is how the different tribes of living 
 things have come into being.' * Yes,' says religion, 
 * that is how God has brought them into being.' 
 
 And now the whole universe will seem, not like 
 a machine wound up and set going once for all, but 
 more like a plant which is never cut off from the 
 forces which vitalise it, but is always drawing on 
 them and transfusing them into its life and sub- 
 stance at every part. We think of the divine force 
 or energy, not as applied at one end of the machine 
 as when a man turns a handle or works a treadle, 
 but as flowing equably through every vein and 
 nerve of the whole mass as the sap pulses in every 
 vesicle of the great tree. 
 
 The picture which modern science draws of tht 
 
Cod in the Universe ^q 
 
 universe is indeed surpassingly sublime. This uni- 
 versal force is declared to flow through every atom 
 of matter — solid, liquid, gaseous — throughout the 
 infinite area of the boundless whole. Take the 
 minutest particle of matter which the eye can see. 
 That itself is a whole universe of energy. Within 
 its bounds molecules are vibrating, 'darting from side 
 to side, with inconceiviable velocity all the time. 
 And the like is going on in every particle of matter 
 from the spot on which we stand right away to 
 the stars whose light takes ten thousand years to 
 reach us, — and on as far — a thousand times as 
 far — beyond that. Yes, and motions are continually 
 passing from end to end (if there were any ends) 
 of the universe itself. So that every stroke of the 
 pen I made in writing this chapter and every vibra- 
 tion of the air you make in shaping the spoken 
 words, if you read my book aloud to a friend, 
 goes flying forth on the wings of the ether to those 
 far away moons and suns. It is all one whole, 
 pulsing with one beat, yet ten million beats in every 
 cubic hair's-breadth, transfusing themselves through 
 the total mass unceasingly. Imagination reels be- 
 fore the effort to conceive it all. But take with you 
 the firm conception that every individual motion, be 
 it ever so minute, is in fact the direct expression of 
 a Power akin to the will-force which we know in 
 ourselves, — and have you not truly a transcendent 
 idea of God ? He is not in the shape of a man. 
 You can set no bounds upon him. The Zeus of the 
 
40 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 Greeks, the Jehovah of the Jews alike fade into 
 insignificance before him. He is the Energy, the 
 Will-power, the Spirit that flows through the whole, 
 conscious at every point, with attention concentrated 
 everywhere. 
 
 Let me dwell for a moment on that conception, 
 ' attention concentrated everywhere.' We men and 
 women are capable of but the most limited range of 
 attention. When we were children we were con- 
 tinually told that we * could only attend to one thing 
 at once.' That was never quite true : we learn by 
 degrees to attend to three or four things at once. 
 The art of the conjuror consists largely in drilling 
 himself to attend unobserved to other matters be- 
 sides those to which he is obviously attending in 
 the view of the spectators. He is attending closely 
 to his secret manipulations at the same moment that 
 he is also attending to the by-play which is to divert 
 the attention of his public from the machinery of his 
 trick. To the non-musician it seems a miracle that 
 the skilled pianist should be able at once to attend 
 to the score that he is reading and to the swift 
 movements of both his hands and all his fingers on 
 the keyboard, and perhaps to carry on a lively con- 
 versation at the same time. But just as the little 
 child who at the first venturous steps across the 
 floor has to give absorbed attention to the planting 
 of each foot and the balance of his body, ere long 
 learns to walk without any attention at all and to 
 occupy his mind with other things while he is walk-. 
 
The Attention of God 41 
 
 ing, so in all the affairs of life we are continually 
 learning to hand over the operations we most fre- 
 quently perform to automatic action while we turn 
 our conscious attention to other things. Now that 
 is the necessary economy of our limited mental 
 powers ; and we can only conceive that these auto- 
 matic actions are discharged, like our breathing and 
 the circulation of our blood, by the working of those 
 natural forces which everywhere carry on the pro- 
 cesses of the natural world. But, on the one hand, 
 God has no natural forces outside and distinct from 
 his own energies to which to hand over areas of the 
 universe removed from his own attention ; nor, on 
 the other hand, can his power of attention be con- 
 ceived as limited in any way analogous to the 
 limitations of human attention. So that while I 
 would willingly find, if I could, some word less 
 anthropomorphic, less man-like that is, than * atten- 
 tion ' to describe thd conscious touch of God on 
 every fibre and every atom of his universe; on 
 the other hand I am convinced that we approach 
 much more nearly to the truth when we conceive 
 the attention of God * concentrated everywhere,' 
 than when we try to imagine any natural processes 
 whatever as carried on apart from his instant and 
 continuous heed. And thus I conclude that when 
 Jesus said, * Not a sparrow falls to the ground 
 without your Father,' so far from over-stating, he 
 was immeasurably under-stating the fact, since in 
 every feather of the sparrow, and in every thread 
 
42 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 of down upon each feather, and in every chemical 
 atom in each thread, the Divine Consciousness and 
 Power are operating at every moment. 
 
 And this unescapable philosophical conclusion 
 has incomparable religious significance, since it is 
 the absolute refutation of that objection to religion 
 which consists in arguing that the Supreme God 
 cannot concern himself about aught so humble as a 
 single human soul. It is the irrefutable reply to the 
 cry of the Psalmist, * What is man that thou art 
 mindful of him ? and the son of man that thou 
 visitest him ? ' For shall he whose energy is con- 
 centrated on each molecule of a grain of sand, for 
 whose care no mote floating in a sunbeam is too 
 minute, be heedless of a human soul looking forth 
 with wonder on the heaven of heavens, or have no 
 care for the heart that approaches him in reverent 
 love and prayer ? 
 
 But when we look not only at the universe in 
 the present moment, but in its history, the panorama 
 is more impressive still. 
 
 Let us ask science what she can tell us of the 
 story of the universe. Taking not only the abso- 
 lutely demonstrated facts of science (if there are 
 any), but also such probable conjectures as seem to 
 be generally accepted by scientific men, the history 
 is something like this. * In the beginning,' that is, 
 before there was any organised universe at all, there 
 was a thin fluid evenly diffused throughout space; — 
 no suns, no planets, no moons, but everywhere this 
 
The Birth of Worlds 43 
 
 evenly diffused fluid. Then at certain centres this 
 fluid became thickened, while outside those centres 
 it was further rarified, and the thickening of these 
 centres produced a rotatory motion, till each one of 
 them became a globe revolving on its axis with 
 immense velocity and at a prodigious heat The 
 rotatory motion led to smaller masses being flung 
 off/rom each central sun, and these, though first 
 forming rings, like the present ring of Saturn, 
 gradually themselves also became globular, with 
 motion round their own axes as well as motion 
 round the central sun. These again in many 
 cases flung off further films which formed into 
 moons having a treble motion, rotation on their 
 own axes, motion round their planets, and with 
 their planets motion round the central sun. The 
 cooling of these sundry bodies by radiation of 
 their heat into space by degrees has brought, is 
 bringing, or will bring each for a period to a 
 temperate heat such as that now enjoyed by our 
 Earth, suitable for life akin to that on Eartli, 
 Science can only guess whether there is actual 
 life on other globes, but it knows that there is 
 on this. It sees atoms of matter shifting into 
 such combinations as at last to constitute proto- 
 plasm, the physical basis of life ; though why just 
 this combination of atoms should suddenly put on 
 that entirely new set of characteristics which we 
 call ' life,' science can form no sort or kind of 
 guess. There is a great chasm between inorganic 
 
44 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 or non-living and organic or living matter which 
 no bridge of thought can span. But this proto- 
 plasmic matter goes on building itself up into more 
 and more highly organised material, till at last there 
 is one more great leap, and it becomes the seat of a 
 new thing — unknown in the universe before— that 
 which we call ^consciousness.' And here also, how- 
 ever rudimentary, dim, and vague the consciousness, 
 another bottomless chasm is crossed, over which 
 thought can never fling a bridge. After that, this 
 consciousness-sustaining life-substance branches out 
 and pushes on along sundry lines of progression till 
 all the varieties of the animal kingdom are formed, 
 from the simplest skin-bag in the ocean slime, 
 through the molluscs, the Crustacea, and the verte- 
 brates, up to regal man himself. 
 
 Now some philosophers, trying to get rid of the 
 will-power in the universe on which I have laid so 
 much stress, tell us that the laws of motion im- 
 pressed on all the molecules of matter as part of 
 their very nature at the beginning of all things could 
 not but work out as they have worked out. They 
 say that they can prove this of the simpler motions 
 at the beginning, and that it is only reasonable to 
 believe that it is so right on to the end. Give us, 
 say they, those thickenings, at certain centres, of the 
 primeval, universal, glowing world-stuff, and we can 
 show that the rotation and the sun-making and the 
 planet-making and the moon-making must follow by 
 the primary laws of motion ; and so the universe. 
 
What about the Start ? 45 
 
 • 
 
 even as it is, could not help being evolved, if only 
 you give it time. 
 
 Now in my view, as I have said, it is absolutely 
 necessary to true thinking to require actual will- 
 power always, everywhere, in every motion of 
 matter from first to last. But suppose I am wrong 
 there. Suppose that unconscious matter is itself 
 endowed with certain energies and forces which act 
 automatically without the presence of will. Still I 
 find hitches in this so-called scientific theory of the 
 universe. First of all, what about the ^start ? An 
 evenly diffused fluid everywhere and then a thicken- 
 ing here and there. What or who brought about 
 that thickening ? Grant that all the universe would 
 follow when once you had got those little uneven- 
 nesses — that rotating and cooling and hardening 
 would forthwith begin. But how did the evenness 
 turn to unevenness? You must have some power 
 there to start the evolution. Evenly spread fluid 
 that had been lying evenly spread from all eternity, 
 —even supposing it had existed from all eternity, 
 and had never been created, — could not by sudden 
 spasm gather into knots and nuclei, unless some 
 power other than itself were applied to it. Push 
 God back and back, if you will ; but at the outset, 
 the first start of the stupendous evolution, you must 
 have divine volition, or your even fluid will remain 
 even and unorganised for ever and ever. 
 
 And there are at least two more hitches. Let 
 the laws of motion work on the material of the 
 
4v On God Revealed as Power 
 
 m 
 
 universe till planets with rocks and sea and air have 
 been developed, no evolution can ever carry you from 
 inorganic to organic matter. Life is an absolutely 
 new beginning. Who or what gave the magic touch 
 to the first lump of protoplasm made of the ancient 
 elements, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, 
 so that of a sudden its particles began that quite 
 new kind of shifting and renewal from surrounding 
 matter which we call ' life ' ? And finally, after this 
 vegetable life had become common on the earth, 
 by what possible evolution did it suddenly become 
 the seat of that quite new and unprecedented thing 
 which we call * consciousness ' ? This too was a 
 sheer and clean new beginning, and no possible or 
 imaginable laws of motion or of matter can as much 
 as begin to account for it. Stamp matter, then, 
 with what endowments you will, tnere are these 
 three points where you can by no possibility get 
 rid of the divine will-force, — the beginning of the 
 whole evolution (if there ever was a beginning), the 
 beginning of life, and the beginning of consciousness. 
 There are indeed certain deep and ingenious 
 speculations which strive to smooth away these 
 * hitches ' by supposing that both life and conscious- 
 ness have been in some dim way inherent in the 
 universe from all time, and that the building up of 
 the vegetable and animal kingdoms are but the 
 development and specialisation of the vague life- 
 power which lies in all things, and that this new 
 world of consciousness in bird and beast, and in 
 
I 
 
 77?^ Rise of Self-consciousness 47 
 
 man himself, is but the brighter blaze in higher 
 organisms of the dim consciousness which stirs 
 even in the humblest atom of inorganic matter. 
 But even if we were to allow this somewhat 
 strained speculation, and so to get life and 
 consciousness out of the universe at the end by 
 putting it in at the beginning, we should still, I 
 think, have to recognise what I have called a * hitch,' 
 the necessity, that is, of the appHcation of some 
 power other than and above the inherent properties 
 of the universe, in the first rise of s^^-conscious- 
 ness the appearance of one who is a person 
 consciously distinct from all the universe around, 
 and saying to himself, * 1 am L' And this sense 
 of being a separate self, a person distinct in 
 consciousness from all other being or beings what- 
 soever, is the assurance and conviction that lies 
 deepest, clearest, and most secure in the heart of 
 every one of us. 
 
 But, indeed, it is absurd to say that the mere 
 inherent laws of motion or of matter produced just 
 this universe and no other. No sane man can 
 steadily contemplate the whole course of evolution 
 which has led up to the existence of civilised nations 
 of men, without feeling that this is no chance or 
 accidental result, but reveals steady purpose ruling 
 and shaping from the beginning to the end. Nature 
 seems always to be working on from climax to 
 climax, each in its turn the goal in some long road, 
 yet each again the path towards other goals beyond. 
 
48 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 All inorganic Nature is a pathway of forces working 
 towards the consummation of that which we call 
 Life. The rocks, the seas, the atmosphere are the 
 prior requisites which make possible 'the seaweed, 
 the green herbage, the great forests, the fragrant 
 flowers, the luscious fruit. These in themselves are 
 ends ; but they are also means. For without them 
 the air could be filled with no buzzing and twittering 
 life, the surface of our globe could give no support 
 to beasts and creeping things, the sea would be 
 empty of the vast shoals which crowd its depths. 
 The plants furnish the great laboratory which 
 prepares the food for these ; — * only,* says Dr. 
 Martineau, ^ that, unlike our chemists' apparatus 
 and processes, their experiments are all silent, their 
 alembics all sweet, their products the grace and 
 beauty of the world, and their very refuse a glow of 
 autumn glory.* And all this conscious life, itself an 
 end, is in turn in a thousand ways, the means 
 towards human life ; and within the scope of this 
 human life, the appetites, the affections, the senti- 
 ments, in ascending scale, step after step, lead up 
 towards the final realisation of the ideal of the 
 conscience. So that from the lowest motions of 
 minerals and gas in the framework of the globe 
 — nay, from the first thickening of the primeval 
 fluid world-stuff, — the controlling Power moves on 
 and on, step by step, vibration by vibration, till 
 it produces the god-like being of the prophet and 
 the saint. 
 
Did the Atoms take Counsel? 49 
 
 But this steady progress through means after 
 means on and ever on towards a noble end, is the 
 mark not of the clash of purposeless, mindless 
 atoms, but of conscious, self-determining will, ^ see- 
 ing the end from the beginning, weaving the ages 
 as a work upon the loom/ 
 
 Prof. Flint, in a powerful argument on this 
 matter, points out that it is millions of millions to 
 one against the atoms, if left to themselves, pro- 
 ducing a universe like that which exists. * Did the 
 atoms take counsel together,' he asks, * and devise a 
 plan and work it out ? That hypothesis is unspeak- 
 ably absurd ; yet it is rational in comparison to the 
 notion that these atoms combined by mere chance, 
 and by chance produced such a universe as that in 
 which we live.' 
 
 A chapter on * God revealed as Power ' might 
 easily be expanded into a volume. The writer's 
 difficulty is to decide not what to say, but what 
 to leave unsaid. As for me, I shall only ask 
 you briefly to consider one more change in the 
 manner of contemplating God which is involved 
 in our modern notions of the way in which the 
 universe has grown. 
 
 The famous Archdeacon Paley elaborated a 
 famous argument which stands to this day at 
 the very centre of ordinary English theology. He 
 imagined himself finding a watch on a heath, ex- 
 amining its works, being struck by the evidence of 
 contrivance and design in the making, and imme- 
 
5^ On God Revealed as Power 
 
 diately inferring that it had an intelligent maker. 
 Then he argued, * But the world is like a watch ; it 
 too shows innumerable marks of contrivance and 
 design ; therefore it has a maker, and its maker is 
 God.' The argument belongs to that wrong mode 
 of thinking of God of which I have already said so 
 much. It thinks of God as outside the world, con- 
 structing it, and setting it going. It thinks of the 
 forces in the world as something other than God, as 
 the mainspring of the watch is something other than 
 the artisan. But its great vice is that it destroys 
 the omnipotence of God. The artisan who makes a 
 watch has to contrive, to get over difficulties, to hit 
 upon a plan for making the hands go round in spite 
 of their natural inertness. But if in this chapter I 
 have rightly spoken of the divine will as itself con- 
 stituting the force and energy in Nature and the 
 whole of the force and energy in Nature, then the 
 divine will cannot have to contrive, to get over 
 difficulties, to dodge and baffle adverse forces ; and 
 the flooding of the universe with the divine energy 
 is in no way like the construction of the watch. If 
 you insist on likening the world to a watch, then 
 you must liken God, not to the artificer, but to the 
 mainspring, a mainspring living and energising 
 through every part and particle of the whole. 
 
 But we shall prefer to cast aside the likeness of 
 a watch, and to think of the universe as a living 
 organism, an organism of which God himself is 
 the life and power, an organism in which the 
 
The Divine Immanence and Pantheism 5 1 
 
 divine will and wisdom need resort to no con- 
 trivance, because there are neither difficulties nor 
 adverse forces, — but move, as we have seen, evenly 
 and steadfastly onward from the beginning through 
 all time towards the ever higher and higher purpose 
 that is to be. 
 
 But I have often been confronted, when pressing 
 the general argument of this chapter, with an im- 
 portant and most relevant question. ^ Is there any 
 distinction,' I am asked, ^ between the doctrine of 
 the Immanence of God in nature, as you state 
 it, and Pantheism ? And if there is a distinction, 
 wherein does it lie ? ' 
 
 Now there is no doybt that such writers as 
 Theodore Parker and Carlyle, who have both dwelt 
 eloquently on the Immanence of God in nature, have 
 occasionally slipped into forms of expression which 
 are not easily distinguishable from Pantheism. But, 
 for all that, Pantheism and the Immanence of God 
 do not mean the same thing, and belief in the 
 Immanence does not involve the Pantheism. 
 
 What is Pantheism ? It is, as its two Greek 
 terms imply, the doctrine that All is God, and that 
 God is All, that every existence is Deity and that 
 Deity is every existence, that God and the Universe 
 are conterminous and identical. 
 
 Now it is true that I have contended that the 
 divine energy flows through every particle of matter, 
 that every motion, every vibration in the physical 
 universe is nothing else than the immediate action 
 
52, ' On God Revealed as Power 
 
 of God's volition. So far I go with the Pantheist; 
 but I do not say but that there are measureless 
 reserves of divine force wholly beyond that which 
 acts in the physical universe. In other words, I 
 hold with Dr. Martineau that the Immanence of God 
 is by no means opposed to the Transcendency of 
 God, that the fact of divine action everywhere and 
 always through the physical universe, affords no 
 inference that there are not spheres of divine ex- 
 istence transcending and beyond that universe. 
 
 But I would much rather put it in this way : the 
 relation of the physical universe to God is, within 
 certain limits, analogous to the relation of my body 
 to myself The movement of my tongue as I speak, 
 of my eyes as I glance at my friend, of my hand as 
 I write these words, proceeds from that stream of 
 conscious energy which you may call my mind, my 
 soul, my spirit, ray will, or myself. Instantaneously 
 the command of my unseen self flows through my 
 seen self and modifies its attitudes, its gestures, 
 its several and separable parts. But the intimate 
 connection between myself and my body does not 
 imply that I am my body or that my body is myself, 
 the ^ Ego.' If they are in absolute alliance, they are 
 also in absolute antithesis. Nor, even if you went 
 on to imagine my body the absolute product of my 
 own will, and its automatic and reflex action, the 
 breath, the circulation of the blood, the beating 
 of the heart, the growth of the hair and the nails 
 to be the effect of my will, and my consciousness 
 
The Weakness of Pantheism 53 
 
 to be perpetually engaged in conducting these pro- 
 cesses, would you be one step nearer identifying me, 
 the 'Ego,' the self, with this body. The 'Ego' would 
 be immanent in the body, but it woul-d be other 
 than the body, above and beyond it, transcending 
 it, of a nature belonging to a superior order to 
 it, in another and a higher plane than it. Press 
 that analogy home, and you have a safeguard 
 against Pantheism. The Universe may be thought 
 of as the body of God, but as it is gross to confound 
 the body with the man, so it is gross to confound the 
 universe with God. The soul is in the body only in 
 the sense that its energies flow through the body; 
 a man's soul (that is the man) is not in the body 
 in any physical sense. The body is its organ and 
 its instrument. 
 
 But why do we shrink from Pantheism? Not 
 from dread of losing the physical universe in God, 
 but from dread of losing our own souls in God. 
 Pantheism only becomes deadly to vigorous religion 
 and morality when it makes the man's soul, the 
 man's self, a portion of God. Theism claims that 
 the human soul is a free Cause, a separate island of 
 individual will in the midst of the great ocean of the 
 Divine Will. Leave us man confronting God, not 
 absorbed in him, and the conditions are preserved 
 for the ethical life of the individual and also for 
 that communion of the soul with God as another 
 than itself, the very possibility of which is de- 
 stroyed if a separate personality is wiped out. 
 
54 On God Revealed as Power 
 
 On this matter of the otherness of man from God, 
 I hope to say more in a later chapter. 
 
 So much then of God as Power, or God as 
 revealed in the outward universe. We discover 
 a boundless, intelligent life-force moving through 
 all things that are, always, everywhere. That 
 life- force we sum up under the name of ^ God.' 
 We feel that before this living Power, embracing 
 all things, we are feeble and powerless indeed. All 
 the strength of our manhood may beat against his 
 laws, but we cannot break them. We are filled 
 with unspeakable awe. We know that we are in 
 absolute subjection. But that is all. As yet we 
 have found nothing in God to love, nothing to per- 
 suade us that his goodness is as infinite as his 
 power, nothing to waken in us the longing to be 
 good ourselves, nothing to strengthen and cheer us 
 in the struggle. We must open and search other 
 chambers of our nature for all this ; and we shall 
 find God revealed to us in other aspects by which 
 he feeds the springs of righteousness and religion 
 in our breasts. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON GOD REVEALED AS RIGHTEOUSNESS. 
 
