. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Received^ NOV 21 1891 Accessions No.^ 9 T&.^'&?. ' Shelf No... 18 WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 1. FIRST PRINCIPLES OF MORAL SCIENCE ; A First Course of Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge. Crown 8vo. Ss. 6J. 2. MODERN UTILITARIANISM; or The Systems of Paley, Bentham, and Mill, examined and compared. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. 3. MODERN PHYSICAL FATALISM, and the Doctrine of Evo- lution, including an Examination of Mr Herbert Spencer's First Principles. Crown 8vo. 6s. 4. THE DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF in connection with the Creation and the Fall, Redemption and Judgment. Second Edition, enlarged. Crown 8vo. 5^. 5. AN ESSAY ON THE RIGHT ESTIMATION OF MSS. EVIDENCE in the Text of the New Testament. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 6. COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK OF ISAIAH. Second Edition, revised. 8vo. us. 6d. MACMILLAN AND CO. 7. THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 8. THE EXODUS OF ISRAEL. 9. HOR^E APOSTOLIC^E. RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY. 10. THE WAYS OF GOD. 11. THE TREASURES OF WISDOM. SEELEY, JACKSON & HALLIDAY. 12. SCRIPTURE DOCTRINE OF CREATION. SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. 13. THE SACRAMENTS, SCIENCE AND PRAYER. CHRISTIAN BOOK SOCIETY. SUPERNATURAL REVELATION, OR FIRST PRINCIPLES OF MORAL THEOLOGY. BY THE REV. T. R. BIRKS, \l PROFESSOR OF MORAL THEOLOGY, CAMBRIDGE. OF THE UNIVBRSIT7 Honlron : MACMILLAN AND CO. 1879 [The Right of Translation is resemtd.'] PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, ]\T. A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. PREFACE. FOR forty-two years I have had the great privilege of unfolding and maintaining the great truths of the word of God both by speech and writing, as a clergyman of the English Church. For the future I expect to be restricted chiefly to the second means alone. The obli- gation to maintain and unfold Christian truth through the press is thus increased ; especially since I hold the office of Professor of Moral Theology and Moral Philo- sophy in the University of Bacon, Newton, and Milton. Attacks have been made and are still in progress on Christianity and on all the foundations of our Christian empire, by three allied systems of error Ultramontan- ism, Agnosticism, or Secularism, and the Liberationism, which would banish the name of Christ from the whole world of politics. At such a time, I would earnestly counsel the younger clergy, and the moral instructors of the next generation, lay or clerical, to lay to heart the charge of St Paul, just before his martyrdom, to Timothy, his son and companion in the faith. That vi PREFACE. caution applies with equal force to the varieties of unbelieving thought in our days, as to the Gnosticism of the first century. " O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain bab- blings, and oppositions of science falsely so called, which some professing have erred concerning the faith." What " babblings " can be more " profane and vain " than those of Positivism with its " new Supreme Being;" or of Agnosticism, which places an algebraical x, THE UNKNOWABLE, on the throne of the universe ? What can be more falsely named science than the audacious conjectures which have been of late repeatedly dignified with the name of scientific theories ? Such as the con- stant generation of the unlike from the unlike, through infinite ages of geological time, before there existed a single man who could witness this prodigious inver- sion of the countless experiences of all real science for the last six thousand years ? One great duty of Cambridge at this crisis, is in the study of nature to abide stedfastly by the induc- tive principles of the philosophy of Bacon and Newton, so well carried out by many Cambridge students of these later times. But this implies the further duty to refrain from that unbridled license of imagination in scientific subjects, which leads many to dignify plausible or even unplausible conjectures with the name of science. Conjectures in science have a great use, but this depends on our never confounding them with proved facts. Their magnitude to the senses of casual observers, like that of the tails of comets, is sometimes in inverse propor- PREFACE. Vil tion to their solid mass. Yet even when their solid substance is small and almost evanescent, it is often possible that by their means, when carefully examined, weighty scientific conclusions may be attained. A second great duty is to apply this same principle of careful and inductive search to the study of the sacred Scriptures. The word of God will else be overlaid with ambiguities, uncertainties, and partial misconcep- tions, human traditions, distortions and corruptions of its genuine meaning, which not only obscure its heavenly brightness, but are liable to become a great encourage- ment to the assaults of open unbelief. There is scarcely any revealed limit to the appre- hension of the beauty, truth and harmony of the Holy Scriptures which may be attained by those who study them with prayer, humility and perseverance, not as if they were isolated and accidental compositions, but as one comprehensive whole. The neglect of such study by too many Christians, is one great cause of the many controversies by which the church has been disfigured, and its peace and unity disturbed. There is a promise in the word of God, not only of the increase of natural knowledge in the last days, but of the increase of spiritual knowledge also. In the great day of the Lord, "at eventide there will be light." " Then shall we know if we follow on to know the Lord.'* "The path of the just is as a shining light, that shinethmore and more unto the perfect day." May the University of Cambridge, by this double work, the inductive study of all nature, and the indue- Vlll PREFACE. tive and persevering study of all Scripture, fulfil in fuller and still fuller measure its true office and calling, as a seminary both of sound learning and religious education. The present work, while endeavouring to clear away some of the mists of unbelieving philosophy, is intended, if life be spared, to be followed by others, in which I would attempt, in reliance on the promised help of the Holy Spirit, to unfold some of the manifold har- monies of truth in the sacred Scriptures, the "lively oracles " of the Living God. CAMBRIDGE, February, 1879. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. THE SCEPTICAL STARTING-POINT. Series of ten attacks on revealed religion in the present century, p. 2. Strife among the assailants, 5. "Supernatural Religion." Bearing of the controversy on "Moral Theology," 6. Sceptical starting-point, the Duty of Inquiry, 7. Is this duty unlimited ? 10. Real and fictitious inquiry, n. Search preferred to truth, 12. Results in the Hamiltonian philosophy, 13. Two modes of inquiry, which may be called centrifugal 'and centripetal, 16. Negative creed of the author, 18. By which he judges the apostles, 19. The Being of a Personal God is said to be a mere assumption, on the authority of Christian Divines, 20. Thesis of the Book, 22. First necessary condition of the duty of inquiry, 24. The author's starting-point, religious nescience, 25 ... i 26 CHAPTER II. THE AUTHOR'S STATEMENT OF THE OBJECT OF HIS WORK. "Is Christianity a Divine revelation or not?" 27. Moral presumption in its favour from the number of believers through fifteen centuries, 27. The Greek and Latin Churches, and a portion of the Anglican Church, have renounced the principle of free inquiry. How far does this weaken their testimony ? 28. Protestant Christians affirm the duty of free inquiry, 30. The claim of Free-thinkers to be the only honest seekers after truth, 31. The work now examined not an unbiassed inquiry. 32 27-33 X CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. PROTESTANT FAITH IN CONTRAST WITH FREE-THINKING. Protestantism not a negation, 34. What honest inquiry implies, and what it does not imply, 34. Neutrality impossible, 35. The promises of Scripture to seekers after Truth, 35. The perfect truthful- ness of Holy Scripture, 36 34 37 CHAPTER IV. REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. The author constructs a puzzle by combining three different statements of various Divines, (i) That Miracles and Prophecy are necessary creden- tials of revelation. (2) That there may be false as well as true miracles. (3) That the only truths proper to a revelation are "beyond reason," 38. The two first are truths affirmed by Scripture, the third an ambiguous statement, 39. How far any knowledge rests on pure reason, 39. How far on observation and testimony, 40. These have narrow limits both of time and place, 41. The problem which reason has to solve is to construct a theory that will account for the facts of human experience as a whole, 41. Eight solutions which have been attempted, 42. The latest conclusions of H. Spencer and Mill, 43. Does Christianity claim abso- lutely to solve this problem ? Its claim is quite different. It is to supply fresh facts, with full evidence, centering in a unique Person, 44. In what sense the words and acts of such a Person are supernatural, 44. The facts of the Gospels illustrated by the first voyage of Columbus and the discovery of the New World, 45 38 48 CHAPTER V. REASON AND THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION. Misrepresentations of the doctrines of Christianity, 49. Frustration of the supposed Divine design in Creation, contrasted with the u glorious invariability of Nature," 50. Scriptural account of the Divine foreknow- ledge of evil, 51. Dr Mozley quoted to convey a meaning the reverse of his own, 51. His statement really agrees with that of our Lord Himself concerning the true Christ, and a false Antichrist, 52. Consilience of superhuman power, knowledge, and goodness, 52 . . . 49 54 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER VI. THE PERFECTION OF NATURE, AND FOUR MOCK DEITIES OF SCEPTICISM. Conflict of sceptical speculations, 55. M. Comte and Dr Tyndall, Mr Spencer and Mr Mill, 56. "Glorious perfection" of Nature con- trasted with Mill's description of the cruelty of Nature, 57. What is Nature in the creed of Atheism? What does Nature really include? 57. Is Mill's indictment valid? 59. The Deities of Scepticism; Collective Humanity, Physical Force in two forms, Evolution, 60 . . 55 62 CHAPTER VII. MR SPENCER'S THREE THEORIES OF THE UNIVERSE. Spencer's definition of Philosophy, 63. He admits no medium between Omniscience and utter Nescience, 62. His three alternative theories of the Universe : (i) Endless Involution tending to Omnipresent Death, 64. (2) Endless Oscillation tending to perfect quiescence, 64. (3) A self- perfecting Theory of Nature, 65. A great truth of Scripture mis- construed, 68. Physical laws are never broken, moral laws can be and are, 69 6370 CHAPTER VIII. NATURE WITHOUT MAN OR GOD. Four kinds of action conceivable : (i) The action of God ; (2) The action of men and other rational beings; (3) The actings of the animal and vegetable creation ; (4) The actings of matter devoid of life, 71. Matter has real activity, subject to three laws: (i) Universal appetency ; (2) Special appetency ; (3) Ethereal repulsion, 72. Limited powers of matter, defined at Creation, 73. Matter necessarily non- moral, 74. Mill exacts from Nature the unnatural, 74. Admitted excellence of the laws of Nature, 74. The great problem beyond man's solution, 75. The utter contrast between Mill's view and that of the author of "Supernatural Religion," 75 71 76 Xll CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX. THE UNNATURAL IN CONTRAST TO THE SUPERNATURAL. Six main classes of Natures. In each there may be three kinds of actings : (i) Natural or normal ; (2) Unnatural ; (3) Supernatural, 77. The apotheosis of Death most unnatural, 78. Agnosticism un- natural, 79. It necessarily tends to unnatural degradation, 80. First form of the Supernatural, the prophetic, 80. The higher form involved in an Incarnation, 81 . . 