 LET US count up our gains and see what we now 
 possess. We have appealed to the necessary 
 laws of our own thought, that natural thinking con- 
 stitution of ours from which we cannot escape ; and 
 we have found that it compels us to believe that 
 * every event, occurrence, or happening has a cause.' 
 But we found also that the very meaning of the 
 word * cause ' in our minds is a * living energy akin 
 to our own wills'; and we further recognised that 
 the whole history of the universe is the history of 
 an innumerable chain of events, occurrences, or hap- 
 penings. So that there is no rest, no pause, no 
 stopping-place for our minds short of believing in 
 a living Energy akin to our wills moving through 
 the universe everywhere. Moreover, the movement 
 has been along certain lines and up on to higher and 
 higher planes, from the evenly diffused fluid world- 
 stuff up to the myriads of spherical worlds, up again 
 to organised life-stuff, from that to consciousness, 
 and from that to human beings with their ever ex- 
 
56 On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 panding mental and moral powers ; so that it is 
 borne in upon us quite irresistibly that in the im- 
 mense evolution under the stress of the living 
 Energy there has been guiding purpose from first 
 to last. And we are landed, under the impulse of 
 the simplest reflections, at the conception of a 
 Living Energy akin to our wills moving through 
 the universe everywhere and moving along certain 
 lines revealing Purpose. We may call this Living 
 Energy ' God ' ; and this is the idea of God which 
 is yielded by those laws of our minds to which 
 we have already referred, in view of the great 
 and wonderful universe in which we find ourselves 
 dwelling. 
 
 But sublime as this idea of God is, it impresses 
 the intellect rather than the conscience or the heart. 
 It is tremendous, but it is not lovable. Still holding 
 our clue, the laws of our own conscious nature, can 
 we go further and find anything revealed to us of 
 God of the kind which prophets and preachers have 
 most delighted to proclaim ? Is there anything to 
 obey ? Is there anything to love ? 
 
 We all of us possess — however we come by it — a 
 certain sense of quite a different kind from any 
 which I have touched on in the earlier chapters. 
 We have noted the physical senses, sight, hearing, 
 touch, taste and smell. We have noted the remark- 
 able faculty of memory. We have noted our sense 
 of causality. All these — though the trustworthiness 
 of not one single one of them can be proved — we 
 
The Moral Sense Vy 
 
 trust and believe and cannot help trusting and 
 believing ; and they lie at the root of vast measures 
 of our knowledge of the world in which we live. 
 
 But here is another sense which we all possess, 
 however we come by it. I mean the moral sense. 
 It opens out quite a new book of our natufe. Men 
 often try to get rid of it ; and they can weaken 
 and dilute it. But I doubt if any man ever yet has 
 killed it. When it seems most dead, suddenly it 
 will flash out in some moment of crisis with awful 
 power. What is this moral sense ? And what 
 does it declare ? 
 
 The senses of sight and touch declare that there 
 is a world outside of us ; and we cannot but believe 
 them. The sense or faculty of memory declares that 
 at this present there is a consciousness in me corres- 
 ponding point by point with certain happenings in 
 the past ; and I can no other than believe it. The 
 sense of cause declares that each event occurring 
 has had behind it some propelling energy akin to 
 that one energy I know immediately and call my 
 will ; and I can find no way out of believing it. 
 In like manner — though in quite a new field — the 
 moral sense declares that certain kinds of conduct 
 are more worthy or more unworthy than others, dis- 
 cerns and proclaims a distinction of transcendent 
 importance between them, which distinction is 
 marked by the words * right ' and * wrong.' I am 
 only as yet saying that we have a sense of differ- 
 ence between right and wrong. I have not said 
 what we mean by it or how we get it. 
 
58 On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 But these are questions which we must ask 
 and answer ; and on the answer hang issues of 
 unspeakable interest and moment. 
 
 What do we mean by right and wrong ? I see 
 Edwin Long's picture of the maiden of Ephesus, 
 called orf to offer incense on Diana's altar. Her 
 lover, with burning eyes, urges compliance. Judge 
 and executioners look sternly on. But the delicate 
 white hand is withheld. Loyalty to Christ and 
 Truth prevails. And we know that to-morrow the 
 damsel will be thrust on to the arena where the 
 panther or the tiger will lap her blood. What is 
 this emotion which stirs me? Not only appreciation 
 of the artist's art or even of the lovely light in the 
 maiden's face ; but, above and beyond all that, a 
 bounding sense of nobility^ of worth, of worthiness, 
 in that fair Christian's loyalty. I am carried out of 
 myself with a sense that here is something which 1 
 must honour — which I do honour and cannot but 
 honour, even though it would be hard to show that, 
 apart from the intrinsic nobility of her protest, any- 
 one would have been one penny the worse for 
 her dropping a pinch of the fragrant incense on 
 the shrine. 
 
 But now again I am passing down a London 
 slum. I hear a bitter cry. And, turning my head, 
 I see a huge brute with giant strength thrashing 
 a woman or a little child, his unrestrained passion 
 at every blow endangering life. What is this 
 emotion which surges up ? Not only pity for the 
 
A Deed of Shame 59 
 
 victim ; not only an impulse to intervene ; but, 
 above and beyond these, a sense that here is some- 
 thing that is unutterably base I am carried out of 
 myself with a sense that this is something which I 
 must execrate — which I do execrate and cannot but 
 execrate while any power of feeling is in my heart. 
 
 ' Nobility * and * baseness ' : these are qualities 
 which I quite instinctively recognise. * Honour * 
 and * execration * : these are feelings which are spon- 
 taneously generated in my heart. 
 
 That is about as far as we can get in analysing 
 what our moral sense impresses on us with regard 
 to the conduct of other people. If we wish to have 
 a yet clearer insight into the pronouncements of our 
 moral sense, we must note what emotions it wakens 
 in us concerning the conduct not of others, but of 
 ourselves. 
 
 Suppose that I have received great kindness 
 from a friend. He took me to His house when I 
 was homeless, advised with me, sympathised with 
 me, helped me when I was desolate, started me in 
 life, and ever since with brotherly interest has 
 watched over my career. In the confidence of our 
 friendship he tells me a secret of his circumstances, 
 not in itself in any way dishonourable, but such 
 that his prosperity depends on the confidence being 
 sacredly kept. But I know that his rival and com- 
 petitor will give me fifty pounds for the secret, and 
 I forthwith go and sell it to him and receive the 
 cash. A year afterwards my friend dies, a ruined 
 
6d On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 and broken-hearted man through my betrayal. I 
 meanwhile have greatly prospered. My fifty pounds 
 has become five thousand pounds. But the night 
 after hearing of his death I lie sleepless on my bed, 
 and my conduct all rises up before me vivid in every 
 detail. And the moment that is so, an intense 
 self-abhorrence, an almost unbearable shame seizes 
 on me. I judge myself with a poignancy and an 
 unsparing justice more acute than I have ever 
 applied to others. I try to frame excuses to 
 myself. But they wither and shrivel before I can 
 shape them in thought. I know, without any 
 reasoning whatsoever, that I have been a sneak and 
 a traitor. I do not argue with myself. I cannot. 
 The knowledge overwhelms me. Shame and con- 
 fusion of face are mine. And it is vain for me to 
 attempt to console myself with the thought that no 
 eye sees me ; and that the only man who knew of 
 my treachery is 'dead. I execrated the conduct of 
 that other man who beat his child. But I felt no 
 shame. This shame, this remorse, this agony of 
 conscience is a feeling wholly different from abhor- 
 rence of another man^s wickedness ; it is a personal 
 anguish of overwhelming sense of unworthiness, of 
 having rebelled, of having broken an obligation, 
 of having risen in insurrection against an authority. 
 
 Such is the terrific and most peculiar force of 
 the moral sense when we have done evil. But 
 suppose that, instead of that, I have done well. In 
 great temptation, and to the loss, not only of 
 
The Moral Sense 6 1 
 
 wealth, but of dear friends and of that repute among 
 men which seems the very jewel of life, I have done 
 the difficult, painful right. What is my emotion 
 then ? Great sorrow at my grievous losses ; perhaps 
 even some passing wave of bitterness at the in- 
 justice of men ; but, deeper down than that, a 
 wonderful satisfaction and peace, a sense of harmony 
 with what is highest and best and most enduring 
 and most inwrought into the eternal framework of 
 things. The suffering and sorrow are great. But 
 I would not undo my conduct if I could. I am so 
 far satisfied with myself. Mr. Lecky laughs at 
 those who speak of this self-satisfaction and com- 
 pares them to Little Jack Horner, who said, * What 
 a good boy am I ! ' But the kind of satisfaction I 
 am speaking of has been felt, sometimes at any 
 rate, by everyone who is trying to lead a good life, 
 and is absolutely consistent with the truest modesty 
 and the deepest humility. 
 
 Now if I describe green grass or blue sky all 
 day long, I do not succeed in explaining what green 
 and blue are any more clearly than you understood 
 them to begin with. The sense of greenness and 
 the sense of blueness in objects are absolutely 
 simple ; and what is absolutely simple can never be 
 explained. If you are acquainted with blueness and 
 greenness, you wil understand me at once. And if 
 you are not, I might be as great an orator as 
 Demosthenes and as great a philosopher as Plato, 
 but I could not give you an inkling of what I mean. 
 
"^ On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 And in like manner with the terms * right ' and 
 * wrong/ * morally good' and 'morally evil/ a * good 
 conscience ' and a * bad conscience.' If you have 
 the moral sense, you know what I mean before I 
 begin to explain ; but if you had it not, no explan- 
 ation in the world could ever give you the smallest 
 inkling of what it means. I have given examples of 
 the action of the moral sense, not by way of 
 explaining it at all, but by way of leading you 
 to realise that you possess it, and to feel how 
 absolutely different its declarations are from the 
 declarations of any other faculty whatever in the 
 whole repertory of your nature. 
 
 I hold that the moral sense deals with a peculiar 
 province of its own which can never be translated 
 into any other province, any more than sight can 
 ever be translated into terms of hearing, or smell 
 into terms of touch. If a man had no ears, you 
 could never give him a glimmering of the meaning 
 of the word * shrill ' by painting pictures for him. 
 If a man had no nostrils, you could never give him 
 a glimmering of the meaning of the word 'fragrance' 
 by making him feel the soft petals of the rose. And 
 if a man had no moral sense, I hold that, in like 
 manner, you could never give him a glimmering of 
 the meaning of the words ^ right ' and * wrong,' 
 * noble ' and * base,' by any talk addressed to his 
 reason or his taste or any other of the faculties 
 which he might possess. 
 
 But in this I am stating to you a view which is 
 
The Moral Sense 6 J 
 
 vehemently opposed and contradicted by the most 
 popular philosophers of the eighteenth and nine- 
 teenth centuries ; and we must glance at their efforts 
 to dissolve the moral sense into some other faculty 
 and moral truth into some other kind of truth. 
 
 The chief opponents of the view which I have 
 laid down are the utilitarians, that is the philo- 
 sophers who teach that the moral quality of con- 
 duct depends on its usefulness and that the moral 
 sense simply declares that one sort of conduct is 
 more useful than another sort. But the utilitarians 
 are divided among themselves (for I venture to use 
 the term, as it may, I think, legitimately be used, to 
 include both those whom Mr. Henry Sidgwick calls 
 Egoistic Hedonists or pleasure-seekers, and those 
 whom he calls Universalistic Hedonists), the more 
 old-fashioned of them measuring the usefulness 
 which in their view makes a line of conduct moral, 
 by its service to the person whose conduct is in 
 question; the more modern, on the other hand, 
 measuring that usefulness by its service to society 
 at large. The former class of philosophers teach 
 that moral conduct is simply conduct based on 
 *an enlightened self-interest,' and that wrong-doing 
 is no more than doing that which in the long run 
 will tell against your interest. The latter class, on 
 the other hand, teach that moral conduct is conduct 
 that makes for * the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number,' or that is * conducive to general 
 enjoyment.' The latter view is as much nobler 
 
^ On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 than the former as unselfishness is nobler than 
 selfishness. But I. believe that the simplest in- 
 vestigation of the facts of our own nature shows 
 that both are alike untrue. 
 
 Do we mean, when we say that John's conduct 
 is praiseworthy, that it is for his own truest interest? 
 I have no doubt that praiseworthy or moral conduct 
 is for a man's true interest, because I believe that 
 God has constructed the world on a moral basis. 
 But when I say first : * John has acted for his own 
 true interest/ and next, * John has acted rightly/ do 
 I mean the same thing ? Do these two expressions 
 stand for one idea or for two ideas ? When the 
 question is put so, it seems impossible to doubt the 
 answer. These are two ideas as truly as 'brown' 
 and * square ' are two ideas, when we say, * the box 
 is brown and square.' No doubt, the brown box 
 may be square, and the square box brown. It may 
 all be one and the same box. But the two adjec- 
 tives do not stand for one and the same idea. And 
 so John's act may be for his own best interest and 
 also right. Prudence and morality may coincide. 
 But they are not the same thing. Sometimes a 
 man's interest seems^ at any rate, all to pull one way, 
 his duty the other. Perhaps, indeed, they may not 
 really. But we think that they do. And just 
 because John's conduct seems to go right in the 
 teeth of his interest, we are enthusiastic about his 
 nobility. Whereas if self-interest were the measure 
 of morality, we ought to be enthusiastic about 
 
Is Morality Self-interest? 65 
 
 his conduct just in proportion as self-interest 
 guides him. 
 
 But Archdeacon Paley reminds us that self- 
 interest must be measured by an eternal, not a 
 temporary measure. There are heaven and hell to 
 look to, says he ; and the only sanction of our 
 moral sense is that heaven and hell lie behind it. 
 But, says Dr. Martineau, let Paley visit the Cornish 
 miners and pit his teaching against Wesley's. 
 Which touches the quick of the moral nature ? 
 Paley preaches : * Be sober, honest, and chaste, or 
 you will go to hell.' How many hearts will he 
 touch ? how many consciences quicken ? But Wes- 
 ley preaches : * Be sober, honest, chaste, because 
 it is a shame to be otherwise, because you are 
 laid under a great obligation, because you arc 
 called by a divine authority, because it makes all 
 the difference in your intrinsic worth,' — and the 
 rude Cornishmen feel the breath of a new spirit, 
 their moral man is regenerated as by a magician's 
 touch. So that regard for even the most tremen- 
 dous and enduring interests of self is not identical 
 with morality "and righteousness. 
 
 But much more alluring is the doctrine that 
 morality, goodness, righteousness, is that conduct 
 which makes for the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number, conduces to the general enjoy- 
 ment ; and that moral approval is a sense that the 
 person approved has so acted as to make for this. 
 
 Yet even here a simple inquiry, what is the 
 
■ On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 conduct which we praise, admire, revere, what the 
 conduct which we blame, loathe, despise, shows 
 that there is something else in goodness than this 
 ministration to enjoyment, and something else in 
 approbation than recognition that conduct makes 
 for enjoyment. No doubt, good conduct generally 
 promotes happiness and bad conduct generally 
 promotes pain. I believe for my own part that, 
 if we could trace their workings far enough, we 
 should find that on the large field, and in the 
 long run, it always is so. But I am quite sure 
 that that is not the whole of what I mean when 
 I say that this conduct is noble and that that 
 conduct is base. I have told you that the con- 
 duct of that maiden at Ephesus comes home to 
 me as surpassingly noble. Yet it certainly made 
 against the happiness of her lover, and I am sure 
 you will not say that its nobility arose from the 
 cruel pleasure it would give the populace in their 
 brutal holiday ; and if you insist that the girl be- 
 lieved that she would be snatched up to eternal bliss 
 the moment the wild beast's fang should pierce her 
 heart, then we all feel that that rather detracts from 
 than adds to the moral splendour of her faithfulness. 
 So that it is absolutely clear that the high morality 
 of her loyalty did not consist in making for the 
 enjoyment or happiness of any persons whatsoever. 
 
 But there is one extraordinarily striking instance 
 in literature of the impossibility of holding steadily 
 and consistently by this doctrine that morality lies 
 
MiWs Splendid Inconsistency 6y 
 
 in conduciveness to happiness. The great apostle 
 of that doctrine in our time has been John Stuart 
 Mill. He has advanced it with a persistency, an 
 ingeniousness, and a strength of conviction which 
 no other writer has surpassed. And yet the first 
 moment he gives himself a free rein and forgets 
 his theory in the fervour of his own moral feeling, 
 he runs clean away from it. 
 
 Mr. Mill for the moment has forgotten his 
 theories and his whole soul is aflame with abhor- 
 rence of the doctrine preached by some, — and, as he 
 thought, by Mansel, the famous Bampton Lecturer, 
 — that God governs on principles which the highest 
 human morality would not sanction. * Convince me 
 of it,' he says, * and I will bear my fate as I may. 
 But when I am told that I must believe this and at 
 the same time call this being by the names which 
 express and affirm the highest human morality, I 
 say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power 
 such a being may have over me, there is one thing 
 which he shall not do ; he shall not compel me to 
 worship him. I will call no being good, who is not 
 what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow- 
 creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to 
 hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.' 
 
 * To hell I will go ' : that means, I will incur all 
 possible pain and woe. It is obvious that Mill is 
 here laying down a principle which he would have 
 all men accept. Rather than that men should wor- 
 ship an immoral God, he would have them one and 
 
Xpo Qff QqcI Revealed as Rwhteousness 
 
 'S' 
 
 all accept misery and torment for ever. Our hearts 
 and consciences respond to the nobihty of the senti- 
 ment. Unquestionably Mill felt that he was utter- 
 ing himself in the spirit of the highest and purest 
 morality. Yet what a demolition of the whole of 
 his philosophy of morals ! The most moral conduct, 
 he teaches, is always that which conduces most to 
 the general enjoyment. That is what we mean by 
 morality, — so he argues with all his astonishing 
 dialectical keenness. But when it comes to the test, 
 in the name of morality itself he protests that under 
 certain conditions all men ought to sacrifice ever- 
 asting joy and embrace everlasting pain. And we 
 know that his theory is wrong and his sentiment 
 right. *When a crucial case really comes before 
 him,' says Dr. Ward, *his better nature compels 
 him to decide sternly, peremptorily, effusively, in- 
 dignantly, against his own doctrine.' 
 
 But if the idea ^ right * cannot be identified with 
 the idea * making for happiness,' and the idea 
 'wrong' cannot be identified with the idea * making 
 against happiness,' neither can these moral con- 
 ceptions be translated into terms of any other of 
 our faculties. The more perseveringly we try to 
 identify the qualities in conduct which the moral 
 sense perceives with qualities perceived by some 
 other sense, the more shall we be forced to the 
 conclusion that in reality the moral idea is an 
 absolutely unique idea, incapable of translation 
 into any other. * Right' and 'wrong' are simple, 
 
The Moral Idea Unique ^9 
 
 unanalysable conceptions, given to each of us as 
 part of the natural furniture of cur minds, not 
 derived from any reasonings, but appealing to a 
 special faculty or sense within us. If you had 
 no conception of right and wrong, I could never 
 give it you ; though if you have it faintly, I may 
 nurse it into clearness ; just as if you had no eyes, 
 I could never give you vision, though if your eyes 
 were very short-sighted, I might doctor them into 
 clear, strong seeing. 
 
 All our simple perceptions — all those perceptions 
 of ours, that is, which cannot be analysed, taken tc 
 pieces, explained into something else — are given to 
 us directly as part of the endowment of humar. 
 nature. They are not and cannot be derived from 
 some other perceptions of ours, for if they were, 
 they would not be simple, but • could be taken to 
 pieces and analysed into their elements. But this 
 moral sense, this perception that there is a morally 
 right and a morally wrong, that the one is noble, 
 the other base, that the one is to be approved and 
 praised in others, the other to be disapproved and 
 blamed in others, this sense of peace in ourselves at 
 the one and of shame in ourselves at the other; — 
 this moral sense which we all have, but cannot 
 explain, is simple ; therefore it is given to us in our 
 nature, not derived from any other sense or senses. 
 It is part of the original make of human nature, like 
 the sense of causality, or memory ; and though we 
 can never prove it, we cannot help believing it. 
 
70 On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 But when I say *given/ the question starts up, 
 * given ? given by whom ? ' And of this element in 
 us, as of our bodies and our senses and our mental 
 constitution generally, we can only say * given by 
 the action of that Living Energy akin to our will 
 which we have found moving through and control- 
 Hng all the universe/ We can believe no other 
 than that our moral nature is given us of God. 
 
 I am not conscious that in saying this I am 
 saying anything contrary to the great doctrine of 
 Evolution rightly understood. An endowment may 
 be given, yet given gradually only. No one sup- 
 poses that it is any objection to the doctrine that a 
 man's physical strength is given him by God that it 
 has slowly grown from very small beginnings in the 
 feeble body of a baby. Nor is it any the less open 
 to us to suppose a mental or moral endowment of 
 our race to be given us by God because it has been 
 developed in us from primordial beginnings through 
 the slow processes of a countless succession of 
 generations. 
 
 But if given us of God, its tenour cannot but be 
 consonant with the divine thought. It is incon- 
 ceivable that God should weave into a man's soul 
 a moral sense which does not answer to his own 
 nature. If God has made me feel by an inward 
 sense that avarice or meanness is base and to 
 be condemned, while generosity is noble and to 
 be approved, it is impossible but to suppose that 
 God himself — however vast the difference between 
 
The Moral Sense God^s Gift 7 1 
 
 his consciousness and mine — in some kind of man- 
 ner also views avarice or meanness as base and 
 views generosity as worthy. If God has quickened 
 in the human mind an instinctive moral sense with 
 power to inspire men to the loftiest heroism for the 
 sake of right or to plunge them in maddening re- 
 morse on account of wrong, then it seems quite 
 impossible to think that God himself is passive and 
 indifferent to right and wrong and has in his own 
 divine nature nothing corresponding to our moral 
 judgments and the emotions which beat with such 
 vivid light about those judgments. 
 
 And so by this long, slow path which through 
 this chapter we have been pursuing, a path thorny, 
 stony, difficult, on which I have painfully felt myself 
 but an indifferent guide, we have, if you have fol- 
 lowed me, suddenly arrived at a great and splendid 
 truth which was worth a long climb to reach. The 
 great and splendid truth is this : * Whatever be the 
 mode of God's own life and consciousness, whatever 
 the inscrutable mysteries of his nature and being, 
 he is a moral God.' This does not mean that he, 
 like us, has a battle to fight against temptation, and 
 moral victories to win ; but it means that to him as 
 to us moral good and moral evil stand dissevered ; 
 that to him as to us they are good and are evil ; and 
 that good and evil mean to him that same simple, 
 unanalysable, but clear, solemn, and momentous 
 thing which they mean to us. And from this it 
 follows that he is himself a God of righteousness; 
 
72 On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 that whatever there may be in the universe to 
 puzzle, to bewilder, sometimes to confound us, that 
 purpose which threads together the ages, cannot but 
 be a righteous purpose, — that, as Matthew Arnold 
 puts it, * this Power not ourselves,* which we call 
 God, ' makes for righteousness.* 
 
 The moral sense, then, conducts us to the recog- 
 nition of God as God of Righteousness. But it does 
 so also by a shorter and quicker path than that 
 which we have just been traversing. 
 