77 83 CHAPTER X. THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. Dr Mozley's Bampton Lectures on Miracles, 84. Professor Tyndall's review in the "Fortnightly," 85. The truth midway between them, 85. Tyndall's strictures justly apply not to Divines, but to Positivists, 86. Dr Mozley's reasoning is weakened by his admission of one main principle of the Positive Philosophy, 86. Bishop Berkeley's paradox, 87. Hume's extension of the reasoning to mental phenomena, 87. Mill adopts this phenomenalism in his " Logic," 87, fully with regard to matter, partially with regard to mind, 88. Spencer adopts the same theory, 88. Con- stancy of Nature: different meanings of the term, 89. Necessary character of the laws of physical science. Tyndall ascribes this doctrine to Newton, who expressly denounces it, 89. The result of excluding all spontaneous action of man, or of God, 90. The future cannot be exactly like the past, nor wholly different from it, 92. We rely on permanence, and anticipate change, 93. All unforeseen changes come practically under the head of the miraculous, 23. Constancy of Nature, according to the author of " Supernatural Religion," 95. Varia- tion as conspicuous in Nature as its constancy, 95. Nine laws in operation, 95 98. The geological reasonings of Sir C. Lyell based on a confusion of two different things, 98. The course of Nature has three elements ; the permanent, the periodic, the ever varying, 100 84 100 CHAPTER XI. THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT INVOLVED IN THE WHOLE COURSE OF NATURE. Meaning of three terms ; the mysterious, the unusual, the mira- culous, 101. The sense of mystery weakened within the limit of the usual, 101. The unusual, its use, 103. Two classes of the unusual ; the calculable and the incalculable, 104. Their 'effect on the human CONTENTS. Xlll mind widely different, 105. Relation of the miraculous to the unusual and unforeseen, 105. Three different modes of the miraculous : (i) Modification of instincts of lower creatures ; (2) Special powers imparted to individual persons ; (3) Revelation of God Himself in a Person, 105 .......... 101 107 CHAPTER XII. THE THREEFOLD INCONSTANCY OF TERRESTRIAL NATURE. Three limitations of the "Constancy of Nature." (i) The law of human life and the rate of increase of population, 108. (2) The con- stitution of the earth's crust, in. The "causes now in operation" cannot be the same as the forces in operation 10,000 or 100,000 years ago, in. Some of the elements which must have varied, in. The known elements in the problem of the constitution of the earth's crust 10,000 years ago, only a small fraction of the unknown, 112. (3) The relation of our earth and system to the Sun, 113. Various scientific theories, all inconsistent with the unlimited constancy of ter- restrial nature, 113 108115 CHAPTER XIII. THE WITNESS OF ALL NATURE TO THE BEING AND PERFECTIONS OF GOD. Concessions of Divines quoted by the author of " Supernatural Religion," 1 1 6. These concessions added together, reduce the evidence for the ex- istence of God to zero, 119. The true order of the evidence, 120. (i) That of the world of matter, 121. The law of gravitation, 123. (2) The world of living creatures, 124. Spencer's definition of life examined, 125. A living thing implies a unit, linked with an organized system, 127. Power of spontaneity, 128. Inferences in regard to the great First Cause, 129. (3) The moral universe: its evidence as to the nature of God, 131, How is it that the witness of Nature is not discerned by many? 133 116 134 CHAPTER XIV. THE CENTRIFUGAL AND CENTRIPETAL TENDENCIES OF MODERN SCIENCE. Evolution defined, 135. Demonstrable result, 136. To avoid this re- sult, the atheist re-introduces theistic elements, 137. The laws of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest," 137. The tendency of science to unity, 138. Attraction and appetency, 138 . . .. . 135 142 XIV CONTENTS. CHAPTER XV. THREE HEADLESS PHILOSOPHIES. (i) The Positivism of Comte, 143. (2) The Agnosticism of Spencer, 143. (3) The Nihilism of Hamilton, 144. Positivism involves two physi- cal mistakes, 144. Spencer's mistaken facts, 145. Hamilton's system barren as to discovery, 145. All three have darkened the study of physical science, 146 143147 CHAPTER XVI. THE FOUR MAXIMS OF MODERN NATURE-WORSHIP. The Creed of Anti-Supernaturalism, 148. God "unknowable," 148. The reign of Death " irreversible," 149. Angels or spirits, non-existent, 150. Nature unchangeable, 151 148 152 CHAPTER XVII. THE ATTEMPT TO REVIVE HUME'S ARGUMENT. Dr Farrar's statement; the author's retort, an inversion of facts, 153. Proof from "Paley's Evidences, and Appendix," 155 157. Mill's com- ment on Hume's argument, 157, brings clearly to light a sophism involved in it, 159. Mill's doctrine of "kinds" clearly applies to the Gospel miracles, 160. The man, CHRIST JESUS, a kind apart, 160 . 153 161 CHAPTER XVIII. THE LAW OF GOD, AND THE CREATED UNIVERSE. (i) The law of the world of matter, 162. (2) The law of the world of life, 163. (3) The law of the moral world, 163. Benthamite utilitarian- ism, 163. The Divine law of altruism, 164. (4) The Supreme law of duty, 165. Its two aspects, 166. Its only foundation, the knowledge of God, 166 162 169 CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER XIX. FUNDAMENTAL FACTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE. (i) The Fall of Man, 170. (2) The existence of good and evil angels, 171. (3) Temptation and the Tempter, 173. (4) The conflict of good and evil, 174. (5) The Supremacy of Death, 176 . . . 170176 CHAPTER XX. THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. Christianity not the doctrine of an abortive design, 177. The statements of Scripture, 178. (i) That God is the Only-Good, 179. (2) The Only Wise, 1 80. (3) The Most Just, 181. (4) The Omnipotent, 182. Mis- conceptions of Omnipotence, 182. Statements of Mill, Butler, and Mozley compared, 183. Real doctrine of Scripture that Omnipotence is self- limited, 184. Perfection of the Divine scheme, 185. Bampton Lectures of 1877, 1 86. True Christian Optimism, 187 . . . . 177188 CHAPTER XXI. THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLD'S REDEEMER. Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, 189. His Wisdom as the Christ, in the fulfilment of prophecy, ' 191. His Wisdom as the King. St Matthew's Gospel, 193195. His Wisdom as the Lord of nature. St Mark's Gospel, 196. Christ, the Son of Man, St Luke's Gospel, 197. The Adversary, 198. The Redeemer is stronger than he, 199 189 200 CHAPTER XXII. THE INCREASE OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE LAST DAYS, A SCRIPTURE PROPHECY. The hidden source of the wide stream of physical science, 201. Lord Bacon's motto, 202. His view of his own work, 203. Bacon's " Student's prayer," 204. His "Writer's prayer," 205. Bacon's definition of the relation between Christian faith and genuine Science, 205 . 201 206 XVI CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXIII. THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN CHRISTIAN FAITH AND SCIENCE "FALSELY so CALLED" IN THE LAST DAYS. " The Gospel of the Resurrection," 207. Its Appendix on Positivism, 209. Positivism the creed of the last Antichrist, 209. Newton's Scho- lium, 210. Likeness of Agnosticism to early Gnosticism, 211 . 207 213 CHAPTER XXIV. THE REVELATION IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS ONE HARMONIOUS WHOLE. Rationalism; its source and effects, 214. Rationalism and Superstition, 215. The darkest stage of Rationalism, a revelation impossible, 216. If not impossible, it might be superfluous, 218. If possible and desirable, yet it may never have been given, 219. The two forms of German Rationalism; naturalist, 220, mythical, 221. They contradict each other, 222. Steps of the evidence to an honest inquirer, 223. Three varieties of doctrinal Rationalism, 224. Parker's "absolute religion," 225. Undogmatic Ra- tionalism, 227. Depreciation of the Old Testament, 229. Coleridge's " Confessions," 231. The Gospels affirm the contrast between the Old and New Testaments, 232. The Ceremonial details and Genealogies of the Old Testament, 231. The severity of the Old Testament, 234. Real harmony of both Testaments, 236. The truth on which Rationalism builds, 237. Man's reason is appealed to in Scripture, 238. Historical study of the New Testament is the practical antidote of unbelief, 239 214239 ERRATA. Page 17, line 4, for centripetal read centrifugal ,, 94, ,, 8, more ,, some SUPERNATURAL REVELATION, OR FIRST PRINCIPLES OF MORAL THEOLOGY. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. THE SCEPTICAL STARTING-POINT. THE anonymous work named " Supernatural Religion" has attained sudden notoriety within the last few years, and flashed like a lurid meteor across the theological firmament. It is a formal challenge to all believers in the old and everlasting Gospel to give a reason of the faith that is in them. The writer complains that Dr Lightfoot and Dr Westcott have not touched his main thesis and central argument, but have turned aside to a secondary issue as to the Ignatian Epistles. I intend, in this work, to take up the main issue alone, though if life be spared I shall hope to resume, with the added light of thirty years' further study, the subject treated in " Horae Evangelicae," and to place in a still clearer light the concurrence of external and internal evidence for the truth, authenticity, and Divine authority of the four Gospels. B. f- i 2 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. For thirty years I have been mainly engaged, in more than twelve works, in labouring to vindicate the truth and authority of the Scriptures and the Gospel of Christ, against several of the persevering attacks to which they have been exposed, both from open unbe- lievers and halting or timorous half-believers, whose groundless surrenders of the truth of God are some- times more dangerous than the assaults of its open opposers. The works against which I have especially contended are (i) Strauss's " Life of Jesus," with its mythical theory of the Gospels. (2) The assault on the authenticity of the Books of Moses by Bishop Colenso and the German critics whom he has followed. (3) The " Seven Essays and Reviews," with their varied attacks on the fundamentals of Christianity. (4) The " First Principles," of Mr Herbert Spencer, and the Bampton Lectures on " The Limits of Religious Thought," with their common theory which makes all genuine revelation strictly impossible. (5) In my " Com- mentary on Isaiah," I have replied to the attack of Dr Davidson and the German sceptical critics on the authenticity of that Book. The present century, following close on the short- lived infidel outbreak of the French Revolution, has been marked through its whole course by a series of earnest attacks on revealed religion, and the very foundations of morality and religious faith, by a series of writers of reputation and ability. Besides an immense mass of loose and popular writing in the cause of scepticism, there have been many leading schools of unbelieving thought, each with a multitude of attached and credulous followers, but distinct from, and even opposed to each other, agreeing in little else than a rejection of the Bible, and the Gospel of Christ, and faith in the God of the Bible, whom some of them style " the wrathful THE SCEPTICAL STARTING-POINT. 