 Our moral sense is a sense of obligation. Do 
 what we will, we cannot empty our moral perception 
 of this strange and unique characteristic, that it is 
 always the perception that there is a bond binding 
 us to, an authoritaitve power calling us to, a certain 
 sort of conduct. Tens of thousands of young men 
 have tried to break up this sense of an authority, a 
 bond. They have said : * It will give me more 
 pleasure on the whole to lead a gay Hfe for a year 
 or two, than to plod on in the dull routine. I will 
 do as I please. Why not ? * And they have done 
 as they pleased. But the balance of pleasure which 
 their calculations promised them has been broken 
 and marred by this unescapable sense of a bond,. 
 an obligation, an authority. Their revels have been 
 haunted by the sense of a debt unpaid. Their 
 intervals of inaction have been darkened by a sense 
 of shame, as before one who has an inalienable right 
 to look in upon the soul and chasten it. But every 
 phase of this feeling, the sense of bond, obligation,. 
 
The Sense of Obligation y^ 
 
 debt, the sense of shame, the sense of shrinking as 
 before a gaze of fire, implies that there is another 
 Being than the man himself towards whom these 
 relations are sustained. If I owe, I owe some one. 
 If I am bound, I am bound to some one. If I am 
 ashamed, I am ashamed before some one. And any 
 faithful reading of the emotions of a stricken con- 
 science spells in them the name of God ; the Living 
 Energy who has made me what I am, and himself 
 has wrought into my spirit that moral sense which 
 he calls on me to make, my guide through life. 
 
 This is the cardinal point of Dr. Martineau's 
 ethical philosophy. But no one has put it with 
 more beautiful and striking force than Cardinal 
 Newman. * If,' says he, * on doing wrong we feel 
 the same fearful, broken-hearted sorrow which over- 
 whelms us on hurting a mother ; if, on doing right, 
 we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same 
 soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our 
 receiving praise from a father, we certainly have 
 within us the image of some person, to whom our 
 love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our 
 happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we 
 direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled 
 and waste away.' 
 
 The moral sense or conscience, as we may now 
 term it, teaches us then that a divine Being calls on 
 us to do the right, to shun the wrong. It teaches, 
 too, that that inward voice which speaks to us has 
 intrinsic right everywhere and always to the obedi- 
 
74 On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 ^nce. of every creature. We can imagine no created 
 being, capable of receiving it, with a right to put 
 aside and ignore its behest. We recognise it then 
 as the voice of that Spirit which governs always, 
 everywhere, — the Supreme and Everlasting God. 
 
 Now though I believe that the reasoning in this 
 chapter is philosophically sound, yet I can well 
 imagine that I have failed to carry with me some of 
 my readers. The premises seem slight to sustain 
 so tremendous a conclusion. And you may well ask 
 me to put my belief in a God who concerns himself 
 with righteousness, and that in the case of each in- 
 dividual man, woman, and child, calling on the 
 individual by an inward voice, which is his own 
 day by day and minute by minute to do right and 
 shun wrong, — you may well ask me to put this 
 amazing and stupendous belief to the test I myself 
 have suggested : ' Does it work ? ' 
 
 * Does it work,' — this belief that God is in each 
 man's breast urging on to good or calling back from 
 evil, approving or disapproving, wakening the de- 
 light of peace with himself or the shame of broken 
 obligations ? Does it make efficient men and 
 women, strong, brave, true ? The question only 
 needs to be put to find its answer. Almost all that 
 is great and noble in human life, that marks man- 
 kind off from the lower orders of creation, that beats 
 down the coarse, the selfish, and the brutal in us 
 and nourishes the pure, the spiritual, the god-like, is 
 the direct working of this belief that we are under 
 
Does the Theory work ? 75 
 
 the call of God, that he speaks in the voice of con- 
 science, that there are bonds binding us with unique 
 authority to do his will and obey his law. Cut this 
 thought right out of the human heart, and who will 
 dare to say how terrible will be the fall of man and 
 the breaking up of the bonds of human society ? 
 The moment a man feels that God is there, his con- 
 duct takes the highest line. It is the one lever 
 beyond all others to lift mankind to pure, effective, 
 and noble manhood. 
 
 It may indeed be contended that there are many 
 men in our day who have given up all belief in the 
 Living God, and yet are living noble and strenuous 
 lives. It is true ; and we may even add that there 
 is something peculiarly grand in the manner in 
 which a Cliiford or a Huxley continued to live for 
 the noblest ends and to hold his manhood on the 
 highest levels of character, when the old helps to 
 goodness had passed from him altogether. But 
 Miss Cobbe has well pointed out that, whatever the 
 personal opinions of such men may be, they have 
 been born into an atmosphere of belief in God and 
 the solemn religious sanctions of morality. They 
 enjoy the heredity of a moral character formed under 
 the influences of Christian faith. And, however 
 lofty the ethical standing of a few picked individuals 
 who have ceased to feel God round them, that can 
 give us no security for the like ethical elevation in a 
 generation trained in an atmosphere of atheism and 
 born into no Christian heredity. Nor have we to 
 
^d On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 look far abroad to see how many lose moral grip and 
 swerve below the high level of a noble life when 
 faith in God grows weak. Nor again, I think, can 
 any of us doubt that we ourselves have been most 
 nearly what we would wish to be at those times 
 when Faith in the Heavenly Father has shone 
 brightest and clearest in our hearts. 
 
 But at this point it will be well to notice one 
 seemingly formidable argument which has driven 
 hundreds of intelligent persons to doubt whether 
 the voice of conscience can indeed be the voice of 
 God. * Look,' they say, * at the different ideas of 
 right and wrong in different ages, different countries, 
 and even among the same people at the same time. 
 Are not half the disputes that keep the world astir 
 disputes as to what is right ? How then can you 
 pretend that God gives a sovereign verdict in each 
 man's breast ? ' 
 
 And indeed the objection seems staggering. 
 The Greeks thought it a duty to expose to death 
 every weakling child. We condemn the neglect 
 of children as a hideous crime. Nay, forty years 
 ago devout and excellent ministers of religion were 
 found to defend negro slavery. And to-day some 
 of the best of men are found to defend the practice 
 of vivisection, while to others among us the practice 
 seems no better than consummate devilry. 
 
 To take the last first. The explanation is very 
 simple. No thinker has ever said that God usurps 
 the individual's judgment about particular acts. It 
 
The Limits of Conscience 77 
 
 is at most contended that he intimates that certain 
 kinds of conduct are good and certain other kinds 
 are evil. Now vivisection is regarded by some as 
 highly benevolent, because it is supposed to lead 
 to the mitigation of human suffering, while the 
 awful animal suffering which it inflicts is quite 
 unrealised. It is held by others to be unspeakably 
 cruel, because it puts dumb creatures to excruciating 
 pain. Now what God's voice in conscience does 
 is to extol benevolence and to condemn cruelty. It 
 is obvious then that according to whether an 
 individual happens to concentrate his thought on 
 the alleged benevolence or the actual cruelty in 
 vivisection, conscience will be enlisted on the one 
 side or the other. And which way a man's thought 
 fixes itself is a question not decided by conscience, 
 but by accidents of education, association, tradition, 
 and circumstance, by actual acquaintance with the 
 facts, or by too easy a reliance on the pleadings of 
 ■ professional apologists. So again in so complex an 
 institution as American slavery, two men might 
 equally love justice and hat€ injustice, and yet the 
 one had been so saturated with the point of view 
 of the better class of planters, and the other saw so 
 clearly by the light of the abolitionists, that they 
 would diam.etrically differ on the right or wrong of 
 the institution in dispute. 
 
 But when we take that other example — the ex- 
 posure of children among the Greeks — we touch 
 on other facts of vast importance. Conscience is 
 
7® On God Revealed as Righteousness 
 
 the gift of God, but like every other gift of God in 
 our nature it has been, as I have hinted, gradually 
 developed. It began, in some very dim, dull way, in 
 those days when, as Fiske tells us, man was less 
 different from the ape than from Plato or from Paul ; 
 and age after age, under the stress of life, like the 
 reason itself, the moral sense cleared and strength- 
 ened and was illumined. There is in the human 
 breast a great range of springs of action, from the 
 lowest animal passions to the loftiest promptings of 
 religion. But man began with the lower ones only ; 
 and in the evolution of society and of mind and 
 thought and feeling, the higher ones one after 
 another stole on to the arena of the soul and 
 entered into competition for the guidance of the 
 man's conduct and the rule of his heart. And what 
 conscience, that present speech of God, has always 
 done is this : it has declared with ringing clear- 
 ness as each higher spring of action for the first 
 time took its place, its superior worth and holiness 
 to its less lofty predecessors. The education of 
 the race is always going on, and even in our own 
 time, for example, desire for the good of the world 
 at large is only slowly forcing itself into action and 
 making itself felt as higher than desire for the 
 interest of our own country. Many folk still deem 
 world -philanthropy or pure humanity a fanatic's 
 dream beside patriotism; but a hundred years hence 
 it will be a moral axiom that the race comes before 
 the nation. 
 
From Patriotism Upwards 79 
 
 So those old Greeks had arrived at patriotism as 
 a spring of action, and that was the highest that 
 they knew. And if the puny, puHng child seemed 
 likely to incommode rather than help the State, the 
 highest duty seemed to demand its slaughter. But 
 then came the Man of Nazareth and opened out a 
 higher spring of action still, — reverence for the 
 individual soul as the temple of God. And that 
 spring once quickened in the heart, the thing which 
 had seemed a virtue slid into the place of a vice in 
 men's conception. The infallible voice of God, when 
 once this new motive had been quickened, pro- 
 nounced that to be the higher and declared that 
 therein lay the right of guidance and control. 
 
 And so from age to age new fields of character 
 have been opened up and received their consecration 
 from conscience. Purity, humility, truthfulness, 
 spiritual reverence, — each of these has had its epoch 
 in which it has first shown its face and pleaded with 
 men to love and serve it. And over each as it has 
 taken up its place that voice of God which we call 
 Conscience— the moral sense — has pronounced its 
 benediction : * This is my beloved Son ; hear him 1 ^ 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ON GOD REVEALED AS LOVE. 
 
 WE have now traced in outline the revelation 
 which God makes of himself to men along 
 two separate lines. From the necessity under 
 which we find ourselves to think of every happen- 
 ing or phenomenon as having a cause, together 
 with the fact that what we mean by ^ cause ' is 
 something akin to that living power in ourselves 
 which we call our will, we arrived at the revela- 
 tion of God as the Living Cause behind all the 
 phenomena of the outward universe from the very 
 beginning of evolution. And along this line of 
 thought we come to conceive of God as the Living 
 Energy by which alone the worlds and all that in 
 them is are sustained in their perpetual thrill and 
 everlasting tremor of motion. If we try to realise 
 what that energy is, our imagination is instantane- 
 ously baffled, overwhelmed, confounded, by its 
 velocity as well as by both its minuteness and its 
 immensity of operation. On the one hand it has 
 been estimated that the gas in the air which we 
 
The Mmal Law Universal 8 1 
 
 breathe consists of molecules of which there are 
 nineteen million, million, miHion in a single cubic 
 centimetre, and that each of these molecules dashes 
 backwards and forwards throu<:^h all the seconds of 
 all the years at the rate of five or six hundred 
 yards a second. On the other hand we can set 
 no boundaries whatever to the universe. No tele- 
 scope was ever yet contrived so strong but that at 
 the furthest limits of its range, chiefly, however, in 
 one plane, star-clusters seem to blossom out; and 
 who can say how far beyond there may be star- 
 clusters more again? Light starting to-night from 
 the nearest of the fixed stars, at a speed of 1 86, OCX) 
 miles a second, cannot reach us for three long years ; 
 and light from some of the nebulae faintly gleaming 
 there in the space-distances has taken thousands of 
 years on its long, sure journey thence to our eyes. 
 What we see is the star, or rather the light about 
 the star, as it was long before Babylon was built or 
 the Pharaohs arose in Egypt. The star as it is 
 to-day will shed its light on the eyes of our children 
 when a longer his-tory has been written from to- 
 day than the history since first the antique men 
 scratched their strange records on the rocks. Such 
 is the scale of that universe, throughout which 
 pulses that ceaseless Energy which is the manifesta- 
 tion of the Living God. 
 
 And then we have seen how God reveals him- 
 self also along the line of the Moral Law. He has 
 set in us a mysterious sense by which we know that 
 
82 
 
 On God Revealed as Love 
 
 certain kinds of conduct are worthier than other 
 kinds. We know by some necessary law of our 
 minds that reverence is more noble than conceit and 
 that compassion is more noble than vindictiveness. 
 It is a constantly recurring experience with us that, 
 when two lines of possible conduct present them- 
 selves to us, we know that we ought to pursue the 
 one and not the other. And we are convinced that 
 that is God's judgment as well as ours, and that 
 God makes us judge so because he judges so; and 
 that the same springs of action which are nobler for 
 us are nobler also for all beings everywhere before 
 whom the like choice is presented ; and not only 
 that, but that whatever beings God may have im- 
 pressed with a moral consciousness in the remotest 
 past or shall so endow in the remotest future, with 
 them also the like moral law has held and shall hold 
 good. The moral law, we are persuaded, is as uni- 
 versal in space and in time as the physical laws 
 of gravity or the refraction of light. *The rule of 
 right,* says Dr. Martineau, ^ the symmetries of 
 character, are no provincialisms of this planet ; they 
 are known among the stars ; they reign beyond 
 Orion and the Southern Cross ; they are wherever 
 the Universal Spirit is; and no subject mind, though 
 it fly on one track for ever, can escape beyond their 
 bounds.* Yes, and we may add : that was so from 
 an Alpha ere ever the planets broke from the 
 central sun and shall be so to an Omega when 
 all the worlds now astir with life shall be dead 
 worlds floating dark through space. 
 
The Moral Law Universal "3 
 
 Language has no words, imagination has no 
 pictures/ in which to set forth the sublimity of this 
 infinite and eternal range of the one Causal Energy 
 and the one Moral Fiat which are two of the self- 
 utterances of the Living God. 
 
 But I have now to try to expound how^ God 
 is revealed to us along one other line of thought 
 and feeling. 
 
 We have seen how by its very constitution 
 the human mind forms a multitude of judgments 
 independently of and prior to any reasonings 
 or arguments, judgments that we cannot help be- 
 lieving to be true, though we are for ever incapable 
 of demonstrating or proving their truth. 
 
 If anyone says that there is no world at all 
 outside us, we cannot prove that he is wrong, and yet 
 we know that he is wrong. We trust our senses. 
 
 If anyone says that the consciousness now in 
 my mind that I was very tired when I had to trudge 
 from St. Paul's to Piccadilly last Saturday for want 
 of an omnibus, is a mere delusion, I cannot prove 
 that he is wrong, and yet I know that he is wrong. 
 I trust my memory. 
 
 If anyone says that the idea that there is any 
 cause making the minute-hand move round th^ face 
 of the dial, or making the sun set in the wesr, is a 
 groundless fancy, I cannot prove that he is wrong, 
 and yet I know that he is wrong. I trust my 
 natural belief that every phenomenon has a cause. 
 
 If anyone says that my conviction that I ought 
 
Sa. 
 
 On God Revealed as Love 
 
 not to nourish vindictiveness against John Smith for 
 that ill-natured remark he made yesterday, and that 
 I ought to tell the truth about that absurd and dis- 
 agreeable little mistake I made on Monday rather 
 than hide it by a lie, is a baseless superstition, I 
 cannot prove that he is wrong, and yet I know that 
 he is wrong. I trust my conscience. 
 
 Now here is a philosophical word which we shall 
 have to make use of in connection with these things : 
 the word is ^Intuition/ Intuition is merely Latin 
 for * a looking at ' or * a looking into/ And an 
 Intuition in philosophical language is the knowing 
 that a thing is true by simply looking at it. If I 
 say to you : * The square drawn on the side of a 
 right-angled triangle opposite to 'the right angle is 
 exactly equal to the two squares drawn on the other 
 two sides added together,' you will very properly 
 ask me to prove it before you believe it. You may 
 look at the figure in Euclid for half-an-hour, but 
 mere looking at it will never make you sure that it 
 is true. But if I say to you : ^ The whole of this 
 straight line is longer than half of it,' you know that 
 what I say is true, the moment you look at the line 
 and the place where the half of it is marked off. 
 Nay, you know it with your eyes shut A mental 
 look is enough. I only have to conjure up in your 
 thought a whole line and the half of it, and the 
 knowledge that the whole line is longer than the 
 half is there in your mind along with the thought of 
 the whole and the half without an instant's pause 
 
What are Intuitions ? ^S 
 
 for reasoning or even for reflection. That is a truth 
 known just by looking at it. So that piece of know- 
 ledge is an Intuition. Some philosophers use, not 
 only the noun * Intuition/ but the verb * to intue ' ; 
 and such a philosopher will say, * I intue that the 
 whole is greater than the half.' 
 
 Now it is only fair to say that some thinkers 
 deny that we have any intuitions at all. Even, say 
 they, if it be true that you really do now see some 
 truths at a glance, it is only that by constant 
 practice you have learnt to work them out in your 
 mind instantaneously. There is suppressed reason- 
 ing, or rapid, unconscious reference to experience. 
 You have always found that the whole is greater 
 than the half. You never in all your life came 
 across an exception to the rule. And that is why, 
 the moment you think of * whole' and *half' now, the 
 idea * greater than' pushes into your mind at the 
 same moment. Other philosophers admit that indi- 
 vidual experience alone will not explain the intuition, 
 but they contend that the experience of the race will. 
 But in the case of memory, at any rate, it cannot 
 be that it is previous experience that makes us 
 judge the moment we look into our minds, that 
 makes us * intue,' • * Yes, this impression in my 
 mind now of having shivered in the snow-storm 
 corresponds with what actually happened to me 
 last winter'; for I have to * intue' that memory 
 speaks truth before I can refer to my past experience 
 at all. Nor, again, with the moral sense, can we 
 
86 On God Revealed as Love 
 
 admit that the judgment * it is nobler to defend a 
 weak woman from a brute than to stand by and 
 laugh ' is a rapid reasoning or a reference to the 
 experience either of the individual or of the race. 
 It cannot be a rapid reasoning ; for even slow 
 reasoning could never prove it to one who denied it. 
 And it cannot be a judgment founded on experience; 
 for no experience could persuade us that it was 
 nobler, if we did not feel it so the very first time any 
 such case came up for judgment by our conscience. 
 We do 'intue' then. We have intuitions.' But 
 it is quite possible that with the general advance 
 of the mental and spiritual capacity of the human 
 race, they may arrive at new classes of intuitions 
 which were not within the compass of mankind in 
 earlier and less highl}'- developed stages of its exist- 
 ence. Indeed, when we come to think of it, if the 
 teaching of Darwin be true, this must be so. We 
 are descended, he tells us, from the lowest forms of 
 animal life, — nay, animal life itself is descended from 
 organisms that were not even animals. But if that 
 be so, then just as we saw in a former chapter, that 
 there must have been some point in the long evolu- 
 tion when the first faint consciousness appeared in 
 connection with a physical organism (unless indeed 
 that speculation be true which holds that there is an 
 elementary consciousness in all the matter of the 
 universe), so there must have been a point of 
 time when the first spark of memory lighted up 
 the consciousness, and a moment when the neces- 
 
Intuitions 
 
 87 
 
 sity to refer all phenomena to some kind of cause 
 first made itself felt in the mind. And just as there 
 was a moment when for the first time the rays of 
 light found a seeing eye to strike on, so there must 
 have been a moment when the universal moral law 
 first struck upon a moral sense in the breast of man. 
 This erect forked creatui?e that we call Man, may 
 have been physically fairly complete ages before the 
 first of those intellectual and moral intuitions, which 
 make up the permanent fixtures in the furnishing of 
 the mind now, had worked into life and taken com- 
 mand of his thought and feeling. 
 
 And so even now there may be some new class 
 of Intuitions — of beliefs the nature of which it is 
 in each case to be matured the moment the terms 
 of the belief are presented to the mind — which are 
 kindling into life in the human soul to give it a new 
 dignity and a new hold on God. 
 
 And indeed I believe that this is so. I believe 
 that by a new range of Intuition, select souls, at any 
 rate, if not all the run of common men, know when 
 they are touched by some exceeding beauty that 
 then and there they are in the presence of the Living 
 God, and that thereby God touches them, that there- 
 in God speaks to them. 
 
 To guard against any misunderstanding of what 
 I wish in this chapter to press upon the reader, let 
 me here say that of course the sense of beauty itse:lf 
 is not new in the human mind. It has been there 
 through all historical time. It is a quite specific 
 
88 Ow God Revealed as Love 
 
 sense, having its own laws and its own objects just 
 as much as the sense of cause or the sense of right 
 and wrong. 
 
 Quite as many and as ingenious attempts have 
 been made to analyse what we mean by * beautiful * 
 as to analyse what we mean by 'right' and 'wrong.' 
 Yet in the end all that we shall be able to say about 
 our sense of beauty is that it is a certain specific 
 kind of pleasure which we derive from the contem- 
 plation of certain objects. These objects may be 
 perceived by us through the eye or the ear or any of 
 the physical organs of sense, or they may be objects 
 of pure thought in the contemplation of which we 
 take delight. What it is in the objects which excites 
 the special feeling that we have when we say, ' How 
 beautiful 1 ' is a question on which philosophers 
 from Athenian Plato to Burke and the Scoto-Irish 
 Hutcheson have debated much. Some have con- 
 tended that the essence of beauty lies in utility, so 
 that when we say, ' How beautiful ! ' we merely mean 
 * How useful, how admirably adapted to its purpose I ' 
 Others, again, think that you cannot draw the line 
 between the sense of beauty, and the sense of right 
 and wrong, so that when you say ' How noble, how 
 praiseworthy was the conduct of Casabianca on the 
 burning deck ! ' you merely mean how beautiful it 
 was. But I think that we must all feel that though 
 adaptation to its purpose, or utility, often enchances 
 the beauty of a vase or a building or a living organ- 
 ism, yet the pleasure we feel in beauty is something 
 
JVhat ts the Beautiful? 89 
 
 other than the pleasure we feel in usefulness, and the 
 perception of beauty is something other than the 
 perception of usefulness. And I think that we must 
 all feel likewise that, though undoubtedly noble 
 conduct is beautiful, yet to say that it is beautiful 
 is something else than to say that it is good or 
 righteous, and that the delight we feel in contem- 
 plating it as beautiful is at any rate not quite the 
 same as the reverence it awakens in us because 
 it is noble. 
 