3 Jehovah of the Old Testament." An exhaustive list would be impossible, for the varied forms of unbelief, like the heads of a Hydra, are intertwined with each other, and agree in little else than a common antipathy to the truth of God's Word. The following are some of the chief divisions of the embattled array, (i) The destructive criticism of Germany, aimed against the authenticity and truth of the Old Testament Scriptures, beginning with Strauss's " Life of Jesus," and the work of Renan, followed in our country by the writings of Bishop Colenso, and a multitude of similar works. (2) The assaults on the historical truth and authenticity of the Gospels, forming the mythical School of modern German criticism. (3) The Positive Philosophy of M. Comte, with its double rejection of Metaphysics and Theology, as superstitions of the infancy and youth of mankind, and its fictitious law of human pro- gress culminating in the rejection of the living God, as a dream of superstition, to be replaced by a new religion, and a " new Supreme Being," the worship of Collective Humanity ; a kind of earnest of the last manifestation of that " Man of Sin " who will " seat himself in the temple of God," averring that he is God. (4) A fourth variety of unbelief is the agnostic philo- sophy of Mr Spencer, summed up in this one statement; that Pantheism, Atheism and Theism meaning by the last faith in a personal God are three equally futile attempts to solve the great problem of the universe, with the added axiom that the unknown cause of the universe is, and must ever remain, completely inscrutable. (5) This Cimmerian creed of midnight darkness receives a further supplement. Its author propounds to us a new Trinity of Matter, Force, and Motion, each alike indestructible. This supplement of the agnostic theory is an apotheosis of solar force, embodying itself in the 4 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. monstrous paradox that force and motion are inde- structible, but that the sun, which is their great source, is being steadily exhausted by his own activity, and his diffusion of light and heat, so that all motion is con- stantly tending to equilibration and rest, and the uni- verse, under its new Divinity, tending steadily to the reign of Omnipresent Death. (6) A sixth form of unbelief is the elastic materialism of Dr Tyndall in his Belfast Address, who thinks that modern science binds fast all nature in the bonds of fate, and that matter contains in itself the promise and potency of every kind of life. (7) A seventh is what may be called the negative materialism of Mr Mill, and his sensational philosophy ; he denies that matter exists at all, but allows us to speak of minds as if they did exist, though strict philosophy would lead to the nihilism which denies both mind and matter, and replaces both by " permanent possibilities of sensation." (8) The doctrine of Evolution, and Natural Selection, as held by Mr Darwin and his disciples, which fills up by con- jecture the intervals between a hundred thousand exist- ing or extinct species of plants and animals by a thou- sand times the number, or ten thousand thousand intermediate varieties or types of being, which must have existed if the theory be true, and have passed utterly away without leaving a trace of their existence either among the fossils or the actual flora and fauna. This gigantic mass of conjecture, when supplemented by the doctrine of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, or by millions of millions of acts of choice where there is no one to choose, and the survival of millions of millions of organisms, on the ground of their superior fitness to accomplish some wholly unconceived end or purpose of the great scheme of the universe ; this pyramid of pure conjecture, of telescopic magnitude, THE SCEPTICAL STARTING-POINT. 5 resting on a microscopic apex of ascertained and certain fact, is gravely propounded even by some Divines, as the latest revelation of God to man, to which all our other beliefs, whether drawn from the Bible or genuine science, must be made subordinate. (9) The direct and simple Atheism or Monism of Professor Haeckel is another variety. (10) A tenth, and perhaps least remote from Christian faith, is the new Manicheism of Mr Mill in his posthumous Essays; a kind of half-way house in a progress from the outer darkness of utter atheism to the dubious light on the verge and outskirts of morality and religion. In various works I have examined at length several of these main varieties of sceptical thought, and shewn the great amount of error and self-contradiction which they contain. I shall now confine myself to two of the latest ; the anti-super- naturalism of "Supernatural Religion;" and Mr Mill's posthumous Essays : the parting contribution to this great inquiry of one of the ablest and, as I think, the most candid and truth-seeking of the leaders of modern scepticism, whose early training makes regret and pity almost forbid indignation even at those con- clusions which are most abhorrent to the instincts of Christian faith. The danger to the faith from these many forms of modern sceptical thought is somewhat lessened by their internal strife and antagonism. The hosts of unbelief resemble the camp of Agramant in Ariosto, when discord had been sent by the archangel to hinder their threatened attack on the Christian host by stirring up strife among the Moorish paladins, and succeeded so well that a mortal feud ensued between each separate pair of the Paynim leaders, and these were followed by secondary quarrels which pair should have the first turn in the bloody tournament by which their strife was 6 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. to be decided. There is here the same kind of conflict, but one still more strange, for each school of infidel philosophy includes some essential contradiction, by which it is at hopeless variance with itself, and a lateral feud by which it is in hopeless rivalry with each of its neighbours. How refreshing it is to escape from this dark and dreary chaos of human error and contradiction, to the sacred confines of those true sayings of God, where chaos first retires, and the ceaseless strife of human error and falsehood is replaced by the dawning of light from the eternal source and fountain of light. The work I now propose to examine has a direct bearing on the aim and purpose of the Knightbridge Professorship. During the six years I have held that office, I have published three volumes directly on Moral Science, but none hitherto on Moral Theology. The work in question contains a thousand pages devoted to the task of proving supernatural revelation impossible or incredible, and Christianity, in claiming to convey a message from God to sinful men, a gigantic fraud wholly unworthy the faith of rational beings. No more audacious Goliath has ever stood forth to challenge and defy the armies of the living God. One hundred pages are occupied with an attempt to prove that the claim of Christianity is to be a supernatural revelation founded on miraculous evidence, and itself miraculous, but that all miracles are impossible and incredible ; a hundred pages more are employed in defaming the Apostles and first Christians, as a set of credulous simpletons steeped to the neck in Jewish prejudices, credulity and childish superstition. This accusation against the witnesses chosen before by God for the transmission of His message, is supported by laying to their charge all the follies and fables in the rabbinical writings, and in the forgeries of the THE SCEPTICAL STARTING-POINT. 7 Apocryphal Books, wholly overlooking the charge which St Paul has given against " giving heed to Jewish fables." Tit. i. 13, 14. The other eight hundred pages are spent in an attempt to prove that the four Gospels themselves have no evidence of their existence before the end of the second century, and are therefore forgeries by unknown parties, which gained acceptance afterwards in the church without any solid reason, as the writings of two of the Apostles, and two companions of the Apostles. The manner of dealing with the mass of evidence, in the three first centuries, of their public acceptance by all the churches of Christ as inspired Scripture, is the very same by which some geologists suppose that our present continents are being carted away, grain by grain, by sub-aerial denudation, till they may come to be buried at length in the depth of the ocean ; but on this part of the subject I do not now enter. The first hundred pages alone, on which the whole argument rests, will afford ample materials for inquiry, analysis and refutation. The writer complains that his critics have dealt only with a side issue, but had he really been seeking for truth, as he professes, he would have found in Dr Westcott's " Gospel of the Resurrection" much truth that bears directly on the main issue, and a virtual reply to the greater part of his argument. THE DUTY OF INQUIRY. In a work where the unbelief is so deep and all- pervading it is needful to pause at the outset, and dig down to find if possible some first principle from which our reasoning may proceed, that we may not fight in utter darkness. Such a principle I find in the caustic 8 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. censure of the Introduction, on the inconsistent half- faith of many Christians, who strive " with thoughtless dexterity to eliminate from Christianity every super- natural element which does not quite accord with current opinion; ...they ignore the fact that, in so doing, ecclesiastical Christianity has been altogether abandoned." "This tendency is fostered with profoundly illogical zeal by many distinguished men within the church itself, who endeavour to arrest for a moment the pursuing wolves of doubt and unbelief by practically throwing to them, scrap by scrap, the very doctrines which constitute the claims of Christianity to be regarded as a Divine revelation... They abandon some of the most central doctrines of Christianity, and try to spiritualize or dilute the rest into a form which does not shock their reason ; yet they cling to the delusion that they still retain the consolation and hope of truths which, if not divinely revealed, are mere speculation regarding matters beyond reason. They have in fact as little warrant to abandon the one part as they have to retain the other ; they build their house on the sand, and the waves which have already carried away so much may any day engulph the rest." S. R. Introduction, pp. xcii. xciii. These remarks are clear, forcible and true, like a streak of morning light in contrast to the thick moral dark- ness which marks the rest of the book, from its begin- ning to its close. If Christianity is a message from God to men, guaranteed by works of supernatural power and prophecies of superhuman wisdom, it is plainly foolish to concede that we are at liberty to choose out scraps and fragments of the message at our own pleasure, and can retain our faith in those which fall in with our wishes or tastes, while we reject all the rest. This arbi- trary separation into two parts of a message which has been attested as a whole, exposes those who practise it to the charge of irrational superstition in what they retain, on evidence which the very separation would prove worthless, or else of profaneness and unbelief as to the parts which they reject. The one positive principle here implied is the duty THE DUTY OF INQUIRY. 