 The nearest that we can get to defining what it 
 is in an object of our contemplation that makes it 
 beautiful and kindles in us that specific pleasure 
 which things beautiful create would seem to be 'o 
 say that it is a certain unity in variety, a certain har- 
 mony of the constituent elements. That harmony 
 may be harmony among the colours in the object, as 
 in a beautiful sunset (though in a beautiful sunset 
 there is much more as well), or it may be harmony 
 among the different elements of its form, as in a 
 beautiful Greek temple, or it may be harmony 
 between the form and the ideas with which the 
 object is connected, as a Church spire pointed to 
 the heaven where we imagine God to dwell ; — 
 the most tapering spire would not be beautiful, 
 but ugly on a factory. I have seen a factory- 
 chimney shaped like a spire, and it was hideous. 
 Or it may be harmony between the outward form 
 and the high thought and pure feeling which belong 
 to a sweet or noble character, as in the face of 
 
go On God Revealed as Love 
 
 a young girl or of a great and good man. But 
 whatever be the quahties in objects that excite 
 in us the sense of beauty, the sense is here in us, 
 known to us all, though perhaps not excited by the 
 same object in my mind and my neighbour's ; and it 
 differs from every other sense that we have. It is 
 the source of a unique pleasure to us different from 
 any other pleasure, and capable of rising into a 
 delight most pure in quality and most intense in 
 degree. 
 
 Now I have expressed the belief that a new kind 
 of Intuition is in our time coming into being in the 
 soul of man which consists in this : that when he is 
 under the strong spell of exceeding beauty, — when 
 this sense of the beautiful is excited in him to the 
 highest degree — he knows that a Holy Unseen 
 Power is there touching him with its presence and, 
 through the beautiful thing that he is contemplating, 
 addressing him soul to soul. 
 
 The clearest cases of this Intuition occur when 
 the object exciting the sense of beauty is beautiful 
 natural scenery. Now there is no doubt that, in 
 the West at least, the sense of a divine beauty in 
 natural scenery is in the main a new endowment of 
 man. There is little trace of it in its modern form 
 in classical antiquity. Vergil indeed startles the 
 reader of the second Georgic by a passage which 
 reveals a true sensibility to the spiritual impression 
 which the lovehness of Nature may convey; but that 
 passage is rather a prophetic foregleam of modern 
 
G(id in the Beautiful 9^ 
 
 feeling than a characteristic illustration of Roman 
 sentiment. To Scipio and to Hannibal the Alps 
 were but the vast buttresses or barriers of Rome. 
 Even to so late a writer as Dr. Johnson the 
 mountains of Scotland presented no aesthetic charm. 
 And while in early English poetry there is often a 
 recognition of what is picturesque in Nature, we 
 rarely meet with passages revealing that in sublime 
 or lovely scenery the soul has been caught up as 
 into the presence of God. But we in our century 
 have virtually added a new delight to life. The 
 ravishing sense of beauty in the great harmonies of 
 nature in the glorious sweep of earth and sky has 
 possessed the latest generations as it never possessed 
 their predecessors. It is not then by mere chance 
 that in our time also has been developed, as never 
 before, that Intuition which, under the sense of great 
 beauty, ^ intues ' the living presence of God. 
 
 Of this new Intuition Wordsworth has been the 
 priest and prophet, and it is worth while to recall at 
 length the classic passage in The Excursion in which 
 he has exhibited it. He has just described the boy- 
 hood of his friend, the Wanderer, now an old man 
 wise and good and sweet. He tells how even as a 
 boy the Wanderer *had felt the power of nature,' 
 and was prepared to receive *the lesson deep of 
 love* which nature has it in her to convey. Then 
 he proceeds : — 
 
 Such was the boy — but for the growing youth 
 What soul was his, when, from the naked top 
 
92 On God Revealed as Love 
 
 Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun 
 
 Rise up, and bathe the world in light ! He looked — 
 
 Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth 
 
 And ocean's liquid mass beneath him lay 
 
 In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched^ 
 
 And in their silent faces did he read 
 
 Unutterable love. Sound needed none, 
 
 Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank 
 
 The spectacle : sensation, soul, and form 
 
 All melted into him ; they swallowed up 
 
 His animal being ; in them did he live, 
 
 And by them did he live ; they were his life. 
 
 In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 
 Of visitation from the living God, 
 
 Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. 
 
 No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ; 
 
 Rapt into still communion that transcends 
 
 The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, 
 
 His mind was a thanksgiving to the power 
 
 That made him : it was blessedness and love I 
 
 A herdsman on the lonely mountam tops, 
 Such intercourse was his, and in this sort 
 Was his existence oftentimes possessed. 
 Oh, //len how beautiful, how bright appeared 
 The written promise ! Early had he learned 
 To reverence the volume that displays 
 The mystery, the life which cannot die ; 
 But in the mountains did he fee/ his faith. 
 Responsive to the writing, all things there 
 Breathed immortality, revolving life, 
 And greatness still revolving : infinite ; 
 Their littleness was not ; the least of things 
 Seemed infinite ; and there his spirit shaped 
 Her prospects, nor did he believe, — he saw. 
 What wonder if his being thus became 
 
The Revelation through Beauty 93 
 
 Sublime and Comprehensive ! Low desires, 
 
 Low thoughts had there no place ; yet was his heart 
 
 Lowly ; for he was meek in gratitude, 
 
 Oft as he called those ecstasies to mind 
 
 And whence they flowed ; and from them he acquired 
 
 Wisdom, which works through patience ; thence he learned 
 
 In oft-recurring hours of sober thought 
 
 To look on nature with a humble heart, 
 
 Setf-questioned where it did not understand, 
 
 And with a superstitious eye of love. 
 
 Now this passage is not poetry only, but, like 
 so much of Wordsworth, a close psychological study. 
 It is a precise statement of a unique experience of 
 the soul. These are the central and dominating 
 statements : * In their silent faces ( those of the 
 clouds) he read unutterable love ' ; ^ Rapt into still 
 
 communion his mind was a thanksgiving to 
 
 the power that made him * ; * In the mountains did 
 h& feel his faith'; * Nor did he believe, — he saw.' 
 ^Read,' 'felt,' 'saw,' 'communion,' — these words are 
 all efforts to express the immediateness of the 
 spirit's consciousness of God under the stimulus of 
 beauty. The sense of God there^ of visitation from 
 the living God, was not a reasoned thought or chain 
 of thinking. The result of that is belief; but this 
 was more, — it was immediate sight ; and I can have 
 no doubt that the true reading is as I have given it, 
 'nor did he believe,' — not, as you will find it in some 
 editions, ' now did he believe.' He did not merely 
 believe, — he saw. It was not any argument, ' this 
 is so beautiful and wonderful that God must have 
 
94 On Gor/ Revealed as Love 
 
 made it/ It was an immediate and direct per- 
 ception, an Intuition, a seeing of God there by the 
 immediate sensibiHty of the spiritual organ. 
 
 And though rarely perhaps is this spiritual 
 sense so clear and powerful as in Wordsworth, yet 
 there are few of us who have not known something 
 of it. Different organisms are sensitive to different 
 sorts of beauty. To some sublime scenery, to some 
 quiet meads and streams, to some the ever uuresting 
 sea, to some the marvel of the nightly stars, to some 
 a wayside flower, — to some again the mysterious 
 charm of music or of song, to some a poem, to some 
 the face of a little child, to some a face beautiful 
 with the story of a long and faithful life, has most 
 quickening power. But I hardly think that there 
 can be any of us who have not known the mystic 
 influence of one or other of these media of divine 
 grace. The spirit of the man has been disturbed by 
 the frictions or worries of life. All has seemed at 
 cross purposes. The weight of care has seemed too 
 heavy to be borne ; when by some blessed chance 
 the spirit has been submitted to the action of beauty 
 — sublimity or loveliness — in one or other of these 
 forms, and with the sense of beauty has instan- 
 taneously broken forth in the soul the sense of a 
 divine and gracious presence before which care and 
 worry have been dissipated like mist before the 
 mid-day sun. It is an overwhelming sense of a 
 spiritual presence, strong, tender, holy, which on the 
 moment bursts into life ; and even when the vision 
 
Is it Illusion ? 
 
 95 
 
 IS past, it may leave a vividness of impression on 
 the memory which for years may sustain in a man 
 a more vivid assurance of God than either the 
 revelation of God as the universal Cause or the 
 revelation of God as the Source of the moral law. 
 In moments such as these we recognise with 
 passionate conviction the supreme truth of the great 
 Johannine declaration that * God is Love.' 
 
 * But,' you will say perhaps, * after all, these 
 impressions that you describe are mere impressions 
 — often evanescent impressions — and you cannot 
 prove that they are not all pure fancy.' If you are 
 a philosopher you express this by saying that the 
 impression may be purely subjective, and there may 
 be no objective fact corresp>onding to it. 
 
 I admit your argument, but I set beside it pre- 
 cisely parallel arguments, exactly as forcibly, exactly 
 as feeble. 
 
 My impression of green grass and brick walls 
 may be all subjective ; there may be no objective 
 existences corresponding to them. Yet I believe in 
 thfe grass I see and the wall against which I knock 
 my head. The impression of cause may be all 
 fancy. I cannot so much as conceive the beginning 
 of a proof of its reality. Yet I believe that my will 
 is the cause of the smashing of the cupboard door 
 with my fist, and that the divine will is the cause of 
 the circling of the planets round the sun. It may 
 be a mere subjective impression that the behaviour 
 of Jesus in Gethsemane was nobler than the 
 
9^ On God Revealed as Love 
 
 behaviour of Judas. I cannot begin to prove it 
 Yet I know and you know that so it was. 
 
 And so when, under the midnight heavens, or in 
 the bosom of the everlasting hills, or in the thrill of 
 the melody of perfect song, the impression that God 
 is laying hold of my spirit and that I am in veritable 
 communion with him shines out vivid in me, I can- 
 not prove that it is not self-deception, but neither 
 can I doubt that it is real and vital fact. 
 
 But still formidable objections are put forward. 
 It is quite true that men sometimes trust impres- 
 sions which are delusions, though they seem so 
 self-evidently true. When I had once advanced an 
 argument similar to that which I am now pressing, 
 a friend of high intellectual and religious character 
 wrote to me : * You speak of the starry heavens 
 restoring to your soul peace and consciousness of 
 God : I have found a cup of coffee have the like 
 effect. Do you not think that a dose of opium or 
 haschisch, if of right amount, would open up heaven 
 to you ? ' Is then what I have described a veritable 
 Intuition, or is this action of, the beautiful upon the 
 soul the mere working of a drug, the delusion of 
 which will pass away when the effect is worked out 
 of the system ? 
 
 Now it is quite possible that even a cup of coffee 
 may upon occasion help to clear and quicken the 
 faculties, for the interdependence of mind and body 
 is a fact of our present constitution which we can 
 neither escape nor deny. But the argument of my 
 
Does the Intuition work? 97 
 
 friend is clearly intended to suggest that what I 
 have thought to be a true Intuition originating in 
 our sensibility to beauty is really a sort of feverish 
 or intoxicated illusion such as arises from the stimu- 
 lation of drugs. There seems to me to be one very 
 practical test whether this is so or not, whether 
 Wordsworth's Wanderer was under a hallucination 
 akin to that of an opium-smoker or whether he was 
 really drawn into communion with God. So far as 
 I know, all illusive states of consciousness, whether 
 in fever or under the action of intoxicants or 
 narcotics, are followed by reaction. The false ex- 
 altation gives way to a corresponding depression ; 
 the vivid assurance is succeeded by a period of 
 blank doubt and darkness. But this is not the case 
 when the pure sense of beauty has quickened in a 
 man's spirit the sense of the God-presence. The 
 actual vision, the actual sense of contact with God, 
 that indeed passes away. But after it has passed 
 away and is a memory only, the man finds himself 
 not less, but more sure of God than he was before 
 the vision. There are many men whose faith, a 
 faith sustaining and inspiring all through life, rests 
 mainly on the recollection of such seasons of direct 
 vision. There is no reaction. And that is the 
 token that these moments of direct vision are not 
 moments of the disease of the soul, but of its true 
 health ; and that the vision itself is not a phantas- 
 magoria presenting a lie, but an actual insight 
 presenting a truth. 
 
9^ 071 God Revealed as Love 
 
 I knew a man some thirty years ago who was 
 troubled in spirit through grievous things, and the 
 world seemed dark to him and almost without God. 
 And in his care and pain he went out at night on 
 to a lonely common and stood beside a great stone 
 quarry. And the stars were in the heavens and in 
 their eternal silence looked down upon him. And 
 there and then he knew that God was with him and 
 felt that living touch of God upon his spirit. And 
 rarely since then has he felt God quite so near. 
 But the memory of that moment of vision has re- 
 mained with him always, and it has made him more 
 sure of God than any argument ; nor when he has 
 recalled that moment, has he been able to doubt that 
 that was a true revelation of the Eternal to him in 
 his weakness and his need. 
 
 And if we put that other test which I have so 
 often advocated, * Does it work ? ' — I do not think 
 the answer can long remain in doubt. If a man 
 thinks that under the awe and the solemnity of the 
 mountains or the stars or the sea he has seen God 
 with the eye of the soul, does the belief work ? 
 Does it make this being, Man, a more efficient crea- 
 ture and open up fresh powers in him ? After an 
 opium pipe or a dose of haschisch, I suppose a man 
 will think himself endowed with the genius of a 
 Shakspeare. And at the moment he may indeed 
 produce verses above what he could have written 
 without the drug. But flatness soon supervenes, 
 and so far from his being a more efficient poet that 
 
The Thr&e-fold Consciousness 99 
 
 day week than he was before, his nerves are all ajar 
 and he cannot concoct a decent verse. Not so 
 with the man who in soberness of soul has believed 
 that God touched him when the sheer hills rose 
 before him, or Mendelssohn's * Hymn of Praise ' 
 flooded his being, or the human eyes of one revered 
 and beloved looked into his own. The vision 
 passes, it is true. But it leaves the man the 
 stronger and the purer. * Such high hour of 
 visitation from the living God,' as Wordsworth puts 
 it, is indeed an hour only. But like that meat in 
 the strength of which Elijah went for forty days, 
 it does not drug, but feeds the man, entering into 
 his mental and moral fibre so that all his efficiency 
 for what is good is augmented and not deteriorated. 
 Such then is the revelation of God tc man 
 through man's sensibility to beauty. Philosophers 
 distinguish three main elements of our conscious 
 life, — the Intellect, the Will, and the Emotions. 
 They point out that we think, we act, we feel. 
 Nor can you lay your hand on anything that passes 
 in 3^our consciousness but it groups itself under one 
 or other of these three modes. Other beings in 
 other worlds may possess other categories of con- 
 sciousness, other modes of mental life. But to us 
 they are inconceivable. There is no fourth kind of 
 consciousness known to us. It is true that the 
 intellectual life, the life of thinking (which covers 
 understanding, reasoning), and the moral life, the 
 life of acting (which covers willing, choosing), and 
 
^S^ ' On God Revealed as Love 
 
 the emotional life, the life of feehng (which covers 
 loving, hating, enjoying, suffering), are so woven 
 together that you can perhaps not find a single 
 waking moment in your life in which each is not 
 present in some degree. Thought sets Emotion 
 pulsing, and Emotion wakes the Will. The Will 
 falls back on Thought for guidance, and its own 
 action quickens the currents of Emotion. But still, 
 as the white light is really constituted of the three 
 primary colours, so is conscious life constituted of 
 these three elements of consciousness. 
 
 And this is what we have now arrived at, and 
 surely it is striking and momentous. In connection 
 with each several one of these three, God makes 
 himself known to such as patiently and faithfully 
 mterpret their own minds. Thought cannot take a 
 step without encountering the demand for Cause, — 
 and as the one all-encompassing Cause it encounters 
 God. Will cannot take up the work of life without 
 finding its obedience claimed b}' the Moral Law, and 
 in the Moral Law it discovers the command of God. 
 Emotion finds itself touched, as soon as it has com^e 
 to the fulness of life, by the power of the Beautiful, 
 and the Beautiful, in one or other of its multitudinous 
 forms, proves to be the vehicle by which God im- 
 presses himself on consciousness as God of Love. 
 These three, I believe, are the modes — and at the 
 last analysis I am inclined to think that they are 
 the only modes — by which that Divine Power and 
 Righteousness and Love to which we give the name 
 
Is Prayer Superseded? 
 
 of God makes itself apprehended by the human soul 
 and through the long ages works upon human 
 character, helping Man slowly to conquer and put 
 away the inheritance of his grosser animal nature, 
 and by steps which are centuries and flights of steps 
 which are aeons to mount up into true and perfect 
 sonship to him, the Father. There have been pro- 
 phets, redeemers, inspired men in the story of the 
 world, but to none, I suppose, has inspiration ever 
 come save in one or other of these three forms in 
 which God communicates himself to the human mind. 
 There is one practice of supreme importance 
 which helps man in the long task which God has set 
 him. I mean the practice of Prayen A young man, 
 consulting me not long ago concerning the conduct 
 of life, observed to me that he understood that 
 modern science had shown prayer to be a super- 
 stition. He only put bluntly and crudely what many 
 are feeling vaguely — an uneasy apprehension that 
 since the chain of cause and effect runs link by link 
 all down the ages, there can be no room left for the 
 appeal of the soul to God. We are but cogs, it is 
 thought, in the great wheel-system of the machine 
 of the universe. As reasonable for us to think to 
 deflect its action by our petition to the Supreme 
 God, as for the cog to ask that the engine shall be 
 reversed. Or, if you will, we are as a fly upon the 
 wheel, but a fly glued on so that he cannot escape. 
 What of that fly's prayers to the power which turns 
 the handle? And so, I fear, thousands whose fathers 
 
I02 On God Revealed as Love 
 
 never began nor closed the day without solemn 
 appeal to the Father of all, have dropped away from 
 the habit of worship or the recourse to prayer in 
 the trials and difficulties of life. Let us then in- 
 quire, do the principles which I have tried in these 
 chapters to expound make for or against prayer as 
 an element in the religious life ? Do they accentuate 
 or remove the difficulties and objections which have 
 been advanced relative to prayer ? To find the 
 answer to that, I ask you to recall the conceptions of 
 the Divine Being to which I have given expression. 
 
 I have repudiated the idea which has generally 
 prevailed in Western Christendom that God is a 
 Being outside the universe who has set it going, and 
 only interferes with the working of the machine on 
 occasion. If I be right, then all that kind of praying 
 which consists in asking for interferences is, indeed, 
 ruled out as futile. But if you deem that a loss, I 
 claim that our gain is greater far. So long as men 
 held God to be thus aloof, they kept being assailed by 
 ever fresh doubts whether their prayers could really 
 reach him ; and they kept turning to ever fresh 
 intermediaries who were to be their messengers to 
 the far-off God — Christ, Mary, the saints ; and each 
 of these tended gradually to take the place of God, 
 and to become not only the messenger but the object 
 of prayer. But whatever else the God I have asked 
 you to believe in be, he is not far off, and there can 
 need no messenger from us to him. In one chapter 
 J have maintained that his Living Energy is actually 
 
God^s Concern with Man 1 03 
 
 working now in every atom of the physical worlds, 
 including our own bodies, the very lips with which 
 we frame the words of prayer, the very eyes with 
 which we look up to heaven. In the next chapter I 
 have maintained that that haunting sense of moral 
 obligation, of 'ought* and 'ought not,' which is so 
 familiar to us, is the actual whisper of God in us ; 
 that conscience is his present, living word. And in 
 this chapter I have maintained that when and where 
 beauty moves us with the rarer emotions which it 
 does sometimes awaken, then and there God is 
 touching the soul, revealing himself as Love, and 
 we are in actual present communication with him. 
 
 God then is not far off, but Tennyson speaks 
 truth : 
 
 * Speak to him, thou, for he hears, and spirit with spirit 
 can meet ; 
 Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and 
 feet/ 
 
 Nor, again, as we have seen, is it possible to 
 maintain that God is too great to concern himself 
 with the joys and sorrows, the wants and woes of 
 such small creatures as human beings. He finds it 
 worth while to be active in the filament of a nettle 
 or the throbbing of a molecule. It cannot be less 
 worth while to be active in a human being. His 
 perpetual presence and activity in conscience is the 
 pledge of his concern in the little choices we have 
 to make hour by hour. His communion with us 
 under the stress of beauty is the evidence that he 
 
I04 On God Revealed as Love 
 
 will mingle his spirit with ours, as a friend with a 
 friend or a father or mother with a child. So the 
 fear that we are too small and that God is too great 
 for our prayer vanishes in presence of the facts. 
 
 And, indeed, if a man be once moved to the love 
 of God, and be persuaded that God loves him, then 
 the communion between God and man, which we 
 call on the man's side prayer or worship, seems to 
 be only the natural and necessary outcome of the 
 situation. For consider this one universal experi- 
 ence, to the truth of which we can all bear testimony. 
 Wherever there is love, it seeks to find some means 
 of communication with the beloved. It has entered 
 into our very proverbs, this universal experience. 
 ' Love laughs at lock-smiths,* says the adage. The 
 minstrel wanders through the lands till the notes of 
 his flute strike through prison bars to the ear of his 
 captive king. The lover binds his letter to the 
 arrow's shaft, and shoots it to the chamber on the 
 tower top where his lady is immured. The heart 
 of friend turns to friend, and even though a thousand 
 leagues may lie between, the missive finds its way 
 from land to land, and did so even before the days 
 of mail steamers and cheap postages. The hands of 
 the betrothed find each other out unseen that love 
 may communicate its thrill from heart to heart. 
 The child flings his arms around his mother's neck, 
 and prattles the words that well up from the depths 
 of his childish being. The husband leaves his work 
 that for a moment he may go and look in his wife's 
 
Love's Craving for Communion jq^ 
 
 eyes and read again the mystery of their union. 
 Love craves communication with the beloved as the 
 first need of Hfe. Business may stand still, the thirst 
 for knowledge be forgotten, the keenness of ambition 
 be blunted, but affection needs to express itself to 
 the cherished object, and the communion of friend 
 with friend is a universal necessity of life. 
 
 And so, unless we are to say that the love 
 between God and man has nothing in common with 
 the love between human beings, that it in no way 
 resembles the love between father and children, we 
 should expect — tremendous and overwhelming and 
 wonderful as the thought may be — we should expect 
 the thrill of actual communication between him, the 
 Infinite and Eternal, and us, his creatures, whose 
 'nsignificance in comparison with him no words can 
 express, save only that he, out of his love of love, 
 has given us hearts able to love him, our Father, and 
 himself, in all the Eternal Majesty of his being, loves 
 us who are his children 
 
 The difference then in our praying will not be 
 that it will be less vital or less real for our modern 
 knowledge, but that it will pass from petition into 
 communidn ; that it will be a seeking not of gifts, 
 but of consciousness of the God-presence. And as 
 consciousness thereof is won, the intellectual life will 
 be cleared, the moral life will receive the sap of a new 
 vigour, the emotional life will pass out of anxiety 
 and trouble into peace and a quiet, abiding joy, till 
 ' all our worship merges in thanksgiving. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 ON THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 
 
 WE have been engaged throughout the last 
 three chapters in laying down the Hnes 
 along which God is revealed to men through their 
 Intellect, their Moral Nature, and their Emotions, as 
 Power, Righteousness, and Love. Whatever hin- 
 drances there may be just in the present conditions 
 of thought to the recognition by all men of God as 
 thus revealed, I am persuaded that the day will 
 come when it will be as impossible for men really 
 to doubt him as to doubt the outward world which 
 they see and touch, and as impossible for them to 
 be deaf to his voice in conscience as to be deaf to 
 the thunder-clap or the bugle-note, and as im- 
 possible for them to be insensible to the love with 
 which he penetrates them as to be insensible to the 
 light that floods the day. 
 
 But many good and earnest people dare not 
 trust these revelations of God, dare not believe fully 
 in his righteousness and love, even though they 
 believe in his power, because of one great and awful 
 
Despair of God 107 
 
 fact which presses upon them and which it is im- 
 possible for them to ignore. 
 
 It seems to them that they would be deceiving 
 themselves in supposing that there can be a God 
 both All-powerful and Good, seeing that the fact 
 cannot be hidden that in this world there exists 
 great, varied, and terrible Evil. In the awful 
 accounts of outrage and massacre which have 
 recently burnt themselves into the consciousness of 
 Englishmen, some of the best of men, within my 
 knowledge, have thought that they saw the refuta- 
 tion of faith in a Heavenly Father. Their devout 
 trust in the Divine government of the world has 
 received a staggering shock from the horrors of 
 Armenia ; and, with poor Cleg Kelly, their hearts 
 have cried out, * It^s all a dumb lie; God's dead.' 
 Terribly impressive is it to observe how this despair 
 of God as a Power making for righteousness in the 
 history of nations has uttered itself in the recent 
 Vv^ritings of one whom some of us have looked on as 
 the most promising English poet of the time. That 
 profound faith in God or some underlying funda- 
 mental Good which gives strength and nobility to 
 all the greatest poetry in the world seems, for the 
 moment at least, to have been scorched clean out of 
 the verse of William Watson. 
 
 Even Tennyson, the poet of trust and hope, in 
 one of his moods declares that ^Nature, red in tooth 
 and claw with ravine ' shrieks against the creed that 
 ^ God is Love.' * Pain, grief, disease, and death/ 
 
lo8 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 says Winwood Reade, * are these the inventions of 
 a loving God ? ' Huxley, writing on * The Struggle 
 for Existence/ decides that the Power ruling the 
 world cannot be benevolent. And John Stuart Mill 
 was expressing his own view as well as that of his 
 father, when he said that his father ^ found it im- 
 possible to believe that a world so full of evil was 
 the work of an Author combining infinite power 
 with perfect goodness and righteousness.' Indeed 
 there are philosophers so impressed with what they 
 deem the prevailing sadness of all life that they 
 argue that the central principle of the universe is 
 bad, and educe their whole philosophy from the 
 root-idea that conscious existence is itself an evil. 
 And though, if I must tell you the real truth, 
 I shall have to confide to you that I believe the 
 pessimistic philosophy of Byron, of Schopenhauer, 
 and of many another had its real origin not in 
 hard thinking at all, but in a bad temper or a bad 
 cigestion, yet I acknowledge to the full that it is 
 often the most generous, the most sympathetic, the 
 most chivalrous natures that are most shaken in 
 their faith in God by the spectacle of the vast and 
 terrific evil which confronts them in the world. 
 
 Let us then frankly consider the whole- matter. 
 The argument against Theism is absolutely simple, 
 seems absolutely clear. *There is great evil in the 
 world. If God cannot prevent it, he is not all- 
 powerful ; if he can, yet does not, he^ is not all-good/ 
 Is there any escape from this dilemma ? 
 
What is Evil? 109 
 
 Can we get out of it by denying that there really 
 is any evil ? Some have tried that way. But it 
 can be adopted only by denying the meaning of 
 words or refusing to acknowledge facts. There is 
 evil. Let us see then what the evil is. 
 
 It is of two kinds, closely connected together no 
 doubt, but still two kinds : Pain and Sin. Some 
 have acknowledged that Sin is an Evil, yet tried to 
 get out of recognising Pain as an Evil. Now I 
 shall argue presently that Pain is often the means 
 to good. But it is useless to say that in itself it is 
 not an evil. Our horror at the sufferings of the 
 innocent, even more than our own shrinking from it, 
 is the evidence that we do all consider Pain in itselt 
 an evil, however often it may be the means to good. 
 
 And I venture to stand by this opinion notwith- 
 standing the fact that Mr. Gladstone, in his recently 
 collected studies of Bishop Butler, has described the 
 doctrine that pain is in itself an evil as to his mind 
 * false, fearfully prevalent, and most dangerous.* I 
 shall myself presently contend that pain in its 
 effects is the source of the highest good, even that 
 the world would immeasurably suffer by the total 
 withdrawal of pain. But it seems to me a mere 
 abuse of language to deny that pain, apart from its 
 results, in itself considered, is an evil. Speaking at 
 Liverpool, in the autumn of 1896, Mr. Gladstone 
 declared that the recent massacre of Armenians in 
 Constantinople had been far less terrible than the 
 previous massacres among the Armenian hills, 
 
I^O On the Problem of Evu 
 
 because these last named had, what the others 
 lacked, the accompaniment of outrage and of torture. 
 But if torture is no evil, where lies the force of the 
 contrast ? If pain is no harm, why are we indig- 
 nant at its infliction ? Or will you say that it is 
 *harm,* but that ^harrn ' is not necessarily * evil ' ? 
 This seems to me, I confess, a fantastic jugglery 
 with words. The meaning of language can only be 
 deduced from the common consciousness of man- 
 kind. And the doctrine that pain is not in itself an 
 evil seems to me an attempt to escape from the 
 common sentiment of our race in the interest of a 
 particular philosophical or theological theory. 
 
 Pain then and Sin are the evils of the world. 
 But it is important to decide which is the greater. 
 Let the choice be between a great pain and a great 
 sin. Which is the better choice ? If we honour 
 heroes and revere martyrs, that is a proof that we 
 consider pain a less evil than sin. If sin were a 
 less evil than pain, we should call the man who of 
 the two chooses pain, not a hero, but a fool. If 
 suffering were a greater evil than faithlessness, we 
 should call the man who of the two chooses suffer- 
 ing, not a martyr, but at the best a fanatic. 
 
 There are two evils in the world, then, Pain and 
 Sin ; but of these two Sin is the greater evil and 
 Pain the less. 
 
 And what are the chief divisions of pain ? 
 
 Some tender hearts have been most haunted by 
 the pain of the dumb animals. It is this that is 
 
The Divisions of Pain ^ 1 1 
 
 gathered up under Tennyson's celebrated phrases 
 when he describes Nature as * red in tooth and claw 
 with ravine/ and as * so careful of the type/ * so 
 careless of the single life* I shall have more to say 
 about the sufferings of the animals presently. Mean- 
 while we have nothing but sympathy to express 
 with those gentle hearts who sorrow over all the 
 pain which is scattered through the world of beasts 
 and birds and creeping things. 
 
 But others are touched most by the pains and 
 sorrows of the innocent and helpless among our 
 own kind — especially by those of children. And 
 they who go in and out among the slums of Lon- 
 don or Liverpool or who read the reports of such 
 societies as that for preventing cruelty to children, 
 know what a terrible mass of suffering this is. 
 Only let me just point out in passing that, while 
 those who read or hear of these things often have 
 their faith in God shaken by them, somehow or 
 other those who are working at their alleviation 
 seem never to have their faith in God shaken by 
 them, but, so far as I know^, are generally all the 
 more assured of the divine love, and seem to see God 
 right through the misery and the anguish. Account 
 for it as you will, that is a most remarkable and 
 impressive fact. 
 
 And then, thirdly, there is all the pain which 
 men bring on themselves by their sin, — the disease 
 of the debauchee, the rags and hunger of the idlei 
 and the drunkard, the isolation from all human 
 
112 
 
 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 sympathy of the selfish, the remorse which tortures 
 the heart whenever the reaHty of its sin flashes in 
 upon the consciousness, the great, awful mass of 
 physical and spiritual woe which is the direct, 
 visible fruit of the sins of men. 
 
 So much for the Pain in the world ; then for the 
 Sin. It appals us by its magnitude, its blackness. 
 There is no need for me to draw it out in detail. 
 We have all been oppressed by the contemplation 
 of it. We have all marvelled at its proportions. 
 We have all known the sting of some of it in our 
 own bosoms. 
 
 Yes, the mass of Evil is appalling — first Pain, 
 and then, more and worse. Sin. Can God be 
 omnipotent, and at the same time good, that he 
 lets these things be ? 
 
 Before we can answer that question, we must 
 decide what we mean by * omnipotent,' which is of 
 course simply Latin for the English almighty or all- 
 powerful. I am going to tell you what wall sound 
 a very trivial, almost a profane thing. But it is 
 neither the one nor the other, for it is the very most 
 solemn and profound thought of which a very little 
 boy was capable. I do not know how old I was, 
 but I cannot have been far out of babyhood. I had 
 been taught that God was ver}^ great and that he 
 was almighty. And I remember quite distinctly 
 thinking of him as an immense man with a square 
 paper cap like a baker's, and wondering whether he 
 could open and shut a window at the same time. If 
 
JV/iat is Omnipotence ? 113 
 
 he was almighty, I supposed, he must be able to do 
 that. And I imagined the opening and the shutting 
 more and more quickly of one particular window in 
 my father's house. But still I never could get tliem 
 in my fancy absolutely at the same time. What 
 was my mistake ? 
 
 My mistake was in not seeing that ' opening and 
 shutting a window at the same time' was not merely 
 very difficult, but an absolute contradiction, and that 
 almightiness or omnipotence does not mean ability 
 to accomplish a contradiction ; for a real contradic- 
 tion cannot be. The word * contradiction ' means 
 the combination of incompatible conditions. No 
 doubt some things that to us seem contradictions 
 would be seen not to be so really, if we could look 
 at them from God's point of view. But if two con- 
 ditions really are contradictory, then not even omni- 
 potence can bring them both to pass together. Not 
 even omnipotence could make the earth a sphere 
 and a cube at the same time. Not even omnipotence 
 could make a triangle of which the side AB is 
 longer than the side BC, and BC longer than CA, 
 and CA longer than AB. All that we have a right 
 to mean by omnipotence is power to do everything 
 that is in itself possible, that is not in itself con- 
 tradictory. If then it should appear that the idea 
 of a world in which there is provision for mora] 
 goodness is in itself contradictory to the idea of a 
 world where there is and can be no evil, then we 
 are not denying God's omnipotence in any real 
 
114 ^^ ^^^ Problem of Evil 
 
 sense if we say that he could not both provicfe for 
 moral goodness in the world and shut out all evil 
 from the world. 
 
 And there is such a contradiction. For what is 
 moral good ? Moral good consists in right choosing. 
 It is right choosing that makes what we call character. 
 Human goodness is made up of right choosings 
 massed into a habit and making the tone and sub- 
 stance of the character. Right choosing: — but if 
 there is to be choosing^ there must be two courses to 
 choose between. If God had made me so that 1 
 could not tell a lie, I could not choose to tell the 
 truth. I should tell the truth automatically as I 
 breathe, and sneeze, and cough. But that would 
 not make character. It would not be moral good. 
 To get moral good out of me, to make character, I 
 must have a free choice between a better and a 
 worse ; — it must be open to me to tell the lie, or 
 there will be no morality in telling the truth. But 
 God cannot at the same time leave it open to me to 
 tell the lie, and shut me off from telling the He, any 
 more than he can at the same time open the window 
 and shut the window. Both alike are contradic- 
 tions ; and omnipotence does not mean power to do 
 contradictory things, but power to do all possible 
 things. 
 
 And as, if his object with men is to get moral 
 good out of them, to make character, God is obliged 
 to leave the lie open to me as well as the truth, so 
 also, throughout all the range of morals, he is in 
 
The Necessity of Choice 115 
 
 like manner compelled, omnipotent though he be, it 
 he would have moral good evolved, character 
 (which is made up of right choosings) developed in 
 men, to leave open to them the wrong as well as the 
 right, the disobedience as well as the obedience, the 
 sin as well as the virtue. And so, if moral good, 
 character, righteousness, be the supreme purpose of 
 God with man, then even omnipotence had to leave 
 open the door to Sin, the greatest of the evils. 
 
 But, say you, why could not God make us all 
 virtuous to start with ? Why could he not endow 
 us with character ready-made ? Because virtue is 
 right choosing, and if there be no choice there is no 
 virtue. Because character is built up of right 
 choosings, and that which is ready-made is not 
 character. Once granted that the purpose of God 
 with men was goodness, character, the human will 
 had to be left free to choose at every moment be- 
 tween the better and the worse ; and it had to be 
 left dependent not on God, but on Man, whether 
 there should be sin in the world, and if so, how 
 much, and how long it should be ere sin should be 
 conquered and righteousness be set up in its place. 
 If character was to be the purpose, then all that 
 the omnipotence of God could do — since it could not 
 do a contradiction — was so to order the conditions 
 of human life that good should be sure in the end to 
 evercome evil, and righteousness to blot out sin. 
 We shall inquire presently whether God has done 
 that. 
 
1 1 6 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 But meanwhile someone may say, * Granted that 
 if character was God's purpose with man, even his 
 omnipotence had to leave the door open to sin ; but 
 he need not have made character his purpose.' 
 
 No ; that is true. God might have made a 
 world in which moral good, character, was not the 
 purpose, in which therefore sin was shut out, and 
 virtue did not exist. Might have? He has made 
 such a world. The animal world is such. The lion, 
 the cat, the sparrow is guided by instinct, knows 
 nothing of these moral choices that are presented 
 to us at every turn. But, let me ask you, if it de- 
 pended on your vote, should you be prepared to vote 
 that our hfe should be assimilated to theirs, and that 
 the whole of the moral life, the whole power and 
 trust of choice between good and evil should be cut 
 clean out of us ? I cannot conceive that any sane 
 man will deliberately and sincerely answer ' yes ' 
 to that question. 
 
 The attack which Mill and those who agree with 
 him make on God is that if he could prevent evil 
 and does not, he cannot be all-good. But we have 
 seen that to get goodness realised in men, it was 
 necessary to leave the door open to evil. So that 
 this is the shape the argument will have to take, 
 * If God were all good, he would not make goodness 
 his chief purpose with men.* So that, again, you 
 are forced into the position of charging it as a blot 
 on the goodness of God that his purpose is the 
 goodness of man. But surely the very meaning of 
 
The Goodness of God ^ ^ 7 
 
 calling a being ' good ' is that he loves goodness 
 beyond all else. It is precisely by making goodness 
 his first purpose with men, and through conscience 
 teaching them that it is his purpose, that God makes 
 us know that he is good. And if once we came 
 to think that he was indifferent to human goodness, 
 we could no longer mean anything by calling him 
 good. 
 
 Such considerations as these — considerations 
 from which it is impossible to find any real logical 
 escape — cut the ground from under our feet when 
 we would lay it as a charge against God that he has 
 left the door open to sin. The fact does not militate 
 against his goodness, since it is the very manifes- 
 tation of his goodness that he has called us to be 
 good. It does not militate against his omnipotence, 
 since omnipotence does not mean power to realise 
 a contradiction, and to malce human life a training 
 school of character, yet shut out the possibility oi 
 sin, would be to realise a contradiction. 
 
 But we saw that there was one thing which it 
 might still be legitimate to ask of God before we 
 should be content to call him both omnipotent and 
 good. Mr. Gladstone, indeed, in his earnest essays 
 on the writings of Butler, pretests strongly against 
 an}^ demands being made by us on the character oi 
 God or any attempt to vindicate his ways with men. 
 He would have us simply bow down in absolute and 
 unquestioning trust. But trust cannot spring up to 
 order. It must have sure and certain grounds on 
 
^ ^ ^ On the Problem of Evil 
 
 which to rest. And we cannot trust God wliile our 
 minds are tortured with apprehensions of injustice or 
 cruelty in his government of man. It is the best 
 and noblest part of our nature, and no idle or 
 captious fancy, that insists on the vindication of his 
 goodness. It is then legitimate to ask whether God 
 has so ordered the conditions of human life that 
 good should be sure in the end to overcome evil, and 
 righteousness to blot out sin. If he had made good- 
 ness his purpose with man, but had not placed man 
 in such conditions that goodness must win in the 
 end, we should still have to think him good, since 
 why else should he have made goodness his purpose 
 with man ; but we certainly could not think him 
 omnipotent, since we should see his good purpose in 
 risk of ultimate defeat. 
 
 But the conditions of life are such that goodness 
 must prevail in the end. " Sin is sooner or later self- 
 destructive, while goodness is reproductive of good. 
 But if that be so — if in the world two forces confront 
 each other, the nature of one of which is to eat itself 
 away, and the nature of the other of which is to 
 reproduce its like, to grow, to spread — then the 
 battle between them may be very long, but in the end 
 the former must necessarily disappear and the latter 
 must necessarily occupy the field. 
 
 But is this so, or am I assuming what experience 
 fails to warrant ? Why do I say that the force of 
 moral evil is self-consuming, self-exhausting, while 
 the force of moral good is self- increasing, self- 
 sustaining? 
 
The Power cf Goodness 1 19 
 
 Here is one reason. He who practises moral 
 evil seeks his own personal end. But he who prac- 
 tises moral good seeks an unselfish end. Now if ten 
 men seek an unselfish end — say the carrying of some 
 reform, or the establishment of some hospital — they 
 can all work together in perfect alliance, and the 
 whole sum of moral force devoted to that end is 
 exactly ten-man power, without a fraction of deduc- 
 tion. But suppose that ten men seek each his own 
 selfish end, they may indeed enter into temporary 
 compacts of alliance, but as their final object is not 
 common to them all, but the real final object of 
 Brown is Brown's pleasure, and of Jones is Jones's 
 gain, and of Robinson is Robinson's profit, and so 
 forth through the ten, their respective forces inevit- 
 ably at certain points work against each other, and 
 weaken or cancel each other, and the total force 
 applied to the common end will not be nearly ten- 
 man power, but only ten-man power minus several 
 fragments of individual power. And so the ten good 
 men will wield a total force indefinitely greater than 
 the ten bad men ; and if the world were left to the 
 ten good men and the ten bad men to manage, the 
 force making for good would with certainty sooner 
 or later overcome the force making for evil. And 
 this is how it is that all confederacies of men for 
 good ends exercise a continuous and solid influence 
 for good ; while all conspiracies among men for bad 
 ends have in them the elements of their own disrup- 
 tion and decay, and the mischief they can do is 
 sooner or later exhausted. 
 
120 Qyi tljc Problem of Evil 
 
 Then, again, here is another reason. Every 
 good man, sooner or later, awakens sympathy or 
 enthusiasm on the part of others for his efforts after 
 good, and so generates new forces in other human 
 centres making for the Hke things. But every bad 
 man, sooner or later, \vakens aversion and repulsion 
 on the part of others, and so, not only becomes more 
 and more isolated, but actually generates opposing 
 forces in other human centres making against his 
 own ends. 
 
 And here is yet another reason. Every man 
 who practises good grows stronger and stronger. 
 Temperance strengthens his body and mind. Dis- 
 interested service braces and invigorates his charac- 
 ter. And at fifty, therefore, he has more power for 
 good than he had at thirty. But every man who 
 practises evil grows weaker and weaker. No doubt, 
 there is a certain infection in evil as well as in good. 
 But intemperance weakens the body and the mind. 
 Selfish conduct enfeebles the man-power, makes it 
 flaccid, vacillating, spasmodic, deadens effectiveness. 
 And at fifty, therefore, the bad man usually has less 
 power for evil than at thirty. 
 
 And what is true of individuals is true also of 
 communities, of nations, of races. 
 
 Nations that are temperate, brave, and conscious 
 of a high ideal grow stronger and stronger, play a 
 larger and larger part in the world, exercise wider and 
 wider influence as long as that character endures. 
 But nations that are intemperate, luxurious, and 
 
Goodness tn Nations 
 
 121 
 
 unconscious of a high ideal, decay, break up, and 
 disappear. A handful of Athenians overcame a 
 host of Orientals ; not primarily because their 
 generals were cleverer, but because they were 
 morally more sound. And even after a temperate, 
 brave, and noble race has ceased to be so, its dead 
 heroes, its thinkers, its moralists, its artists exercise 
 an undying influence on all future time. But a race 
 that has always been corrupt endures but a brief 
 span, and leaves little influence behind. Athens and 
 Israel are among the most potent influences in the 
 world to this day. But Assyria has been blotted 
 out of the history of the world. 
 