9 of adequate inquiry into the truth of any statement of serious importance before believing it. "This," the writer says, "is universally admitted in theory, but in practice no duty is more universally neglected, especially in regard to religion." He continues, " Neglect of examination can never advance truth, as the severest scrutiny can never retard it. Belief without dis- crimination can only foster ignorance and superstition. It is in this conviction that the following enquiry into the reality of divine revela- tion was originally undertaken, and that others should enter upon it. If truth acquired do not compensate for every illusion dispelled, the path is thorny indeed, but must be faithfully trodden." Pp. xci. xcviii. Here then, amidst abysses of sceptical thought, we have something like a first principle man is a moral being ; he has duties and obligations he is bound to fulfil : one of these is to search after truth ; another im- plied duty is to reject all detected falsehood. There is a person whom the writer calls "the great teacher," and who calls himself " The Truth." Now the aim of the work, pursued through a thousarid pages, is to prove that this " great teacher " ought rather to be styled by the opposite name, which He applies to the great source of all evil, " the father of lies ; " inasmuch as by false claims to a nature He did not possess, and to a commission He had not received, He has been really the parent and author of the most extensive and prevalent fraud on the cre- dulity of mankind, which has ever been practised since the beginning of time, when we take into account the number of those who have been thus deceived, and their intellectual eminence ; so that the history of mankind for 1800 years will have been turned into a gigantic mass of credulity, deception and falsehood. Thus the duty of inquiry after truth in the abstract is made the starting-point for the most extensive and thorough- going rejection of concrete truth, and the most complete reversal, in reality, of the duty which is professedly the 10 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. mainspring of the whole inquiry, which it is possible to conceive. Let us examine this first principle a little more closely. Is this duty of inquiry one without any limit ? The duty of seeking for unknown truth must imply the prior duty of holding fast some truth already known ; but the duty of searching for unknown truth and holding fast known truth both involve the same condition, a power to discriminate between truth and falsehood ; both in the case of known and unknown truth, the duty to hold fast and to acquire implies two things, a faculty of discernment by which we may distinguish truth from falsehood, and a capacity of growth, by which we may enlarge the sphere of our knowledge, and contract the range of our ignorance. Thus, the first principle, when developed, implies three great germinant principles (i)That man is a moral creature, subject to a law of duty, and bound to use aright the faculties of discernment and investigation that God has given. (2) That he is a knowing or intelligent creature, who is capable of discriminating truth from falsehood. (3) That he is a creature capable of indefinite progress, of adding to his treasury of known truth, and of detecting falsehood and separating it as dross from the truth with which it had been mingled. What are the conditions then under which the duty of inquiring after truth in religion can alone take effect ? The truths to be inquired into are the existence, the character and attributes of the first Great Cause, the vast scheme of universal Providence, and our own place in connection with it, whether of hope of good to come, or fear of future evil, or of duties and obligations towards God, our fellow-men and ourselves. There can be no duty in the case of one who is blind to attempt to trace out all the mazy pathways and jungles of that infinite forest the universe. The duty THE DUTY OF INQUIRY. II of inquiry can belong only to a moral being who has not put out the eyes of his own soul, or had them blinded by sensuality and vice, who has some firm standing for his feet upon clear and definite truth, and something like a pathway open before him in which progress is possible. These conditions are all expressly taught us by " the great Teacher" who is the Truth. " The light of the body is the eye : if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." " While ye have light, walk in the light, that ye may be children of light." " He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth." REAL AND FICTITIOUS INQUIRY AFTER TRUTH. The duty of inquiry or search after religious truth, or truth of any kind, is one of three connected duties which cannot be sundered from each other. (i) The first is the duty to retain and hold fast truth already known. (2) The second is to discriminate that truth from adherent falsehood, to reject all that is false and untrue, as well as to retain the true. (3) The third is to seek for the knowledge of truths before unknown. The first is the protection against indefinite instability and change, in which the master passion is the love of novelty and not the love of truth ; the second is the protection against indefinite credulity, building up a heterogeneous compound of truth and falsehood ; the third is the antidote to moral and intellectual stagnation. Wherever there is life there must be growth ; the only condition under which truth which we have, can be retained as a real possession, is that of seeking to add to it by the accession of further truth. " The well- spring of wisdom is as a flowing brook," and he who 12 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. holds partial truth without seeking to add to it, changes the flowing brook into a stagnant marsh, liable to be covered with a thick slime of superstitious folly, and to breed by its stagnation a moral pestilence. Whately says : " It makes all the difference in the world whether we place truth in the first place or in the second place ;" but our author, in quoting this caution, has committed the very fault against which it warns us. Sir William Hamilton has said (after Lessing), that if any one offered him truth with one hand, and in- quiry after truth with the other, he would prefer the second. By this one remark he forfeits his claim to the title of a philosopher, and proclaims himself a mere philo-athlete : a lover of intellectual exercise rather than a lover of truth and wisdom. It is not surprising that such a starting-point should lead to no better issue than St Paul has described in his last Epistle, of those who are " ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth," and whom Cowper has pithily described as " Dropping buckets into empty wells, and growing old in drawing nothing up." What are the three prominent features of this famous writer, I cannot call him a philoso- pher after his own confession, though he has had a large school of admiring disciples ? The first is a malignant attack on the moral character of the leading heroes of the great Reformation, which brought upon him the keen and indignant rebuke of Archdeacon Hare. The second is a persistent and bitter depreciation of Cambridge University, the parent and nurse of the greatest intel- lectual names of modern times. The third is a like depreciation of mathematical study, the only field of thought where pure, certain, and demonstrable truth is widely accessible to men, without the help of Divine revelation, and their previous extrication, at least in part, from the deflecting power of moral evil within. HAMILTONIAN PHILOSOPHY. 13 What have been the practical fruits of this preference of the intellectual hunting-field to truth itself, of this contempt for the chosen instruments of the Spirit of God in the great work of extricating the church from its Babylonian captivity to superstition, and of the University of Bacon, Newton, Barrow, Hooker, Joseph Mede, Thomas More and Cud worth ? this contempt of that one field of thought where even in a world in which the higher regions of truth have all been obscured and clouded by the prevalence of moral evil, clear and cer- tain truth has been and is still attained through succes- sive generations of mankind, from Euclid onward, till it has become a stately and imposing structure, the basis of all concrete physical science and also an earnest and pledge that truth and assured certainty are attainable when sought in due order, and under the needful moral conditions, in the higher fields of Ethical Science, Theo- logy, and that Knowledge of the Most Holy, which is the truest and highest wisdom ? What have been the practical fruits of this pretentious " philosophy of the unconditioned 1 ?" The only results I know of are first, a principle which makes all real revelation of Himself by the true God to finite creatures strictly impossible, and fixes a great gulf across which no ray of real light can pass between the most Holy God and the whole world of His creatures; secondly, an exposition of one word in the inscription on the Athenian altar, which contradicts the whole passage where it occurs and the discourse of St Paul himself, based upon it. A third result is a tissue of contradictions with regard to the Absolute, the Infinite and the Unknowable, made up of the wildest chimeras that ever passed through the brain of man. That the Unknowable may be defined as a genus containing two species, the Absolute and the Infinite ; that all the Know* 1 See " Scripture Doctrine of Creation." H SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. able lies as a mean between them ; that reason teaches that one of these two extremes must exist, and leaves it uncertain which, so that one of the two must be a synonym for the only true God, and the other denote an impossible mental fiction ; but that which of the two is a name of a worthless and impossible fiction, and which a synonym of the God of glory, the great and eternal Jehovah, must remain for ever unknown. A fourth and last result, is the logical invention of the quantification of the predicate. The author's contempt for mathematics has here avenged itself by leading him to corrupt his own favourite science, with a strange addition, which would put every process of reasoning into masquerade, en- cumbering every statement of known truth with an added alternative of something wholly unknown. The real process of reasoning is thus confused and obscured. Thus, if I say 'All philosophers are wise' this known truth has for its shadowy attendant this alternative, either ' Philosophers are the only wise beings ' or, ' There are some other wise beings besides them.' Or again, the truth ' All men are mortal ' has the attendant shadow, either, ' Men are the only mortal existences/ or, ' There are some other mortal things besides.' The " quantifi- cation of the predicate " requires us, in all our reasoning, to cut the living child in two, and suspend the two halves on the horns of this dilemma. A more retrogade step from clear reasoning into confusion and mental darkness, was never taken than in Sir W. Hamilton's pseudo-mathematical improvement on the Logic of Aristotle. While such have been the negative results of Sir W. Hamilton's preference of intellectual gym- nastics to truth itself, what fruits have accrued from the study he loads with contempt in the University which he has followed with persistent calumny ? It has extended the boundaries of the Solar system nearly HAMILTONIAN PHILOSOPHY. 