 We all believe that if England roots out luxury, 
 intemperance, and selfishness, she will endure, and 
 her people and her thought will become the domina- 
 ting influence in the world. But if she lets the evils 
 grow, she will pass away like many a by-gone 
 power, and it will be left for purer races to guide 
 the destinies of man. But to believe this is to 
 believe that good is stronger than evil, and that God 
 has so ordered the conditions of human life that good 
 is sure in the end to overcome evil, and righteousness 
 to blot out sin. 
 
 Walt Whitman gives voice to all that I have just 
 been trying to make clear when he writes, aftei' 
 reading Hegel :— 
 
 Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little 
 that is Good steadily hastening towards immor- 
 tality, 
 
'^ , On the Problem of Evil 
 
 And the vast of all that is called Evil I saw hastening to 
 merge itself and become lost and dead. 
 
 Now we saw before that if character was to be 
 God's chief purpose with man, then all that even 
 God's omnipotence could do was thus to order the 
 conditions of human life. That he should so order 
 them was all we could legitimately demand before 
 recognising that God is good. He has so ordered 
 them. Therefore God is good. 
 
 So much for the existence of Sin. Of the tw^o 
 Evils in the world Sin is the greater, Pain the less. 
 It remains to consider Pain. 
 
 First, let us take all that mass of pain — that 
 immense area of suffering and sorrow — which is the 
 direct outcome or effect of Sin. The shattered 
 nerves, the aches and pains that come of intem- 
 perance, the wretchedness which the selfish man 
 inevitably brings upon himself, the ruin of the 
 gambler, — take in any form you will the pain that 
 is the direct issue of sin : no doubt, viewed by 
 itself, all this pain is evil. But viewed as the direct 
 inevitable outcome of sin, can we venture to call it 
 evil still ? We have seen that in a moral world the 
 door had to be left open to sin. Would it be better, 
 that being so, that sin should bring no penalty? 
 Would it be better if a man could be selfish all his 
 days and never lose a moment's happiness thereby ? 
 Would you be more inclined to think God good if. 
 when a man degrades himself and blots out the 
 image of God in him by sensual indulgence, he could 
 
Pain springing from Sin 123 
 
 count on never having a headache or a pain in con- 
 sequence ? No, we all hold and often loudly express 
 the very opposite. Do we not ? Sometimes it 
 seems to us (though always falsely) that some man*s 
 sin is not bearing penalty, not bringing him any loss 
 or pain. What do we say then ? We cry out 
 against God's injustice. If the wicked man flourishes 
 like a green bay-tree, we count that a defect in the 
 making of the world. When the oppressor, the 
 cruel man, the inflicter of suffering on others, comes 
 up smiling and jaunty, and we are deluded into the 
 notion that he has succeeded in sinning without 
 retribution, that makes us inclined to doubt God's 
 goodness. But if that is our way of thinking, then 
 we cannot also lay it as a charge against God that 
 he has so constructed the world that suffering does 
 inevitably result from sin. The suffering indissolubl}^ 
 attached to sin is one great and potent instrument 
 for training men out of sin into virtue. 
 
 But I think that some will say, * Yes, we agree 
 that God does well so to constitute the world that a 
 man's sin should involve that man in pain. But it 
 involves too often not himself alone, but others also, 
 in pain. Why should God constitute the world so ? 
 The sins of the fathers are visited on the children , 
 the sins of the rich upon the poor ; the sins of the 
 dead upon the living. Can this be the law of a God 
 who is good ? 
 
 And here indeed you touch a problem which has 
 broken down the faith of many — and chiefly of the 
 
124 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 good, the sympathetic, the chivalrous. Yet let me 
 say again not often of those who are actually working 
 ro mitigate this pain in daily intercourse with it. 
 They see God through it all. Such is the mystery 
 of service. 
 
 But can we, looking on at the great drama of the 
 world, justify to ourselves this fact that the innocent 
 suffer through the sins of others ? 
 
 Well, it is part of a greater fact and inseparable 
 from it. What is that greater fact ? That all the 
 universe is one whole, and that the nearer its parts 
 are to each other, the more intimately they act and 
 re-act on each other. This applies to human beings 
 no less than to the molecules of the physical universe. 
 It has been stated so far as regards human beings 
 in ancient words of sublime simplicity, * We are 
 members one of another ' ; ^ whether one member 
 suffereth, all the members suffer with it.' For my 
 part, I grieve indeed over the pains of the innocent ; 
 but I cannot bring myself to think that this would be 
 a better world if the pains incurred through sin were 
 limited to the sinner himself. This fact of mutual 
 membership involves great sorrows ; but it involves 
 also all the purest gladness, happiness, and joy that 
 there is in the world. If one man's conduct affected 
 no one but himself, all the beauty and nobility of 
 human life would be sapped at the foundation. The 
 world would not be a colony bound together in 
 fellowship of gladness and sorrow. It would be a 
 vast prison, in which each man, woman, and child 
 had to serve a life- term of solitary confinement. 
 
Vicarious Suffering ^^5 
 
 And further : if my suffering from my sin is 
 God's way of recalling me to a better mind, much 
 more is my child's suffering from my sin God's way 
 of recalling me to a better mind. If every wrong- 
 doer brought trouble on himself alone, the forces 
 making for the destruction of sin would be infinitely 
 less powerful and effective than they are. The force 
 that holds back the hand from striking is far more 
 often the image of the pain which the wrong will 
 bring to others than the image of the pain which it 
 will bring to the man himself. The fact that his sin 
 would break his wife's heart has much oftener kept 
 a man true and pure than the fact that it would 
 bring trouble on his own head. The more carefully 
 you think out what human life would be if the sins 
 of men brought pain to themselves only and left 
 the innocent perfectly happy, the more distinctly, I 
 believe, will you discern that it would be an in- 
 finitely sadder and less holy thing than it actually 
 is under the conditions in which God has set it. 
 
 And then comes in a consideration of enormous 
 weight, which has been felt most vividly by the best 
 and devoutest. There are qualities in pain and 
 sorrow which render them incomparably the most 
 potent instruments in the making of character. If 
 we theorise about this, we get wrong. Logic would 
 seem to say, ' If God brings great pain on a man, 
 it must make the man revolt against God.' But 
 observation of facts compels us t© say, ' No, on the 
 contrary nothiag exercises so extraordinary an in- 
 
126 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 fluence in making men love God as the suffering of 
 great pain at his hands.' Scientific thinking deals 
 with facts as they are, not with a priori notions of 
 what we should expect. And in this matter, the 
 fact as it is, is that goodness is evolved from pain 
 more richly than from any other source. This is 
 what Dr. Marti ncau says : *The truest piety is to be 
 learned only in the school of suffering ; and, strange 
 to say, its usual characteristic is in a certain bright- 
 ness and restfulness of spirit, free from the plaintive 
 tones of painless religion ; its faith is not shaken, 
 but confirmed, by the shock. It is the observer 
 that whimpers, while the victim sings, ^' Though he 
 slay me, yet will I trust in him." ' 
 
 And I say all this after being permitted, by the 
 kindness of the anonymous author, to read in proof 
 an exceedingly clever and earnest little book called 
 * Evil and Evolution.' In that book the author 
 contends that a bright and unclouded existence is at 
 least as good a school of character as a life chequered 
 with suffering. I find it impossible to agree with 
 him. Perpetual prosperity seems never to fail ta 
 breed selfishness in the heart, and the battle with 
 difficulty seems the indispensable condition for the 
 making of human greatness. Take away all suffer- 
 ing and all wrong, and surely heroism would be 
 blotted out of the history of humanity. It is not a 
 sickly and monastic saintli-ness that springs from 
 the soil of pain, as this writer would seem to think,. 
 but all that we include under the term, * manliness.' 
 
The School of Pain 127 
 
 Among moderns, Mazzini seems to me the very 
 type of the nobiUty thus educed — Mazzini, * the 
 suffering Messiah of the nineteenth century.' 
 
 It is clear then about Pain, first that in a moral 
 world it was much better that Sin should have 
 Pain as its consequence than that it should not, and 
 secondly, that Pain has a great and sacred function 
 among men, namely, the training of them in char- 
 acter. These two facts go an immense way towards 
 solving the difficulty we feel in believing that God 
 can be both omnipotent and all-good, seeing that he 
 permits Pain to exist. 
 
 But still the matter, it may be said, is not cleared 
 up wholly. There is much pain in the world which 
 is neither the outcome of human sin nor yet con- 
 ducive to the training of character. I doubt myself 
 whether there can be shown to be any human pain 
 which may not in one way or other conduce to 
 character ; but I readily admit that there are vast 
 areas of human pain which are not caused by human 
 sin, and also that in the animal world, at any rate, 
 there are vast areas of pain which do not and cannot 
 conduce to the making of character. 
 
 Let us look at both these facts : 
 
 Vast areas of human pain that are not caused by 
 human sin ; by what then are they caused ? By the 
 standing, enduring, universal laws of nature, — the 
 regular action of the primitive cosmical forces. 
 
 Take an example : the cosmical laws which run 
 through the whole physical creation include the fact 
 
128 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 that the earth slowly cools, and, cooling, contracts 
 and hardens at the surface. This involves in its 
 process an occasional local spasm in the earth-crust. 
 These spasms (called earthquakes) have tens of 
 thousands of years ago become comparatively slight 
 and comparatively rare, leaving the globe, on the 
 whole, well calculated to support human life. But 
 here and there, now and then, a bad earthquake still 
 turns up, because the cooling and hardening and 
 settling are not yet complete. A few millions of years 
 more, and the earth will be too cold to sustain human 
 life. Just now it is, on the whole, admirably adapted 
 for a thriving and vigorous humanity. Ought God 
 to have waited to set any human beings on the earth 
 till the very last earthquake was over ? Who will 
 dare to say so ? That would have diminished the 
 total number of happy human lives from first to last 
 by thousands of millions. And yet that is exactly 
 what you do say in effect when you point to the 
 destruction which the earthquake wreaks as sign 
 that God is not good. 
 
 These cosmical laws sweep through all time and 
 space. Through them, and through them alone, has 
 any universe at all been evolved. For us to stand 
 up and find fault with gravitation or the law of the 
 refraction of light does indeed seem a monstrous 
 specimen of conceit. While to ask that these laws 
 and the like should be suspended whenever a human 
 being is in the way is to ask that God would sub- 
 stitute disorder and confusion for that perfect and 
 
Animal Pain 129 
 
 universal order which is the very foundation of all 
 society and civilisation and progress and human 
 happiness. * 
 
 When we pass from the human to the animal, 
 from the moral to the unmoral world, then, however, 
 Pain seems to wear a new aspect, and we are afresh 
 startled at the sufferings of such multitudes of inno- 
 cent creatures in a world over which we are told 
 that a good God rules. 
 
 It is impossible here to say all I should like to 
 say about animal happiness and pain. But I would 
 urge everyone on whom this problem presses to 
 read with the closest attention the last four pages 
 of the second chapter of Wallace's * Darwinism.' 
 Wallace, the enthusiastic disciple of Darwin, and 
 himself the greatest living British naturalist, clearly 
 points out the errors involved in estimates like 
 Tennyson's and Huxley's of the volume and in- 
 tensity of the woes of the animals. He shows with 
 absolute lucidity that the phase ^ the struggle for 
 existence,' though an excellent scientific expression, 
 gives a most misleading impression of the troubles 
 of animal life. And he — the highest possible au- 
 thority in this matter — thus sums up : * The popular 
 idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery 
 and pain on the animal world is the very reverse 
 of the truth. What it really brings about is the 
 maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life with 
 the minimum of suffering and pain. Given the 
 necessity of death and reproduction — and without 
 
130 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 these there could have been no progressive develop- 
 ment of the animal world, — and it is difficult even 
 to imagine a system by which a greater balance of 
 happiness could have been secured.' {See Preface?) 
 
 There are, however, pains inflicted on animals 
 by mankind which, to my knowledge, hardly less 
 than the awful catalogue of man's atrocities against 
 man, have tended to shake the faith of many earnest 
 persons in the goodness of God. Some of these 
 are inflicted in sport, in wantonness, or in mere 
 recklessness ; others, and these amongst the most 
 terrible, on the plea of the advancement of science 
 or of mitigating human disease. A tender heart 
 can hardly refrain from longing that God had put ail 
 this out of the power of mankind. But it is not 
 easy to conceive how this could have been done 
 without arbitrary and destructive limitations on the 
 physical capacity or the moral freedom of men. 
 God certainly has Maid upon us a mighty trust'; 
 and when we abuse that trust, we do produce real 
 and essential evil ; and the torture of animals is 
 real and essential evil. We have yet to rise into a 
 far higher and nobler conception of our fellowship 
 with the animal world. Meanwhile, they who arti- 
 ficially increase the sufferings of races helpless 
 against the might of man, take on themselves a 
 responsibility which it seems imj^ossible to measure. 
 
 It seems proper here to say a word about that 
 very ancient mode of solving the Problem of Evil 
 which consists in supposing that, as all good pro- 
 
The Theory of a Devil 131 
 
 eeeds from God, so all evil proceeds from a personal 
 author and lover of evil ; the more so that this time- 
 honoured method of dealing with the matter is 
 revived with wide culture and devout enthusiasm by 
 the writer of that essay on * Evil and Evolution ' to 
 which I have already referred. On the surface such 
 a theory seems at once to dispose of the whole diffi- 
 culty. God and Devil are contending with each 
 other over the whole area of the universe. All the 
 good is to be put down to the credit of God ; all the 
 evil to the account of the Devil. 
 
 But, after all, a little reflection suffices to show 
 us that our problem remains exactly where it was. 
 Suppose there be indeed a Prince of Evil. Is he or 
 is he not the creature of him whom our recent 
 essayist constantly speaks of as * the Creator,' or 
 *the Supreme Being,' or simply ^ God ' ? Is the 
 Devil created by him, and by him endowed with 
 power to bring about whatever evil is in the world ? 
 
 Let us first suppose that this question is an- 
 swered in the affirmative. The Devil is God's 
 creature. It is God who has made him and en- 
 dowed him with his capacity for evil. Where then 
 do you find any relief from the difficulties which you 
 felt before ? You complained that God could not be 
 altogether good if he sent pain into the world and 
 permitted sin in the human heart. But how does it 
 mend matters to suppose that he has done it all 
 through the agency of one single evil spirit ? Is it 
 any better to suppose that he has created a single 
 
1 32 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 being in whom is concentrated all the malignity 
 which darkens the world, than to suppose that in all 
 his children he has, by the tremendous endowment 
 of Free Will, left open the door to sin ? Is it any 
 better to suppose that he has endowed one angel of 
 evil with the power to infuse woe into myriads of 
 human lives than to suppose that sorrow and pain 
 are conditions inseparable from a moral world? 
 Some evolutionists try to get rid of the idea of crea- 
 tion by dividing up the spiritual endowments of the 
 present world into an infinite number of infinitely 
 small accretions of spiritual power. This Satan 
 theory is the reverse of that fallacious contrivance. 
 It gathers up an infinite number of individual sins 
 and lays them all in one vast lump to the charge of 
 one single creature of God, in the hope of slipping 
 evil into the world without making God responsible. 
 The device is equally vain. A hundred million 
 small acts of creation are creation still, just as much 
 as one all-covering act. One single admission of 
 colossal evil into the world presents precisely the 
 same difficulties to the Theist as a hundred million 
 admissions of fragmentary evils. 
 
 Let us then suppose that the Devil is not the 
 creature of him whom our essayist calls * the 
 Creator,' * the Supreme Being,' or simply * God,' — 
 that he is an independent being, and that God is in 
 no way responsible for him. What then becomes 
 of God ? Why, he is God no more in any tran- 
 scendent sense. He is not the universal Creator ; 
 
Diabolus ex Machina 133 
 
 he is not supreme. He is after all only a demi-god, 
 or a god in the sense of the Greek mythology, — a 
 celestial hero, contending against evil powers for 
 the happiness and the virtue of his human children. 
 To such a being, such a champion of our cause, our 
 hearts would no doubt rightly go forth in loyalty 
 and allegiance. But he is not God. We have to 
 peer into the darkness behind him for some other 
 being, the true Creator, the true Supreme, the great 
 Eternal, the First Cause, whence have sprung both 
 Spirit of Good and Spirit of Evil, both Ormuzd and 
 Ahriman. And then with him we have to begin 
 again the same great argument. Why did he admit 
 evil into the world ? Can he be both all-powerful 
 and all-good ? And so from this ancient expedient 
 of a Devil, this Deus — or diabolus — ex machina solu- 
 tion of our problem, this audacious cutting of the 
 Gordian knot, we are forced back to some such slow 
 and patient argument as has formed the substance 
 of this chapter. 
 
 I conclude, then, finally that neither the existence 
 of Sin nor the existence of Pain — and these two 
 things include all that we mean by the dread word 
 * Evil ' — is in any way inconsistent with the view 
 that God is omnipotent and all-good in any rational 
 and real sense of those two words. Rigid reasoning 
 disposes of the Problem of Evil, and leaves us free 
 to revere and love God as all that the best and 
 holiest have declared him to be. But our judgment 
 is ruled more by warmth of feeling than by rigid 
 
134 On the Problem of Evil 
 
 reasoning. And in view of some terrible v/oe or 
 wrong the rigid reasoning will often vanish out of 
 our minds, and the very warmth and fervour of the 
 sympathies which God has kindled in our hearts 
 will shake for the moment our faith in God's good- 
 ness. The safeguard against that does not lie in 
 rigid reasoning, valuable as that is, but first in 
 engaging ourselves habitually in ministering to the 
 sorrows of the world and trying to lead men towards 
 goodness, and secondly in steeping our spirits day 
 by day in communion with God through those 
 several avenues by which, as we have seen in the 
 earlier chapters, our access to him lies ever open. 
 
 In this chapter and in that on the Moral Law I 
 have said much about goodness for its own sake 
 being the proper aim of men and the apparent aim 
 of God for his children. It is, I am convinced, of 
 primary importance that we ourselves should seek 
 first to be good rather than to be happy. But I 
 fully admit that it may sometimes sound harsh to 
 insist that God makes any other purpose paramount 
 in his dealings with us over our happiness. Let me 
 then add a few words which may perhaps be felt to 
 soften and mitigate such a view of the ways of our 
 Heavenl}^ Father with us, his children. 
 
 The elder and coarser philosophical teachers 
 taught that pleasure was the chief aim of life. We 
 have all learnt, I suppose, to translate this word 
 'pleasure,' into the less gross term 'happiness,' a 
 word of purer and brighter radiance. Let us now 
 
The Highest Good 1 3 5 
 
 carry our translation one step higher still. Let us 
 clarify and exalt the idea of * happiness' into the 
 idea of * blessedness,' and it seems to me that this 
 great controversy of the highest good falls away and 
 is solved in the larger unity. And I think that we 
 may truly say that in the eternal heart of God the 
 * blessedness ' of his children lies as the eternal pur- 
 pose towards which, under his shaping hand, the 
 whole creation moves, 
 
 I ask you to consider if this be not truly so. 
 
 On the one hand we have to confess that the 
 purpose of God is our goodness even more than our 
 happiness. But what is goodness ? It is nothing 
 less than life in harmony with the laws of God 
 implanted in the universe and in our own spiritual 
 nature. He who lives wholly in such harmony is 
 wholly good. But again what is * blessedness ' save 
 this, — a state of feeling — a balance of the emotions 
 — in harmony with those same eternal conditions 
 which flow forth from the spiritual structure of the 
 universe? To feel no desires save God's desires, 
 to feel joy in all that gives joy to God, that is to 
 be in perfect blessedness. Someone has said that 
 happiness is * harmony with our surroundings.' That 
 is true. And blessedness is harmony with those 
 wider and more spiritual surroundings, those all- 
 encompassing and interpenetrating spiritual con- 
 ditions, of which the soul becomes sensible only as 
 it advances in the life of goodness. 
 
 And so the great paradox would seem to be 
 
1 36 On the Problem of Evi! 
 
 solved. Goodness is the life of harmon}^ with the 
 eternal conditions which spring from the being of 
 God ; and Blessedness (the pure and perfect happi- 
 ness) is the feeling of that harmony in the life. 
 And so Blessedness and Goodness are but aspects 
 of the one condition. And that manner of conceiv- 
 ing God which contemplates the one as the Supreme 
 End for which he has created life and love, con- 
 templates the other therein no less. And the two 
 ideas — which in their lower phases set the philo- 
 sophers at war — in their highest coalesce and are 
 no more divided. 
 
 Only by us it is to be remembered always, that 
 the goodness, the life^ is the thing for which to 
 strive and pray ; that the blessedness, the Jeeling^ 
 can only come to such as have forgotten to make 
 search for it and are wholly given over to the pur- 
 pose of living in accord with God. 
 
 And so it is a beautiful and holy world ; a world 
 in which, if only we carry up our controversies and 
 our difficulties high enough and contemplate them 
 in the pure light of the shining presence of God, 
 they fade out and are gone ; a world in which with 
 high and happy hope, with deep and undoubting 
 faith, with full-orbed, self-forgetful love, we have to 
 put our hand in God's and go whither he by his 
 Holy Spirit leads the way. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ON MYSTICS AND MYSTICISM. 
 
 WE set before ourselves at the beginning of 
 this little book the question : * How may 
 men know God ? ' In the first chapter I tried to 
 show that we must not expect to be able to reason 
 the whole answer out by pure syllogism without 
 assumption, because none of our knowledge in any 
 department can be reasoned out by syllogism with- 
 out assumption. All reasoning proceeds on assump- 
 tion. *A11 science starts with hypothesis.' Syllo- 
 gism cannot begin without premises to build on. 
 The assumption necessary to reasoning about God 
 is the assumption that our own natural faculties are 
 veracious. The premises necessary for syllogisms 
 about God are those truths which are given in the 
 deliverances of these faculties. My whole conten- 
 tion has been that in normal human nature there is 
 provision for theistic belief, — that assuming the 
 truthfulness of human faculty, it follows that God 
 is real and good and lovable. 
 
 You will no doubt have observed that through- 
 
J ^g On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 out this long argument I have never once appealed 
 to any authority whatever outside our own faculties. 
 My appeal has been to the common reason, the 
 common conscience, the common emotion. I have 
 cited famous reasoners and teachers ; but only to 
 put what they have said to the test of this common 
 reason, conscience, and emotion. Have their utter- 
 ances stood this test, I have adopted them ; have 
 they broken down under it, I have rejected them. I 
 have in no case said, * This proposition must be 
 true because it is vouched for by this Church, by 
 this Book, or by this Man.' Herein I have departed 
 from the almost universal practice of such as write 
 or speak in the name of the Christian Religion. 
 However free and able their reasonings upon that 
 which is given them by Creed or Bible or Prophet, 
 — nay, even though in some portions of their argu- 
 ment they venture to go behind Creed, Bible, or 
 Prophet for their premises, seeking them in our 
 common human nature, — all that vast class of 
 writers of whatever school who are called Christian 
 Apologists, do base some part of their argument on 
 premises borrowed from Church, Book or Teacher, 
 or at least when they have constructed their argu- 
 ment, deem it incomplete till they have shown that 
 Church, Book, or authoritative Teacher teaches just 
 that same thing. 
 
 Now, though I shall have more to say about 
 this in the next chapter, yet I may explain at once 
 that mv departure from this procedure is not due to 
 
The Authority of Inspiration 139 
 
 any undervaluation on my part of that consensus of 
 wise and pious men which may constitute the Creed 
 of a Church, or of that gathering together of the 
 words of the great and good which may invest a 
 Book with the dignity of a Bible, or of that insight 
 beyond the insight of ordinary men which makes the 
 Prophet or the Seer. But my position is that the 
 very existence of the Prophet and the Seer, the very 
 existence, too, of Creeds and Bibles so far as these 
 are representative of the wisdom of the Prophet or 
 the Seer, is based on the normal human faculty 
 which the Prophet and the Seer share with the rest 
 of us, though in them it is greater in degree, more 
 luminous, powerful, and distinct. 
 
 For, indeed, it is in this fact that all the authority 
 of the inspired man lies. His apprehension of 
 divine truth is keener than yours ; and that which 
 you only apprehend when it is suggested to you, 
 he apprehends in the fulness of his insight without 
 human suggestion. The authority with which Jesus 
 of Nazareth is said to have been felt by ordinary 
 hearers to speak lay in this, that when he declared 
 religious verities, they felt inwardly that what he 
 said answered to the dim and hitherto unrealised 
 monitions within their own breasts. It was as 
 when a note is struck on a great organ or blown 
 from a trumpet, it sets athrill in a neighbouring 
 piano or violin the same note in tremulous response. 
 This last is the violin's own music, wrought of its 
 own faculty. Yet it would have been silent but for 
 
140 On Mystics and Mysttctsm 
 
 the call of the larger and mightier instrument. Or 
 it is as when some noble singer is singing glorious 
 music, but he does not so clearly articulate that you 
 can gather all the words. Then a friend, who knows 
 the song well, repeats the words to you ; and next 
 time the noble singer lifts up his voice in the same 
 great hymn, you hear every word distinctly, and 
 marvel at the previous dulness of your ears. If a 
 man is about to do wrong, and another argues with 
 him, he may altogether fail to touch his conscience. 
 Rut let the remonstrant fling out the force of his 
 own conscience : * You know it is wrong,' and the 
 man of feebler moral fibre, whether he heed it or 
 not, feels at once the quickening of his own con- 
 science in response. 
 
 I believe, then, for my part in no other Reve- 
 lation, no other Inspiration, no other spiritual 
 Authority than that the seat of which lies in the 
 Divine Word voiced in the common faculties of man. 
 
 Churches, Bibles, Prophets are media of Revela- 
 tion, are vehicles of Inspiration, are of Authority to 
 us all, just in the measure in which they quicken in 
 us an answering inward sense of the verity of that 
 which they allege. Whensoever and in whatsoever 
 they fail to awake in us such response, they may or 
 may not be true, but for us they are not and they 
 cannot be media of Revelation, vehicles of Inspira- 
 tion, Authoritative teachers. 
 
 Although, then, these Societies, Literatures, and 
 Individual Teachers may be and often are helpful to 
 
The Mystics 141 
 
 us beyond all measure as quickening our own moral 
 and spiritual sense, although without them we 
 should be in comparative darkness and ignorance, 
 yet they do not affect the real bases and sources of 
 fundamental religious belief, which lie in the normal 
 faculties which are ours as well as theirs. 
 
 And accordingly in these faculties I have askec 
 you to put your trust. I have maintained that by 
 our sense of Cause we know God as Power ; that by 
 our Moral Sense we are filled with awe of him as 
 Righteousness ; that through the sense of Beauty 
 we perceive him as Love. 
 
 Now, amid all the official orthodoxies of the 
 world which have enticed or constrained men to rest 
 their faith on authoritative documents or teachers, 
 there have always again and again sprung up men 
 who have reverted to these innate faculties of their 
 own and sought to know God through them. Some 
 have relied wholly on intellectual methods, and these 
 have been th« world^s philosophers. But others 
 have chiefly relied on the more spiritual faculties, 
 and from these have emerged those profoundly in- 
 teresting groups of men who are known as Mystics. 
 
 The word * mystic' is no relation whatever to 
 the word * misty,' though many loose talkers seem to 
 think that that is what it means. It is in its original 
 Greek of the same stock as ^ mystery.' But, though 
 cousins, the two terms, as used in modern English, 
 have formed quite different connections and can 
 hardly be said to be speaking acquaintances. The 
 
142 On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 best definition of the mystic known to me is in 
 the first chapter of Dr. Charles Beard's Hibbert 
 Lectures. * The mystic,' says he, * is one who 
 claims to be able to see God and divine things with 
 the inner vision of the soul — a direct apprehension, 
 as the bodily eye apprehends colour, as the bodily 
 ear apprehends sound.' And he goes on: * His 
 method, so far as he has one, is simply contem- 
 plative : he does not argue, or generalize, or infer : 
 he reflects, broods, waits for light.' 
 
 Now, if this is a true account of mysticism, then 
 wherever there is spiritual religion, there in its 
 measure is mysticism. When Mr. Beard says that 
 the mystic does not argue, of course he only means 
 that the arguing does not belong to the mysticism. 
 But a man may be a mystic and a philosopher, too. 
 He may claim to see God with the inner vision, so 
 being a mystic, and then he may proceed to defend 
 the claim by reasoning, so turning philosopher. 
 Some mystics have done this and some have not. 
 But wheresoever men have revolted from the claim 
 of Church or Creed to dictate the terms of their 
 faith, and have struck direct for conscious contact 
 with God, have declared that they heard him im- 
 mediately in the voice of conscience, saw him 
 immediately in spiritual contemplation, felt him im- 
 mediately in the rapture, the ecstasy, the solemn 
 awe, the deep peace of the soul, there there have 
 been mystics and mysticism. And there is never any 
 pure and unspoiled religion, but some element of 
 
The Intellectual Danger \ 43 
 
 mysticism lies at its root and gives it its sweetness 
 and beauty. 
 
 The Bible is full of mysticism. A text starts 
 up in my mind, as I write, from each of the Testa- 
 ments carrying the very essence of mysticism in it. 
 * Be still and know that I am God,' sings the Psalm- 
 ist, and we are reminded of that form of mystic piety 
 called ^ quietism,' — an absolute stillness of the soul 
 in which the sense of being wrapped in God steals 
 over it. * Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
 shall see God,' says Jesus. And the text serves for 
 a condensation of half the mystical writing of the 
 fourteenth and following centuries. 
 
 You will perceive then that, in my view, the 
 term 'mysticism,' so far from being rightly used 
 as a term of reproach or scorn, really represents the 
 central and ever-abiding principle of true religion. 
 But just because I believe and feel this so strongly^ 
 and have indeed in these chapters urged on you 
 much that is in the true sense mystical, I hold my- 
 self bound to warn you against both the intellectual 
 and the moral dangers into which an enthusiastic 
 mysticism is apt to run. 
 
 The intellectual danger of mysticism is that it 
 should pass through and beyond the contact of man 
 with God and God with man into the identification of 
 man with God and God with man. Passing by the 
 mystics of the ancient East, I suppose the first 
 danger-signal in Christian mysticism may be found 
 in such expressions of the Fourth Gospel as that in 
 
144 
 
 Oil Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 which Christ is made to pray for the disciples ' that 
 they may all be one ; even as Thou, Father, art in 
 me and I in Thee, that they also may be in us.' This 
 bears, indeed, quite well the interpretation that all 
 that is sought is complete harmony between man and 
 God, But it also runs the danger of being inter- 
 preted as a seeking of actual unity^ amounting to 
 identity in personal essence of man and God. And 
 so in the fourteenth century we have Eckhart, a 
 great Master of Mystics, so describing the coales- 
 cence of man and God, that he says, * While God 
 makes himself man in us, he makes us divine in him.' 
 This and the like are so beautiful, poetic expression 
 so readily runs into similar forms, that we are apt to 
 be lulled into unconsciousness that we are passing 
 the line between harmony and unity. To be at one 
 with God is one thing ; to be one with God is another 
 thing. Madame Guyon allures us in her exquisite 
 hymnody into the like danger. If we take the 
 following as poetry, it is as pure religion as the soul 
 of man ever breathed forth. But if we take it as a 
 literal expression of fact, we have passed the border 
 line, and our mysticism has become the destroyer of 
 our own sense of separate personality. 
 Madame Guyon writes : 
 
 1 l(ue my God, but with no love of mine, 
 
 For I have none to give : 
 I love thee, Lord ; but all the love is thine, 
 
 For by thy life I live. 
 I am as nothing, and rejoice to be 
 
 Emptied, and lost, and swallowed up in thee. 
 
The Otherness of God ^^r 
 
 Such rapturous utterance entrances the religioue 
 mind. But it is absolutely essential to the balance 
 of truth that we keep our grasp through it all on the 
 fundamental fact that the man's Ego, the human 
 self, is not God's Ego, the Divine Self, however fully 
 the soul feels itself penetrated and permeated by the 
 God who encompasses and sustains it. 
 
 To put the intellectual danger of mysticism into 
 the language of philosophy, we shall have to say 
 that the danger is lest the distinction between sub- 
 ject and object should be lost. The union of man 
 with God must be like a marriage. The more per- 
 fect the union of will and feeling between man and 
 woman in marriage, the more perfect is the marriage. 
 But the very essence of marriage consists in the 
 separate personalities of the two thus joined to- 
 gether. It is the sense of union, not with self, but 
 with another than self, that constitutes all the beaut}' 
 and solemnity of marriage. And in like manner it 
 is the sense of union with Another, even with God, 
 always other than self, however self be penetrated 
 by God, that constitutes all the truth and holiness 
 of religion. 
 
 In the most famous and influential of all the 
 more recent modes of philosophical thought — that 
 which is broadly known as Hegelianism — the mystic 
 tendency has received a great development, and the 
 human soul — together with the outward universe — 
 seems to be absorbed into the being of God to such 
 a degree that man is deprived of any proper indi- 
 
146 On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 viduality at all and of any freedom of will. And 
 some, who are by no means Hegelians, such as my 
 friend, Professor Upton, in his most admirable and 
 luminous Hibbert Lectures on the Bases of Reli- 
 gious Belief, while fighting hard for the real freedom 
 of the human will, yet are greatly allured by the 
 idea of a certain flowing over of God into the human 
 soul, so that a man is partly^ or in some aspects, a 
 separate individuality, but partly also, or in other 
 aspects, of the very substance of God and not an 
 individuality distinct from him. The chief intel- 
 lectual temptation that leads thinkers of a very 
 different school from Hegel's to make this conces- 
 sion seems to be that they may thereb}^ be able to 
 account for the wonderful fact of conscious com- 
 munion between God and man. But I cannot help 
 thinking that they deceive themselves in supposing 
 that such a conception will really help them at all. 
 The bridge by which one consciousness passes over 
 to another consciousness is one that the thought of 
 man can never conceive or even begin to under- 
 stand. And it does not surely in any way make it 
 easier if we say that there is a divine, universal, or 
 God-consciousness in me as well as an individual- 
 consciousness. The puzzle of how one of these 
 passes into the other is not one whit mitigated bj^ a 
 juggle of words which declares them both to be 
 comprised in my own person. The fact is that 
 there are a multitude of these 'bridges' in the 
 physical and spiritual universes, in which we are 
 
The Mystery of the Bridge 147 
 
 obliged to believe, but which we cannot even begin 
 to explain. Such is the bridge between a prick of 
 my finger and a sensation of pain. Such is the 
 bridge between a volition of mine and the lifting of 
 my fist. Such is the bridge between the contagious 
 emotion of two kindred souls. Such is the bridge 
 by which gravitation acts between two distant 
 bodies. Efforts are always being made in philo- 
 sophy to figure forth or explain these * bridges,' but 
 such efforts are always and necessarily vain. They 
 bridge over chasms which human thought cannot 
 bridge. 
 
 It is really no easier to conceive of gravitation 
 acting through a * medium ' than through a vacuum ; 
 and it would seem to have been pure dogmatism on 
 Sir Isaac Newton's part to describe such action 
 through a vacuum as absurd. And it is really no 
 easier to conceive of God holuing communion with 
 the human soul by supposing God to be in part 
 a constituent of that soul, than if God and the 
 soul are absolutely separate and distinct persons. 
 Neither science nor philosophy has any claim to 
 state that God cannot institute such communion ; 
 and experience has every claim to state that God 
 does institute such communion. 
 
 And certainly the voice of experience goes 
 strongly for saying that the inflow of strength or 
 peace or gladness in answer to the soul's passion of 
 prayer is not an inflow from another element of 
 one's own nature supervening on the weakness or 
 
^^^ On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 the grief of the properly individual element. On 
 the contrary, the whole force and sacredness of this 
 experience lie in the consciousness that the stream 
 of hallowing grace comes, as I have said, from 
 Another than oneself, — One with whom the soul is 
 brought, not into indentity, but into communion, not 
 into unity, but into union. If a man have no clear 
 sense of this in his own spiritual experience, let him 
 read the story of that archetypal prayer, the prayer 
 of Jesus in Gethsemane. Surely that cry of the 
 Master was not to an element in himself, but to One 
 above and beyond ; and that influx of spiritual 
 might was no mere shifting of the elements of his 
 own soul, but the coming of the Father to the rescue 
 of his Son. 
 
 But the danger run by mysticism is a moral 
 and spiritual danger as well as an intellectual one. 
 The strength for a noble moral life which religion 
 gives lies in the bestowal of a Companion, a Friend, 
 on the lonely soul of man. But God cannot be felt 
 as a Companion, a Friend, unless the man retain a 
 vivid consciousness of his own individuality, a vivid 
 consciousness that he is a separate person with a 
 personal centre of his own capable of its own voli- 
 tion, its own emotion, its own personal life other 
 than that of any other person human or divine. 
 
 And indeed history supplies us with some 
 melancholy demonstrations of the danger in ques- 
 tion. Mr. Beard very beautifully says of the 
 mystic : * He prepares for divine communion by a 
 
The Moral Dangtr ^49 
 
 process of self-purification : he detaches his spirit 
 from earthly cares and passions : he studies to be 
 quiet that his soul may reflect the face of God.' 
 Yes, but this very temper often holds a man off 
 from the stirring duties of active life which no man 
 may with impunity shun. 'The morals of mystic- 
 ism,' says Mr. Beard, * are almost always sweet and 
 good.' Yes, but as he allows, not quite always. 
 When a man has arrived at that degree of mysticism 
 in which he thinks that all his feelings are divine, 
 the time comes when evil feelings also are taken 
 to be of God — to be indeed God's feehngs; and 
 terrible sensualities have sprung out of this fatal 
 error. Mysticism has sometimes toppled over into 
 anomianism, which is Greek for lawlessness. Men 
 have first said, ^ I am filled with God ; my emotions 
 are all of God ' ; and then they have proceeded to 
 ignore all moral law save these feelings themselves ; 
 and a distorted piety, an exaggerated pietism, has 
 silenced and destroyed that other voice of God 
 which we know as conscience. 
 
 But once warned of the intellectual and moral 
 dangers of mysticism, let us revert to its virtues, 
 * Mysticism,' says a very great living philosopher 
 and scholar. Dr. Otto Pfleiderer, * overleaps all 
 those channels by which religion is at once inter- 
 preted and obscured in the dogma and the worship 
 of the Church, in order to find its life directly in 
 religion itself, to experience the revelation of God in 
 the heart of the individual, and to possess salvation 
 
^ so On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 now and here, in the sense of most intimate union 
 with God.' ' As the kernal of rehgion/ he adds, 
 * does certainly consist in this^ it cannot be without 
 direct advantage for the philosophical comprehension 
 of religion in general to sound these depths of the 
 mystical consciousness as a guide to the innermost 
 features of the religious life/ Those philosophers, 
 like Mill, who will recognise no inlets of knowledge 
 whatever in man except the avenues of the senses, 
 naturally treat mysticism with impatient scorn. 
 But every one of us who believes that we have 
 faculties of direct apprehension apart from and prior 
 to the senses, is a mystic just in the measure in 
 which he holds that those faculties can directly 
 apprehend that Eternal Power and Love to which 
 we give the name of God. 
 
 If we desire an exemplar of the just extent to 
 which mysticism may go, we have but to turn to the 
 great Teacher who has given the world Christianity. 
 No religious genius was ever more sensitive to the 
 presence of God, or more vividly and joyously con-/ 
 scious of his touch upon the soul. None who has 
 worn our flesh has ever lived with spirit more pene- 
 trated by the divine spirit. The communion which 
 to most of us is the precious experience of our 
 rarest and most sacred hours, would seem to have 
 been to him the bright and invigorating experience 
 of every day, the source of illumination and strength 
 in every difficulty and every temptation, the uplift- 
 ing consolation in the deepest and darkest sorrows. 
 
A Sober Mysticism 151 
 
 Yet no language can be more pronounced or em- 
 phatic than that in which, at any rate in the 
 Synoptic (and, as I beheve, more historic) Gospels, 
 he speaks of, — yes, and speaks to — God as other 
 than, separate from, himself He gave enduring 
 currency to the one symbol which best expresses 
 this dualism between man and God — this fellowship 
 without merging of the distinctive personalities — 
 when he himself called him and taught his hearers 
 to call him * Father.' No term could have been 
 coined more distinctly illustrating at once the 
 perfect closeness of converse and communion open 
 to man with God and the absolute distinction of the 
 personal centre of the human worshipper from the 
 personal centre of the Divine Being. I have been 
 accustomed to think my own thoughts about much 
 which Jesus is alleged to have taught. But I find 
 nothing in literature which seems to me to comprise 
 in brief so perfect, so irrefragable a philosophy of 
 religion as the Nazarene's term * Our Father ' as 
 summing up what God is to man and all the rela- 
 tions between the Eternal Source of all things and 
 the '')uman soul. 
 
 A controlled and sober mysticism then, a mysti- 
 cism that retains the full sense of the human person- 
 ality as endowed with a centre of its own apart from 
 tie divine personality, yet by vividness of conscience 
 f^?ls God and by purity of heart sees God, nurtures 
 a potency of manhood, an effectiveness of moral and 
 spiritual character which nothing else can. It is 
 
152 On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 men with a vivid sense on the one hand of their own 
 personal being as responsible moral agents and on 
 the other hand of God's actual touch with the soul at 
 every point who everywhere make the renovations 
 of humanity by their clearness of vision, their moral 
 vitality, their sense of the smallness of conventions 
 beside divine verities, their absolute fearlessness of 
 men, their perfect faith in the power of man to realise 
 his sonship to God. Such men are always con- 
 demned as heretics, generally rebuked as atheists. 
 It is because their burning sense of the God-presence 
 makes them indifferent to historic modes of stating 
 it, impatient of conventions which deaden or conceal 
 it. Of such on very different planes, but still always 
 of such, have been, for example, Jesus, Paul, Luther, 
 Wesley, Garrison, Mazzini, Theodore Parker. And 
 it is a mark of such men that, while rousing the 
 deadliest antagonism of some, they kindle in others 
 passionate enthusiasm and regenerate the lives of 
 these. In the proportion in which the tremendous 
 twin truths of your own responsible personality and 
 your power of communion with the personality of 
 God possess you, will you rise to the like power and 
 influence with such men as I have named. 
 
 To the above plea for the absolutely separate 
 personality of man, let me very briefly add a vindi- 
 cation of the use of the term ' person ' as applied to 
 God. Human persons, it is true, are limited beings, 
 limited in power, in consciousness, in understanding, 
 in faculty of every kind. But the essence of per- 
 
The Personality of God ^ 5j% 
 
 sonality does not lie in such limitation, but in the 
 consciousness of selfhood, of a self-determining will 
 and self-contained capacity of thought. Nor have 
 I, I must confess, ever been able to understand why 
 so many even of the most spiritual interpreters of 
 the universe assume that * an infinite person * is a 
 contradiction in terms. At any rate, * person ' is the 
 highest entity of which we have knowledge and of 
 which we can conceive. And while I do not doubt 
 that the Being of God comprises that which in- 
 finitely transcends the loftiest attributes of which 
 we are able to frame an idea, I hold that we ap- 
 proach nearer to the absolute truth by describing 
 God as * person ' than by refraining from such 
 description. He surely has whatever * person ' has, 
 even though he do not lack what * person ' lacks. 
 
 * In any case,* as I wrote several years ago in my 
 
 * Man's Knowledge of God/ * if a religious man 
 denies the personality of God, it is that he holds 
 God to be above Person, not below^ more than 
 Person, not less' And I rejoice to add to this, 
 words with which I was not then acquainted, written 
 by Prof Joseph Le Conte in his truly admirable 
 book on * Evolution and its Relation to Religious 
 Thought.' * In our view of the nature of God,' says 
 this clear thinker and lucid writer, * the choice is not 
 between personality and something lower than per- 
 sonality, viz., an unconscious force operating Nature 
 by necessity^ as the materiaHsts and pantheists would 
 have us believe; but between personality as we 
 
J 54 ^^ Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 know it ourselves and something inconceivably 
 
 higher than personality Self-conscious 
 
 personality is the highest thing we know or can 
 conceive. We offer him the very best and truest 
 we have when we call him a Person ; even though 
 we know that this, our best, falls far short of the 
 infinite reality.* 
 
 Before bringing this chapter to an end, it will 
 perhaps be useful to refer in a few sentences to the 
 method of reasoning which I have followed in this 
 book. I have throughout ignored entirely certain 
 grekt and momentous philosophical controversies 
 which touch the very foundations of thought. I 
 have, indeed, told you that some thinkers aver that 
 the very idea of * cause * is a self-deception of our 
 own minds, that it is a form of thought to which we 
 are condemned, but which corresponds to no objec- 
 tive reality. But I have not told you that the same 
 is the case with the idea of space, with the idea of 
 time, with the idea of matter. The most illustrious 
 of all modern philosophers, Emmanuel Kant, taught 
 that ' space * and * time * are ' forms of thought ' and 
 forms of thought only. He meant that they are a 
 kind of mould in our own minds into which we are 
 obliged to pour our ideas of the universe and the 
 objects and events therein, but that our being obliged 
 to think in that shape is no guarantee that space and 
 time are real. Again, there are others who teach 
 that matter has no real substantiality in itself, but is 
 perhaps merely a name we give to bundles of forces 
 
* Forms of Thought* 1 5 S 
 
 which are not material at all, but purely spiritual ; 
 while others again teach that matter also is purely 
 and solely a ^ form of thought' — a mould through 
 which we are obliged to pass our ideas of the 
 existences around us. And yet I have throughout 
 calmly talked of space, time, and matter as if they 
 were as indubitably sure as the Ego which a man is 
 himself, and God — the only two existences of which 
 Cardinal Newman, even as a boy, felt sure. 
 