15 to twice its former range, by the conjoint labours of two of its Professors, one in the way of direct obser- vation, and the other of mathematical reasoning and analysis : the triumph is shared indeed with Berlin and Paris, two other great centres of mathematical study and experimental science. It has solved, by another mathe- matician, the mysterious problem of the rings of Saturn, near the former verge of the system. It has provided at the head of our national Observatory, one who by his double skill as an analyst and a practical observer, has kept our country in the van of modern progress in physical science, and to whom has been committed, by European consent, the treatment of the latest transit observations, to obtain from them the most probable esti- mates of the actual magnitudes and distances of the Sun and all the constituents of the Solar system. It has popularized by him the results of the mathematical reasoning of another eminent French analyst, and by one of its own Professors has added to them fresh dis- coveries, thus perfecting our knowledge of that agent which forms the first step in the Divine record of creation, and which is now becoming an instrument of unexpected discoveries with regard to the motions, the changes, and chemical constituents of the most distant stars and of the mighty Sun himself. Such opposite results naturally follow from the two opposite principles: the love and pursuit of truth itself, and a professed preference for mere intellectual gladiatorship. In that arena the swordsman of to-day often falls by his own weapon, and oftener still is the Retiarius of the morrow, and falls at last ignominiously entangled in the meshes of his own or his rival's metaphysical abstractions. In the present case, the misfortune is that the Scotch gladiator has found disciples among English divines, who have striven to fling the net of these abstractions 1 6 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. over the whole range of Christian theology. Sir W. Hamilton, though himself personally a Christian believer, has thus, through his English disciple, provided a logical pedestal for the most comprehensive and audacious system of antichristian speculation which our age has witnessed. Inquiry after truth has two different forms, which bear a close analogy to the Newtonian doctrine of cen- tral forces, and the exploded Cartesian theory of vortices or celestial whirlpools. The first of these explains the planetary motions by central forces tending towards the Sun, and the other by centrifugal forces in imaginary revolving whirlpools of unformed matter, tending to carry planets outward to the farthest verge of the system ; so, when with a small stock of known truth we begin an inquiry after all that is unknown, there are two opposite ways in which that inquiry may be carried on. The first is to begin with what we know, the certainties already attained; to dwell upon them in thought till their light becomes clearer and more distinct ; to deve- lope their internal relations from the centre outward till at the further edge they may begin to win a little on the surrounding darkness, and the " sacred influence of light shoots into the bosom of dim night a glimmering dawn." For light is like life and has a generative power, " that which maketh manifest is light." Partial truth carefully and reverently studied tends, however slowly, to enlarge its own domain. The kingdom of light and knowledge is like that of a civilized empire, which, surrounded by the kingdom of darkness, like a host of barbarous and ever-conflicting tribes, by its unity and compacted strength tends, even without any sinful ambition, to en- large its own borders and annex some outlying districts to its domain. There is an opposite course which may NEWTONIAN AND CARTESIAN SEARCH FOR TRUTH. 17 be pursued under the deceptive title of inquiry into reli- gious truth. It is that which neglects the modicum of moral and religious truth already known, because it is so small, and plunges itself at once with a centripetal instinct into the vast and shoreless regions of the un- known. Such is the course pursued by the author of " Supernatural Religion." His knowledge at the outset, the definite truth firmly and clearly held, is so small as to approach to utter nescience. The few grains of truth which he admits are nowhere plainly stated, but have to be culled out with care from indirect and accidental admissions. On the other hand, he launches at once into the deepest abysses and mysteries of God's Provi- dence, and of the statements of Scripture, and the super- structures of theological systems, and the whole range of Talmudical literature, the apocryphal forgeries of the first and second centuries, arid the patristic literature of the three first centuries. A slighter skiff and more feebly manned never undertook to cross the Atlantic Ocean : it is no wonder that the result should be an entire shipwreck of what little faith he ever possessed. But the effect is more mournful still, a deliberate and prolonged effort to extinguish God's own lighthouse, the one Pharos lighted by Him who is " the dayspring from on high... to give light to those who are sitting in darkness," to the myriads of voyagers across the dark and troublous waves of this mortal life, and to guide their steps to a haven of peace and light. The guilt of one single murder, which shortens the span of one little life, seems trivial compared with the guilt of this prolonged effort, under the pretext of fulfilling the duty of religious inquiry, to reverse and annul the greatest gift of Divine goodness to a dark and sin- disordered world ; and, after the true Light has dawned, to shut up the present and all future generations of man- is. 2 I 8 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. kind in Stygian darkness for evermore. Before any statement of what little truth he does hold or believe, he plunges at once into an attempted summary of the contents of the Bible and of the Christian faith, made up by selecting those elements which he thinks the most unreasonable and incredible, and completing them with gross misrepresentations of his own, and proceeds to build up a kind of panoply of darkness from the in- accurate statements or the conflicting views with regard to the truths of revelation, and the evidence upon which it rests, of a dozen divines of four or five diverging types of thought or schools of theology. It is not sur- prising, in such a mode of inquiry, that instead of light winning upon the darkness, moral and intellectual con- fusion win upon the scanty modicum of known or recog- nized truth with which the voyage of discovery began. To call such a process a fulfilment of the duty of adequate inquiry into the truth of supernatural religion is to confound opposites. It is rather like what I have called elsewhere " a dip into chaos in order to guess out the nature of the coming world." There are three elements which seem to make up the modicum of faith or unbelief with which the anonymous author sets out on his inquiry. He combines the fea- tures of the ancient Jewish Sadducee and the modern Gentile agnostic or negative atheist. To these two first principles of his negative creed he adds a third, the predicted doctrine of the scoffers of the last times, the unalterable and necessary constancy of the laws or forces of Nature, as incapable of any interruption from any source whatever. He does not believe in angel, demon or spirit of any kind, or in a resurrection, or a life to come, or in a Personal God, or in anything but REAL AND FICTITIOUS SEARCH FOR TRUTH. 19 the unalterable continuance of things seen and temporal, the world as limited by the experience of men between the cradle and the grave for the last 2000 years ; the Non-existence of God and the Omnipotence of Death. With such a starting-point he can hardly be left in deeper darkness at the end of his crusade against Chris- tianity than he was in at its commencement. His creed as a Sadducee may be seen in the 150 pages, chh. in. vi., which he devotes to the task of defaming the Apostles and the first Christians as wholly incompetent witnesses to the leading facts of the Gospel history. His proof of this incompetence of the Apostles as wit- nesses is, in one word, that they were not Sadducees, and did believe in the resurrection of the dead, and in the existence of angels and demons. He ascribes to them, on this negative ground, all the superstitions which he can find in the Book of Tobit, the Book of Enoch, and the Jewish Talmud and Targums, and completes the list with various theories with regard to the stars, demons, and magic, to be found in the writings of the Fathers. The Apostles and first disciples are credited at once, because they were not Sadducees, with the whole farrago of Jewish fables and superstitions in these apocryphal books or Targums. On this sole ground, that the Apostles were not Sadducees, and did believe that the resurrection of the dead was possible by the power of God, he sets them down as witnesses wholly incompetent to report whether they had seen, and con- versed and eaten and drunk with the Lord forty days after His crucifixion. Because they had more faith in the express words of the Lord of glory, and in their own experience when they returned from their first mission, " Lord, even the spirits are subject unto us through Thy name," than in the creed of the ancient or modern Sad- ducee, we are told there is every reason for 2 2 2O SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. " Concluding with certainty that their ignorance of natural laws, their proneness to superstition, their love of the marvellous, and their extreme religious excitement " would make them utterly untrustworthy, "and peculiarly liable to incorrectness in their observation of phe- nomena, and to error in the inferences drawn from them." P. 92. He quotes from Dean Milman and the elder Lightfoot to prove that " the nation of the Jews were given to magical arts beyond measure, and to an easiness of believing all manner of delusions, and that it is dispu- table whether the nation were more mad with super- stition in matters of religion, or with superstition in curious arts." The whole mass of opinions in the Talmud, in later Christian forgeries like the Book of Enoch, and the writings of the early Fathers, the fable of the Phoenix, and the remarks of Lactantius on the Antipodes, are shoaled together to convict the Apostles and first disciples of gross superstition and extreme credulity, though there is no proof or sign whatever of their sharing in those superstitious follies, and they have even given us an express warning against them. The author, while he charges the whole Christian Church and Christ Himself, his own future Judge, with gross supersti- tion, because of their belief in angels, spirits and demons, seems not aware that in that very act he convicts -him- self of the worst extreme of presumption. His little knowledge, being limited to the experience of a few hundred years on the surface of one little planet, he dogmatizes with regard to the whole range of the universe as if he were omniscient, and treats what lies beyond the petty range of his own experience as if it were "non-existent, and as if to believe anything on the very highest authority, beyond that limit, were gross and culpable credulity. The writer's spiritual parentage is not that of the old Jewish Sadducee alone, but of a modern Gentile REAL AND FICTITIOUS SEARCH FOR TRUTH. 21 Agnostic. He borrows from modern Christian divines these maxims that the Being of God as a personal conscious Agent is a pure assumption without any evi- dence, and that nature bears no witness to the exist- ence of an Omnipotent Supreme Being, and thus that the whole evidence of revelation is a vicious circle left suspended in space, revelation resting on miracles, and miracles resting on revelation. For this view he quotes Dr Mozley's Bampton Lectures. He says that Butler, Paley and all other Divines have equally been obliged to commence with the same assumption. He praises the candour of Dr Mozley, for honestly admitting the difficulty of the case. He adds that the "Conception of the Deity proposed by theologians must be pro- nounced irrational and derogatory to the wisdom and perfections which we recognize in the invariable course of nature." He adopts the doctrine from Dean Mansel and Sir W. Hamilton that "The class of phenomena which requires that kind of cause we denominate a Deity is exclusively given in the phenomena of mind, and that the phenomena of matter taken by themselves do not warrant any inference as to the existence of a God." He adds from Spinoza that " Miracles, as contrary to the order of nature, should rather lead us to doubt the existence of God." His final conclusion is that " Both the supernatural religion and its supernatural evidence labour in common under the fatal disability of being antecedently incredible." He borrows further from Dr Irons the rule that "We are not bound to believe in any miracle related in the Old Testament which has not been confirmed by the direct reference to it of Jesus. The doctor abandons altogether the popular theory that the Bible and the doctrines supposed to be derived from it can be established by literary evidence; thus cutting away all solid ground, he attempts to stand upon nothing in the shape of the vague feeling 22 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. that the records are supernatural." "His admissions," the writer continues, "as to the insufficiency of the evidence are creditable to his honesty as a scholar, but his conclusion is simply lame and im- potent ! " " This he denies to be an admission to which he is reluc- tantly driven, and explains it as a vindication of the only possible grounds on which revelation can rest." Pp. 65, 66. The writer adds the comment, "After shewing revelation to be wholly unsupported by anything worthy of the name of evidence, he affirms the religion and the book to be supernatural because he feels they are so. No one who does not feel as he does receives much help from the theory of Dr Irons." With such lamentable surrenders of the cause of Christ, the Gospel, and the Bible, on the part of their professed champions and defenders, can it be surprising that in- fidelity should advance with rapid and gigantic strides ? This Agnostic theory, borrowed from the Hamiltonian metaphysics, then taken up by Dean Mansel, and trans- ferred from both to the pages of Herbert Spencer, to form an adequate logical basis for a massive pyramid of utter unbelief, is then made the ground of a system of thought the most antithetic to the whole range of religion, natural and revealed, which has ever appeared. And accepted in patches, and shreds, even by many who have shrunk from the doctrine of utter darkness to which it logically tends, it has spread like a thick and blighting fog over the whole range of Christian theology. The thesis of " Supernatural Religion" as a whole may be summed up in these four propositions, (i) That Christ- ianity as a supernatural revelation consists of a series of doctrines which are antecedently incredible, and contrary to reason. He gives a summary of them in four pages to prove this indictment. (2) That the miracles or super- natural facts by which it is alleged to be proved are them- selves unreal and impossible, and of such antecedent in- credibility as hardly any conceivable amount of evidence could overcome. (3) That the Apostles and the first REAL AND FICTITIOUS SEARCH FOR TRUTH. 23 Christians are among the most incompetent of witnesses, as belonging to an age and nation peculiarly credulous, ignorant of natural laws and steeped in the grossest superstition. (4) That in the New Testament we have not even the testimony of these incompetent witnesses ; that the Gospels are unauthentic memoirs, of the exist- ence of which before the close of the second century there is no evidence whatever; so that they are probably forgeries of about that date by unknown parties, who contrived to foist them off and get them accepted by the whole Church as the writings of four eye-witnesses, two of them Apostles, and the two others companions of the Apostles. The 900 pages, in which these latter propositions are unfolded, would require a lifetime, to analyse, dissect and refute the multifarious mass of error and misrepresentation of which they consist. In the " Horae Evangelicae " I have discussed the same subject. If life be spared I shall hope to discuss it more fully, and to vindicate afresh the authenticity, the consistency, the historical reality, the internal harmonies, the cumu- lative evidences of truth and wisdom, and the divine authority of the four Gospels. In the present work I can deal only with the hundred pages of the Book which unfold the two first propositions. I have already refuted by anticipation all the main elements of the writer's argument in more than a hundred pages of discussion of the same subject in the " Bible and Modern Thought," and in a supplement to " Paley's Evidences." But the forms and the combinations under which falsehood may be presented are endless, and whatever there is of novelty in the writer's reasoning is due chiefly, to the confusion of thought or baseless concessions of Christian Divines, whose words he presses into the service of his own sceptical argument. The first condition for the genuine fulfilment of the 24 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. duty of inquiry into religious truth is to hold fast all truth already known and received. But the present writer seems precluded from satisfying this condition of the duty he recognizes, by the fact that he does not seem at the outset to accept any religious or moral truth whatever. His first principles are thus described by Him whom he styles "the great Teacher," or the Apostles whom He commissioned to proclaim His mes- sage to the world. The first is the doctrine of the Sadducees, "who say that there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit;'' on which Christ gives the brief comment, " Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God." The next is the Agnostic creed, that the existence of God is a mere assumption, resting on no evidence whatever. This is briefly described by the Psalmist, " The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God ; the Lord looked down from heaven to see if there were any that did understand and seek God,"... " Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge they call not upon the Lord." The same appeal is repeated in another form, " Understand, ye brutish among the people ; ye fools, when will ye be wise ? He that planted the ear, shall He not hear ; He that formed the eye, shall He not see ? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not He know ?" Ps. xciv. The great Apostle of the Gentiles teaches the same truth in a more direct and dogmatic form. " The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against the ungodliness of men who hold down (or stifle) the truth in unrighteousness : for the invisible things of God," he says, " from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse." He goes on to denounce the gross folly as well as the guilt of their unbelief. "When they knew God they glorified Him not as God, neither were REAL AND FICTITIOUS SEARCH FOR TRUTH. 25 thankful ; but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened." He then states the solemn judgment that ensued on their folly. " Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to an undiscerning mind." The same Apostle, as God's ambassador, gives further this solemn prophecy, that the Lord Jesus will hereafter "be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire tak- ing vengeance upon them that know not God." Such is the real character, and the predicted issue of two of the main principles of unbelief with which the writer begins his inquiry. His third main principle, the unalterable constancy of the course of physical change deduced from experience, free from all intervention of a Supreme Law- giver, has also been the subject of an express prediction by another Apostle. " Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers saying, Where is the promise of His coming ? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." " This they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old but the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against a day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." He then cautions the Church long beforehand, " Beloved, beware lest ye also, being led away by the delusion of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness ; " and his further charge is a full antithesis to the Agnostic theory, " Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." The old maxim of philosophy, "Ex nihilo nihil fit" finds a fresh illustration in the present work. The starting-point being an absolute blank, a state of utter religious nescience, there seems no nucleus of truth to which accessions may be made, by accretions, as in all 26 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. inquiry after truth which is real and genuine. The long inquiry of a thousand pages begins with bare nega- tions, and ends exactly where it began. The whole is a dreary waste of darkness and confusion. The only ray of light I can detect in the work from first to last is the implied admission at the outset that man is a moral being, and lies under a moral obligation to search after truth not yet attained, implying of course the two closely related duties, to hold fast and walk in the light of truth already known, and to reject and put away all falsehood either already accepted, or that solicits his ac- ceptance in the course of that inquiry. But this first implied truth remains like an unsprung seed, without any attempt to trace out its related truths or ulterior consequences. Thus at page 41 he says, that he will pass over Dr Mozley's reference to the laws of moral being as " involving questions too intricate for treatment and alien from the argument." Had the author held fast this one truth, he would have been kept from the contemptuous disparagement of the statements he after- wards quotes from Archbishop Trench, Professor Mozley, and Dr Heurtley, as to the moral world higher than the physical, and a region of moral laws higher than physical sequence and uniformity, which lies at the basis of the whole inquiry ; but neglecting to unfold and develope the little morsel of truth he does recognize, and clinging with passive credulity to the giant falsehoods with which he starts, he wanders on through a thousand pages of almost unmitigated darkness and delusion. CHAPTER II. THE AUTHOR'S STATEMENT OF THE OBJECT OF HIS WORK. " There can be no more urgent problem for humanity to solve than the question : Is Christianity a supernatural Divine Revelation or not ? To this we may demand a clear and decisive answer. The evidence must be of no uncertain character which can warrant our abandoning the guidance of Reason, and blindly accepting doctrines which, if not supernatural truths, must be rejected by the human intellect as mon- strous delusions. We propose in this work to seek a conclusive answer to this momentous question."... "To no earnest mind can such inquiry be otherwise than a serious and often a painful task, but, dismissing preconceived ideas and preferences derived from habit and education, and seeking only the Truth, and holding it, whatever it may be, to be the only object worthy of desire, or capable of satisfying a rational mind, the quest cannot but end in peace and satisfaction... the path is thorny indeed, although it must still be faithfully trodden." Pp. xci xcviii. THE Author in commencing his work of a thousand pages, of which the object is to prove Christianity a mere illusion, opposed to reason and devoid of all evidence, has to meet at the outset a very grave objection. The faith which he so describes is held at the present day by about two hundred millions of men, including the most civilized, developed, and powerful nations. One hundred millions at least, including the foremost empire of the world, have held the same faith, in one form or other, throughout fifteen centuries of past time. The moral pre- sumption that all these have not accepted a very unrea- sonable creed without any evidence worthy of the name, is plainly extreme. The author endeavours to remove this insuperable prejudice against his conclusions by the 28 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. assumption that all these accepted it without thought, inquiry, or serious reflection, under the bias of their birth and education alone. It is certainly true of a very large proportion, that their faith has been accepted as a whole, without any separate inquiry into the reasonableness of each part, or the evidence upon which that particular part reposes. Let us consider the question more in detail. Three-fourths of the whole number belong to the Greek or the Latin Churches, or main sects separated from them, or those members of the Anglican Church who have renounced the name of Protestants. Now all of these have formally renounced the principle of free inquiry, or the exercise of private judgment on each part of the faith, and have replaced it by that of deference to Church authority. They differ only as to the