 Is it, then, that I think the contention that space, 
 time, matter, are only forms of thought unworthy 
 of notice ? Far indeed from that. The suggestion 
 is to me of profound philosophical interest. And 
 again, with regard to matter, even without going so 
 far as to reduce it to a mere form of human thought, 
 I am pretty sure that our current conception of it 
 (if, indeed, we have any current conception of it !) 
 is delusive, and I am very much taken by the sug- 
 gestion that what we call * atoms * are in reality 
 vortices of pure force ; though I feel that that too 
 would be a dangerous hypothesis to insist on as 
 abstract truth, inasmuch as a * vortex ' implies both 
 time and space, and it is difficult to conceive of force 
 save as acting on something^ and that something is 
 pretty hard to distinguish from * matter.* To parody 
 the old Latin proverb, you may thrust out matter 
 with a pitchfork, but it always turns up again. But, 
 whether it be true or false that space, time, and 
 matter are only forms of thought, or that the idea of 
 matter is to be dissolved in the idea of force, at any 
 
156 On Mystics and Mysticism 
 
 rate space, time, and matter are forms of thought- 
 necessary forms of human thought ; and, therefore, 
 you and I, who are human, can do no other by any 
 mental legerdemain than think them. If they are 
 forms of thought built into the structure of our 
 minds we must think in those forms, and it is vain to 
 try to escape. 
 
 Does that, then, invalidate our reasoning? Far 
 from it. Some thinkers strive to think of the universe 
 and reason of it outside these forms. The result is 
 inevitable philosophic confusion and darkness. Here 
 and there they seem to get outside of the conditions 
 of space and time and matter in their reasonings 
 about the universe, but at the next turn they inevit- 
 ably drop back into them ; and there is and can be 
 no consistency in their language or their thought. 
 He who thinks by cleverness to transcend his own 
 intellectual nature necessarily meets with the like 
 fate to the man who half-way up the ladder tries to 
 pull the ladder after him that he may mount to a 
 loftier height. 
 
 Whether you prefer to say that our faculties are 
 the direct gift of God or that they are the product 
 of evolution by survival of the fittest, we shall get 
 nearer to truth, you may be sure, by faithfully using 
 them than by any struggle to get outside them. 
 Space, time, matter may be ideas corresponding to 
 fact, or they may have in them elements of illusion. 
 But either way they are guides for our thinking. In 
 some higher state of being we may be able to escape 
 
Relative Truth 157 
 
 from them and think a philosophy that dispenses with 
 them. But the philosophy which we think now and 
 here can only in the end prove translatable, trans- 
 posable into that purer language of thought if we 
 have patiently thought it out along the lines of our 
 existing mental constitution. 
 
 In all things these minds we have now can at 
 best think relative truth, not absolute. Only re- 
 member that relative truth is truth. Truth for us 
 consists in truly apprehending, not existences in 
 themselves, but the relations existing between exis- 
 tences. I judge, when I find in my mind certain 
 unescapable forms of thought common and necessary 
 to me and to all men, that it is within the boundaries 
 of those forms that I can most truly apprehend these 
 relations which for me are the sum of truth. There- 
 fore I put in a plea for the canon of Common Sense 
 in philosophy, the canon which bids us think along 
 the lines of the intellectual constitution common to 
 our race and constituting its sense in the realm of 
 thought 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WHAT THEN OF THE BIBLE ? 
 
 IN this little book I have tried firmly to base 
 the fundamental elements of religious belief 
 on the deliverances of our own nature. I have con- 
 tended that we have within ourselves, if we properly 
 interpret and wisely trust our own faculties, incon- 
 trovertible testimony that we and the world in which 
 we live are the offspring of God, that he is our 
 Father, that we are his children, that he cares for 
 us and loves us, that we may enter into actual com- 
 munion with him in prayer, drawing from that com- 
 munion peace, gladness, and moral strength, and that 
 he will bring about in the end the triumph of good 
 over evil, of righteousness over sin. 
 
 Whether I have been in any measure success- 
 ful in that contention it is for others, not for me,^ 
 to judge. But I desire once more to point out that^ 
 in this course of reasoning, I have followed a route 
 quite other than that which is commonly pursued by 
 the defenders of Christian faith. Indeed very many 
 of those defenders of the faith would, I am afraid^ 
 
Mr. Gladstone and Scripture ^ 59" 
 
 straightway condemn my little book as one of vain 
 speculation, and myself as a vain speculator sub- 
 stituting the questionable imaginations of human 
 reason for the certainties delivered once for all 
 to men in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. 
 This would without doubt be the attitude, for in- 
 stance, of so learned, liberal, and persuasive a dis- 
 putant as Mr. Gladstone, who recently followed 
 up his splendid edition of the writings of that 
 famous theologian. Bishop Butler, with a volume of 
 * Studies ' subsidiary to that author's works. For 
 Mr. Gladstone takes the volume known as the Holy 
 Bible, together with the solemn ecumenical pro- 
 nouncements of the Christian Church in the Apostles' 
 and the Nicene Creeds and elsewhere, as the very 
 starting-point for any religious inquiry. These and 
 these alone to him represent certainty, solid ground 
 where one may plant one's feet firmly without fear 
 of error ; while the use of reason outside that 
 certified territory or the adducing of considerations 
 that are not based on a text or a creed, he regards 
 as at best a dangerous business, and one the results 
 of which must be rigidly tested by comparison with 
 Bible or with Prayer Book. 
 
 The position taken up by Mf. Gladstone and by 
 a host of less illustrious controversialists is that in 
 the Scriptures (to pass by the later declarations of 
 the Church) God has once for all revealed to us 
 such measure of religious truth as it is meet for us 
 to be acquainted with, and that any excursion into 
 
iQp What then of the Bible ? 
 
 outside speculation is legi;imate only if it holds 
 itself in readiness at all points to be checked, cor- 
 rected, and condemned by reference to this supreme 
 authority. 
 
 According to such thinkers, no doctrine resting 
 on other foundations can ever claim the same cer- 
 tainty or take the same rank as belongs to those 
 which are found upon the Scripture page. These 
 have a divine seal which is impressed on the utter- 
 ance of no secular philosopher, the writings of no 
 unauthorised theologian. 
 
 Thus, for example, Mr. Gladstone lays it down 
 as an absolutely unquestionable fact * that our Lord 
 preached to certain disembodied spirits, and that 
 these were the spirits of the men who had been 
 disobedient in the days of Noah,' and founds a far 
 reaching argument on that event, the ground of his 
 •certainty being that the statement occurs in the so- 
 called First Epistle of Peter. But he rebukes very 
 severely those — with Tennyson among the number 
 ^who from general considerations of the character 
 of God, argue that he will at last win the souls of all 
 his children to himself, because there is no text 
 in the New Testament which, in so many words, 
 gives us that assurance. 
 
 Thus then the attitude of this distinguished man 
 and a host of lesser writers is this : — Whatever is 
 stated in Scripture is to be accepted absolutely, be- 
 cause the Scriptures are a Divine Revelation ; 
 whatever is not stated in Scripture is a mere human 
 
A Far-reaching Divergence igi 
 
 •speculation and, if incompatible with any declaration 
 of Scripture, is to b(e ruthlessly rejected, no matter 
 what reasons may be adduced in its support* Hence 
 the one sole ground of real religious knowledge is, 
 we are taught, the Bible,— together, say some, with 
 the authoritative pronouncements of the organised 
 Church. 
 
 Now such a view is in absolute contradiction to 
 the view which I have advocated, the view, that is, 
 that our religious belief is to rest on our own innate 
 faculties. On the one hand, we have the view that 
 religious belief is to rest on and make its final 
 appeal to reason, conscience, and the immediate 
 flash of God upon the soul. On the other hand, 
 we have the view that the only secure basis for 
 religious belief is in a Divine Revelation comprised 
 in that particular book or collection of books which 
 we call the Bible. 
 
 There could not be a more far-reaching diver- 
 gence in first principles. What then are we to 
 say to this tremendous claim put forward for the 
 Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, — this claim that 
 they shall take superior rank to reason and con- 
 science and be the paramount authority for our 
 beliefs about God and Man and eternal life. 
 
 There seems to me to be one thing to be said, 
 which is absolutely fatal to this extraordinary claim. 
 That one thing is this : The claim itself can only be 
 established, if at all, by the use of those very facul- 
 ties which this Divine Revelation is to supersede. 
 
l62 i^/^at then of the Bible ? 
 
 If you cannot trust our reasoning powers to begin 
 with, then neither can you trust them to estabUsh 
 this prodigious claim for the Christian Scriptures. 
 Even if it were true that these Scriptures were an 
 infalHble revelation of the religious truth, they could 
 only be proved to be so by the marshalling together 
 of an immense and protracted argument entering 
 into countless details and resting on an enormous 
 mass of minute and varied learning. All except the 
 picked scholars of the world, all the ordinary mass 
 of mankind, must simpl}^ accept the alleged authority 
 of Scripture on the word of others, whose learning 
 and whose reasoning they have no possible means 
 of putting to the test. But that is an act of intellec- 
 tual suicide ; — and seeing that God has given each 
 one of us reason and conscience of his own, to hand 
 these over, bound and gagged, at the command of 
 those who can give us no guarantee of their au- 
 thority, would seem to be as gross and flagrant aa 
 act of infidelity as it is possible for the mind of man- 
 to conceive. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment, by way of illus- 
 tration, how many propositions of an intrinsically 
 disputable nature Mr. Gladstone has to take for 
 granted before he can build up that theological 
 argument of his on the basis of the propositions that 
 *our Lord preached to certain disembodied spirits^ 
 and that these were the spirits of the men who had 
 been disobedient in the days of Noah.' The text on 
 which this is based runs thus : *he went and preached 
 
An Inverted Method 163^ 
 
 unto the spirits in prison, which sometime were 
 disobedient, when once the long suffering of God 
 waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a 
 preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were 
 saved by water.' 
 
 Mr. Gladstone has to assume (and cheerfully does- 
 so) that (i) this Epistle is by the Apostle Peter, who 
 (2) wrote under an inspiration which guarantees his^ 
 accuracy in all matters of fact ; that (3) the passage 
 cited has always formed an integral part of this- 
 Epistle, and (4) is therefore rightfully included in- 
 Canonical Scripture. Further, he must assume that 
 (5) the Church is right in interpreting * prison ' as 
 * hell ' in which the spirits of the unsaved survive in 
 a disembodied state, that (6) the story of the flood 
 as told in Genesis is substantially correct, and that 
 (7) of the whole population of the world eight souls- 
 only were saved from death by drowning. 
 
 All these propositions, then, must be accepted 
 before we can go one step with Mr. Gladstone in his 
 argument. But on most of these propositions the 
 learned and scientific world is divided, with a steadily 
 growing weight of opinion on the adverse side. Yet 
 every text upon which Mr. Gladstone cari build 
 involves, if it is to be treated as of absolute authority,, 
 a similar array of assumptions the legitim.acy of which, 
 only the learned can decide. In how lamentable a 
 dilemma, then, does the unlearned man find himself 
 if he submit to Mr. Gladstone's leading 1 Faith, 
 hope, trust in God, the blessed life of religion, must- 
 
:.l64 What then of the Bible ? 
 
 ^wait till the learned have decided all these things, and 
 decided th«m too in a sense contrary to the existing 
 trend of opinion, and convinced the unlearned of the 
 authority of their decision. 
 
 The great facts of religion are the Power, the 
 Wisdom, and the Goodness of God, the reality of 
 <:ommunion between the human spirit and the Divine, 
 the conquering power of Good over Evil. It is given 
 to us to know these truths from our own reason and 
 ^our own experience. To reniove them from this 
 ^natural basis on which God has set them and stake 
 them on the theory that a particular set of books 
 written from seventeen to twenty-five hundred years 
 ago, and selected some fifteen hundred years ago by 
 .a particular group of ecclesiastics to the exclusion of 
 all the rest of human literature, contain and consti- 
 tute the sole authoritative revelation of God to man, 
 would be as insane as to attempt to root up the 
 Great Pyramid from the platform of rock on which 
 nt has rested for seventy centuries in order to balance 
 it on its apex on the crest of one of the slim and 
 slender palm-trees that rear their graceful forms 
 between the desert and the Nile. The doctrine that 
 the Bible and the Bible only comprises the revelation 
 of God to Man was invented to make religious faith 
 secure ; as a matter of fact, it cuts off religious faith 
 ifrom its true and broad foundation to rest it on a 
 slender Eiff"el tower of propositions of questionable 
 soundness in themselves, and but loosely bolted 
 together, which only the learned can test, and which 
 most of the learned emphatically reject. 
 
The Bible and Aristotle . ^^5: 
 
 We have then to accept the position that reason^ 
 and conscience are not to be tested by the statements 
 of the Bible, but the statements of the Bible are to^ 
 be tested by reason and conscience. 
 
 Is then the Bible, that ark of so many sacred 
 associations, the Bible which has gathered round it 
 the affections and the reverence of such multitudes . 
 of the best and noblest of our race, to be incon- 
 tinently cast aside, as a literature whose pretensions 
 have been exposed, a scripture having no value for 
 enlightened religious men ? 
 
 That is far indeed from being my opinion. 
 
 There was a time in the history of human thought 
 when the writings of Aristotle were taken almost as 
 a Bible of the intellect. It was enough to show that 
 such and such a philosophical theory had been put. 
 forward by Aristotle. If that were so, then it was 
 thought that the theory in question was sufficiently 
 established. There was no more to be said about it. 
 But with the light of the New Learning some four- 
 centuries ago, men began to feel that, great as 
 Aristotle was, he was not infallible, that he had only 
 used with exceptional power and ingenuity that 
 reasoning faculty with which God had endowed the 
 sons of men generally, and that, if one were to 
 accept an Aristotelian doctrine, it must not be merely 
 because Aristotle had laid it down, but because it 
 stood the test of thoughtful reasoning and inquiry. 
 Did men therefore fling Aristotle aside ? On the 
 contrary, he was thenceforth studied with a more- 
 
:i66 What then of the Bible ? 
 
 mature intelligence, and by the intrinsic merits of 
 his writings, their balanced wisdom, their admirable 
 method, their marvellous outlook on human nature 
 and the world, they have held their own from that 
 day to this as classics in the realm of thought ; and 
 they are woven inextricably into all the best and 
 wisest reasoning, enter into the structure of the 
 daily thought of multitudes who never heard the 
 name of Aristotle, and have helped to discipline the 
 mind of modern Europe. 
 
 And in like manner thai truly wonderful litera- 
 ture which we call the Bible, though we no longer 
 approach it as the one infallible treasure-house of 
 divine truth, yet has entered into the very structure 
 of our faith and trust, has fed and disciplined our 
 spiritual life, has helped to make vivid in our hearts 
 precious trusts and hopes which have never been 
 expressed in loftier strain or with truer touch on the 
 deepest truths which God writes in our souls. The 
 old Greek story of Pygmalion always seems to me 
 most happily to illustrate the difference between the 
 manner in which the old way of regarding the Bible 
 .affects men and that in which under this new way it 
 touches our hearts. You remember that Pygmalion 
 wrought in marble the figure of a nymph. Stately 
 and beautiful was her form, but she had no life in 
 her. Then at his prayer the statue descended from 
 the pedestal and became flesh with all the glowing 
 warmth and loveliness of a living woman, and a 
 ■woman's heart beat within her bosom. In like 
 
The Rank of the Bible 167 
 
 tnanner the Bible has indeed come down from the 
 pedestal on which it stood, but not to be dishonoured, 
 but to be quickened with the life of our humanity, 
 and to be the companion, the comforter, the inspirer 
 oi our daily life. 
 
 Open such a volume as Mr. Moncure Conway's 
 'Sacred Anthology or the more recent collection of 
 passages from the Scriptures of all nations made by 
 Mr. Coupland. Turn over its pages. You shall 
 find a great wealth of beautiful selections from the 
 sacred books of the Hindu, the Parsee, the China- 
 man, the Arab, and many others. But it is the 
 Hebrew and the Christian excerpts that arrest your 
 attention and go straight to your heart. For this 
 Hebrew people among whom this literature arose, 
 ihad the very genius of religion; and there is nothing 
 in the rest of literature quite to equal or to parallel, 
 on their own lines, the lofty paeans of the later 
 Isaiah, the ethical glow of Micah, the seraphic glad- 
 mess of some of the Psalms, the noble pleadings of 
 -Paul, and, above all else, the Beatitudes and Parables 
 of Jesus, the Master. 
 
 But the condition of arriving at a true apprecia- 
 tion of the Bible is that we let it take its place 
 -among the literature of the world, that we do not 
 fence it off or separate it or guard it in any special 
 way. When I have been visiting the sick and have 
 offered to read to them from the Bible, I have some- 
 times asked what passage I should select, and 
 o-eceived the answer that it is all equally good. That 
 
1 68 What then of the Bible ? 
 
 is idolatry, not appreciation. The chronicles of the 
 Kings of Israel are not * equally good' with the 
 twenty- third Psalm or the magnificent fortieth of 
 Isaiah, nor the story of Ananias and Sapphira with : 
 the great speech ascribed to Paul at Athens or his- 
 own sublime account of charity or love. We must 
 set down this great literature of Israel among the 
 other noblest products of human genius, the writings 
 of Homer, of Plato, of Dante, of Shakspeare, of 
 Milton, of Tennyson. Some things in each of these 
 are worth ten times more than some things in the 
 Bible. But the Bible as a whole is worth more 
 than all these put together. Remove all artificial 
 restraints and barriers, and the power of the writers 
 of the Old and New Testaments over the hearts and 
 consciences of men will assert itself victoriously, 
 whatever be their theories of inspiration and of 
 theological authority. 
 
 And if to the due appreciation of the Bible this^ 
 freedom of estimate be essential, much more is that 
 so with the central and transcendent person in whom 
 it culminates. Those who have most endangered 
 the ascendency of Jesus of Nazareth over the 
 affections and the loyalty of men are those who have 
 most insisted on theological definitions of his nature. 
 There is at the present moment a considerable 
 movement in certain Evangelical circles, while 
 acknowledging that the Bible as a whole can no- 
 longer serve as the ultimate basis of religious belief^ 
 to assign this function without qualification to the 
 
The Power ofJesu!S 169 
 
 words of Jesus Christ. No writer has pleaded for 
 this ppsition more persuasively than Dr. John 
 Watson — better known as * Ian Maclaren ' — in his 
 essay on * The Mind of the Master.' Such writers 
 would seem to forget, indeed, that the actual words 
 of Jesus are not preserved to us in any contem- 
 porary monuments, and that the Gospels themselves 
 must necessarily be subjected to a like criticism 
 with other Bible documents ; so that it would be 
 hard to draw up a catena of the utterances of Jesus 
 with that absolute and indubitable certainty which 
 would be necessary were they to be made the one 
 sole basis of our religious faith. But, waiving that 
 difficulty, let us rather insist that the authority of 
 the beautiful sayings oH Jesus rests on the fact of 
 the response which they awaken in our own moral 
 and spiritual nature ; and that the authority of our 
 moral and spiritual nature does not rest on the 
 sayings of Jesus. To say this is exacted from us 
 by loyalty to God ; and it assuredly involves no 
 disloyalty to that wondrous Son of Man. He is 
 pre-eminently a man among men. It is as a 
 man among men that his moral and spiritual 
 power becomes transcendent. Set him down, this 
 peasant son of Mary, among the millions of his 
 fellow-men. Let him find his own place in the com- 
 pany of the world's heroes, prophets, martyrs, saints. 
 Have no fear for him. Let us meet him eye to eye 
 and clasp his hand in ours. Let us talk with him 
 on the way, kneel with him on the mountain-side, 
 
170 ^-^^^ Powe7' of Jesus 
 
 move with him among the crowd, hear the cordial 
 of his speech to weary men and stricken women, 
 watch him at the last through the shadows of Geth- 
 semane and the gloom of Calvary, and you need have 
 no fear but what he will assert his power over our 
 thought, our imagination, our emotion, our life. 
 
 The religious life is the Hfe in which a man 
 knows God as the ever-present Father, hears and 
 obeys his living voice in conscience, and holds inti- 
 mate communion with him in prayer. But though 
 that life be open to us all, yet our realisation of the 
 God-presence is apt to faint and fail, and in the 
 tumult of human affairs we are apt to lose living 
 touch with the Heavenly Father. Then is it a help 
 beyond expression to lift up our eyes and behold 
 the face of him, the great Teacher, or to listen to 
 the words that fall from his gentle lips. For then 
 we see and know the Hfe of the human child with 
 God in its fullest realisation. It is not because 
 Jesus has told me so that I believe that the Eternal 
 God is my Heavenly Father, but because God him- 
 self has told me so in the hours of rapt communion 
 But when I lose my way in life, and through the 
 dimness of my spiritual vision know not how it 
 behoves a child of God to acquit himself in this 
 turmoil of strife and struggle, then, if I look up intc 
 the face of Jesus, I see the answer to my bewilder- 
 ments, and my heart goes out to the Brother v/ho, of 
 all whom I have ever known, helps me the most and 
 leads me the truest way. 
 
 THE END. ^,^^'-~.~- .^ 
 
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