particular authority to which this deference is due. Their testimony then, however large the amount of it, has little weight to confirm particular doctrines or fragments of the faith, which they have only received in gross along with the rest. But it by no means follows that their authority has no moral weight whatever. The case may be compared to that of miners in the gold field, when they lay aside certain nuggets among their stores, because they are convinced from their appearance they contain so much gold that they will more than repay the toil of a later analysis. When the sceptic dilates on what he thinks the unreasonable- ness and lack of evidence of many parts of the Christian religion, and thinks that if tried by pure reason alone, they must be held to be monstrous delusions, he does not observe that in proportion as he darkens the colours of his indictment, he increases the force of the moral presumption in favour of those main truths and elements of the faith, the importance of which, and the evidence with which they commend themselves both to the THE OBJECT OF THE WORK. 2Q reason and the conscience, have made hundreds of millions, including the most intelligent of the human race, through successive generations, willing to receive the whole mingled mass, rather than weaken their hold on those great fundamental verities. What are those doctrines the importance of which, their moral attrac- tiveness, or the strong presumption in favour of their truth, has made this immense multitude of human beings cling to Christianity as a whole, in spite of all the objections or difficulties which may seem to press against certain parts of the composite message ? They are mainly these, (i) The existence of God, the con- scious, intelligent, and benevolent Author of the Uni- verse. (2) Divine Providence. That the world is not the sport of chance, nor subject to blind fate, but governed and guided by a powerful and good Intelli- gence. (3) The beauty and excellency of the moral character of Christ, and of some of the leading precepts of the Gospel. (4) The doctrine of Immortality, or a life after death, the happiness or unhappiness of which is closely connected with the conduct of men in the present life. (5) The doctrine of Divine mercy, or a message of grace and forgiveness to man as guilty and sinful, and proffered terms of restoration to the Divine favour. (6) The doctrine of judgment to come, in which God will bring every work into judgment, whether it be good or evil. (7) The doctrine that the whole course of Providence is so ordered that in the fulness of time there will be a glorious issue worthy of the All-wise God, of whom are all things, and to whom are all things. The preciousness and excellence of these truths out- weighing doubts, difficulties and perplexities as to other elements included in the Scriptures, or in the various forms of ecclesiastical Christianity, can alone account for the tenacity with which the Christian faith has been 30 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. held and retained by hundreds of millions of intelligent men through successive generations. The more the sceptic exaggerates the accessory difficulties of the Creed, and depreciates the direct evidence in its favour, the more does he confirm, in spite of himself, the preciousness and immense importance of these central truths, which have led millions on millions, even of those who have neglected a minute analysis, to lay it up among their choicest treasures. There are from thirty to fifty millions of Christians however, who, instead of accepting the principle of im- plicit faith as a duty, and rejecting inquiry as a sin, hold the very reverse. This is the nominal creed of all Protestants, but probably of these there are not more than one in ten whose practice corresponds with their theory, and who really submit every part of the faith to a serious personal inquiry. In the others, either worldliness or religious indifference, or intellectual torpor, or the passive acceptance of some ecclesiastical creed, or current of religious thought, in the midst of which they have been trained, transfers them really to the large class whose faith is an implicit faith in Christian doctrine as a whole, in one or other of its many corporate forms, and not the result in detail, of personal investigation and inquiry. The other nine-tenths, in common with all the Christians of the Greek and Roman churches, contribute a general evidence of the preciousness and importance of those great central truths of the Bible, for the sake of which they are willing, at least in outward profession, to believe all the rest. But there are left some millions at least in every age, from Constantine until now, who hold it a duty, in questions of such supreme importance, to search and inquire for themselves, and to receive nothing into the citadel of their understanding, which THE OBJECT OF THE WORK. 31 they do not believe in their inmost hearts to be sus- tained by sufficient and reasonable evidence, whether that of natural reason or of supernatural revelation. Against these, we have to place the negative presump- tion from some hundreds of thousands of sceptics, who profess after inquiry to have discovered the emptiness of the claims of Christianity to be a supernatural message from God, and convince themselves that there is no evidence of reason, even in favour of what are called the doctrines of natural religion. The author, in his Introduction, after dismissing as worthless the moral presumption from the faith of hundreds of millions of Christians through successive generations as simply " due to preconceived ideas, and preferences derived from habit and education/' and complaining of the " general eclipse of faith," and blaming the uneasy position of so many Christians in these days, who pro- fess to retain their faith in the Gospel as a supernatural message, and " still clip and prune its doctrines down to the standard of human reason/' adds, " The mass of intelligent men in England are halting between two opinions, standing in what seems to us the most unsatisfactory position conceivable : they abandon, in deference to the current of popular opinion, some of the most central doctrines of Christianity, and try to spiritualize or dilute the rest into a form which does not shock their reason." He claims for his own work, that it is the result of " Many years of inquiry, undertaken for the regulation of personal belief, and as a contribution towards the establishment of truth in the minds of others who are seeking for it ... Seeking only the truth and holding it, whatever it may be, as the only object worthy of desire." The same is the frequent profession of " Free-thinkers," who are accustomed to claim a thousandfold weight for their own conclusions, as conducted without bias and 32 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. with an honest search for truth alone. Now what are the signs of this freedom from bias in the present case ? The author begins his task as a Sadducee, who believes neither resurrection to be possible, nor angel or spirit to exist, that a Supernatural Revelation from God is either impossible or incredible, and that the works of Nature furnish no presumption whatever for the existence of God as a personal and conscious Intelligence. To these he adds the further doctrine that the course of Nature, as known by the experience of the last thousand years is fixed, necessary and invariable ; can never have suffered a change or interruption in past time, nor suffer such an interruption in the eternity to come. With these doctrines he starts, and only adds to them at the close, the high probability that the Apostles were credulous and superstitious simpletons, wholly unworthy of credit, if we were quite sure that we had the actual words of their testimony ; and that the Gospels are most probably forgeries of four unknown writers, about the close of the second century, and therefore almost wholly worthless as historical testimony to the sayings and works of the Lord Jesus. Here then, there is not the slightest trace of that unbiassed inquiry, " dismissing preconceived ideas," the want of which the writer imputes to hundreds of millions of Christian men, as depriving their faith of all moral weight. The only spark of truth recognized, that man is a moral being, who has a duty to fulfil, remains wholly undeveloped through a thousand pages, and when once forced upon his notice by a quotation from Dr Mozley, he coolly passes over it, as involving " questions too intricate for treat- ment, and alien from the argument." The falsehoods with which he sets out, remain undisturbed and un- questioned from first to last : as if they were self-evident and unquestionable truths. OBJECT OF THE WORK. 33 The duty of searching after unknown truth can only be satisfied under two conditions ; first, to have some small amount of known and certain truth from which to start, and next, to proceed from this centre to develope and unfold what is already known, so as to reclaim some part from the outer darkness beyond. The author wholly fails to satisfy both these conditions ; his starting-point is a triad of untested falsehoods which remain in undisturbed supremacy to the end of the work. He plunges at once into the region of darkness, the wide range of talmudical and patristical superstitions, and the varied forgeries as well as genuine writings of the three first centuries, and a chaos of the critical specula- tions of the modern Sadducees of Germany. Thus, professing to " seek only the truth, and hold it, as the only object worthy of desire," he proceeds to answer the question of Pilate, " What is truth ?" very much as Pilate himself answered it, when he gave up the Lord of glory, who is Himself the Truth, to be exposed to the scorn and hate of the Jewish rabble on the cross, be- tween two malefactors. He comes practically to the conclusion that the " great Teacher" Himself, and the Apostles who were His ambassadors to the world, were either most culpable impostors, or amongst the most blind, superstitious, credulous and unreasoning of men, who never once caught a glimpse of the three doctrines which are the alpha and omega of his own inquiry. By calling this an unbiassed search for truth only, he brings himself under that solemn sentence of the prophet, " Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness." B. CHAPTER III. PROTESTANT FAITH IN CONTRAST WITH FREE-THINKING. THE name Protestant has been rejected by many in our days on the ground that it expresses a mere nega- tion. This is a great and grievous error. Protest- antism is simply submission to that Divine command, " Prove all things hold fast that which is good." It is opposed alike to two extremes, an implicit and traditional faith which rests only on Church authority, which swallows blindly whatever ecclesiastical teachers put into its mouth, neglecting the spirit of Christ's command, " Call no man your father upon the earth, neither be ye called master, for one is your master, even Christ." The other extreme is that free handling of religious and moral truth, of which the " Essays and Reviews" were a specimen, which does not " hold fast that which is good," or recognize any clear defi- nite principles of truth to be first believed, and work out from these to the region beyond, but counts it the condition of free inquiry to have the mind like a sheet of blank paper, ready to receive any inscription whatever that may be traced upon it. Honest inquiry implies a capacity in those by whom it is made to apprehend the force of evidence, and to discriminate between truth and falsehood. It does not imply a state of entire equilibrium and strict indifference. Even among philosophers and metaphysicians, since their speculations began, there has PROTESTANT FAITH IN CONTRAST WITH FREE-THINKING. 35 never been a case of pure, abstract, colourless indiffer- ence to the truth or falsehood of Christianity ; the words of Christ make no exception for philosophers or sceptics any more than for Divines. "He that is not for me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth abroad." Neutrality is here strictly impossible. He who begins an inquiry with no bias in favour of the Gospel, will certainly have a strong bias against it. The first requisite of honest inquiry is to take stock of our actual convictions, to sift them in turn, to hold fast those which are good, and to reject those, however long we may have held them, and whatever authorities we may quote in their favour, which inquiry discovers to have no sure evidence or firm foundation. The genuine Protestant is he who acts on this principle, and obeys this Divine command. The same inquiry which may relax his hold on more disputable and doubtful parts of his actual faith, will be sure to strengthen and confirm it on those parts which are true and sound. Truth shines by a light of its own, only that light is obscured and clouded as soon as it is mingled with false- hood. The Christian acts as a disciple of Him who is the Truth, in retaining every particle of truth, moral, religious, or natural, which he already holds, and in rejecting detected falsehood of every kind. In this work he is aided by a threefold promise, "If any man be will- ing to do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be true." "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." (2) "Then shall we know if we follow on to know the Lord." (3) " To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have more abundance;" and "he that seeketh shall find." To be able to discern and retain old truth, and to add to it fresh truth, is the promise of Christ to every faithful disciple, " Every scribe instructed unto the kingdom of 36 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. unto a householder who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old," and the parting command of the Apostle is, " Grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." The revealed descrip- tion of the Scriptures is this, " The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times." "Thy word is very pure," and "every one of Thy righteous judgments endureth for ever." No bound is set to the growing light and increasing knowledge of the Name and Character of God, of the excellency of His word, and the grandeur and wisdom of His counsels of Redemption and Providence, which the Christian may gain by the per- severing study of those Divine oracles, which are the most precious gift of God the Holy Ghost to the suc- cessive generations of mankind. We have no right to expect indeed that all doubts and darkness shall dis- appear until the coming Day-star shall arise. The light shines here in a dark place, but to those who study and reverently search into the Scriptures of truth, it will continue to shine more and more, until at length the "day shall dawn and the Day-star arise in their hearts." My own experience for forty years has been, that grow- ing study has more and more convinced me of the perfect truthfulness of those canonical Scriptures which are called in the Articles, " God's word written ;" in the Ordination Service, " God's most holy word ; " which many, even amongst the defenders of the faith, in the present day, are making it a part of their new creed to lower to the level reached by the words of all good and honest men, that is, a mixture of Divine truth and human falsehood, in which the first predominates. But Dr Westcott's "Introduction to the Gospels" and Bp Ellicott's " Lectures on the Life of Christ " and Bp Wordsworth's "Commentary on the New Testament" PROTESTANT FAITH IN CONTRAST WITH FREE-THINKING. 37 are some out of many faithful testimonies which still remain to the doctrine of the entire truthfulness of the Gospels and the Canonical Scriptures. My own experi- ence has been at every step, while unlearning some secondary misinterpretations, or faulty human inferences attaching themselves to, and obscuring the great truths of Revelation, that fresh harmonies of truth have been discovered lying either just below the surface, or deeper in the mines of Scripture, for the solution of doubts and difficulties which had once been perplexing. Thus year by year a more harmonious apprehension of the great truths and doctrines revealed, has been attained, and a clearer conviction of the authenticity, and manifold his- torical relations, of those lively oracles in which they are revealed. The opposite experience of the author of "Supernatural Religion" setting out in the deep shadows of a modern sceptical philosophy, to end in a darkness where even the few remaining stars seem to be blotted out, impresses me with a feeling of profound pity, not unmixed with indignation. CHAPTER IV. REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION, THE author in his first chapter constructs an apparent puzzle by combining three different statements of Christian divines, with regard to the relation between reason and the contents of a Divine Revelation, (i) He quotes from Dr Mozley, Dean Mansel, Dr Heurtley, Paley, Bp Butler, and J. H. Newman to shew that miracles and prophecy are the natural and necessary credentials of a Supernatural-Revelation. This truth, confirmed by the testimony of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and the preaching of the Apostles, is only contravened (so far as I know) by the Bampton Lecturer of 1877, who strives to refute Dr Mozley's true statement on this head. Again, he quotes Archbishop Trench, Dr Mozley, and Dr Newman, and the express words of Scripture to shew that there may be false as well as true miracles, or Satanic as well as Divine; so that miraculous evidence alone would not suffice to guarantee a message as really Divine. He quotes several authors to establish a third principle, that the proper subject of supernatural revela- tion is to impart truths beyond the range of human reason, which the human intellect could not otherwise have discovered ; that " no one would maintain a system discoverable by reason to have been supernaturally com- municated." The only truths proper to such a revelation are by the hypothesis "beyond our reason." Thus any REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 39 appeal to reason, or the moral sense, to confirm the divine origin of a message which signs and wonders are insuffi- cient to prove, he infers to be precluded and impossible ; for internal evidence " is itself an appeal to reason, but human reason cannot, in the nature of the case, prove that which by the very hypothesis lies beyond human reason." Therefore it follows "that no doctrine which lies beyond reason, and requires the attestation of miracles, can possibly afford that indication of the source and reality of miracles which is necessary to endow them with evidential value." He quotes both Newman and Mozley to shew that they recognize the difficulty and do not remove it. He says further, that " to argue, as some theologians do, that the ambiguity of their testi- mony is deliberately intended as a trial of our faith, is absurd, for reason being unable to judge of the nature either of supernatural fact or doctrine, it would be mere folly and injustice to submit to such a test, being wholly incapable of sustaining it." Pp. 3 1 7. Here, two clear and certain truths of Scripture, con- firmed by a general consent of Christian divines, are joined with a statement so ambiguous, as without fuller explication, to involve the whole subject in hopeless confusion. Let us analyze this statement, that super- natural Revelation, in its own nature, is solely of truths undiscoverable by reason and outside its range. In what sense is our knowledge of the course of nature, and of common things, due to a process of reasoning ? how far is it due to the evidence of our senses, personal experience, and human testimony ? Our knowledge of no one being or circumstance around us is due to pure reason alone ; for this would require us to know it and learn it as a corollary and consequence from our own knowledge a priori of the scheme of the universe. What are the means by which we attain our limited knowledge of the course of nature ? First, direct consciousness with regard 4O SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. to our own existence, thoughts, and actions ; next, direct observation with regard to the existence and actings, or position and changes, of a certain number of human beings, plants and animals, and material objects imme- diately around us ; thirdly, the extension of this know- ledge by the credible testimony of competent witnesses to a larger range of men, animals, plants, and places which we have never seen or visited ; fourthly, the ex- tension of this from the present living generation to two or three past generations, with the same varieties of immediate, indirect, and more remote testimony. This sixfold variety of evidence is completed, and enlarged further, by written records of various kinds, by which evidence of more remote events may be transmitted and preserved from utter oblivion. Our knowledge, then, of the world around us, and of the course of nature, is simply the summation of these various particulars, of which only a small part is obtained from inward consciousness and from personal experience, and nearly the whole from direct or indirect testimony of our fellow men, either of the present or of past generations. The chief office of reason is to sum up the information thus gained with regard to each material object, plant, animal and human being, or each particular part of the earth's surface acces- sible to the foot of man. Besides this knowledge of individual beings, or places, or successive changes, there are a few further conclusions which reason is able to deduce from comparison of these with each other. None of these of course can have a higher evidence of reason than the elements of which they are composed. This loose classification gives birth to maxims which are called "laws of nature" in a loose and popular sense, such as these: That water will extinguish flame; that water may be evaporated by fire and disappear; that it may be frozen by cold and turned to ice ; that solid REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 41 lumps of any kind of matter will fall to the ground if not supported ; that a piece of gold is heavier than an equal bulk of lead, or iron, and that an iron axe if not sustained will sink in water. Another large class of such laws depend on the two great sets of changes, the succession of light and darkness, of day and night, and the circuit of the seasons, summer, autumn, winter and spring. All these so-called laws of nature are a summation of specific facts derived from the experience, direct and indirect, of ourselves and our fellow men. This experience ex- cludes of course all future time, and all past time except about two thousand years, and even within these limits it is inferential, constructive and liable to many illusions, except for one century alone, that is, the furthest range of the living generation of mankind. It is confined also in place to the surface of our own planet, and to a depth of one or two miles below that surface, with some scanty information, derived from transient experiences alone, with regard to the whole range of the visible universe beyond. These individual men, plants, and animals, coming within the range of observation by their birth and successive generation, pass out of the range of human observation by death and dissolution, at the other limit. Thus the whole range of our experimental know- ledge is shut in between the cradle and the grave. The problem then of reason under a scheme of natural reli- gion, apart from supernatural revelation, is to construct a consistent and satisfactory theory to account for the facts of human experience as a whole. The first and simplest, that the universe has been created by a self- existent Being, of perfect wisdom and goodness, is met at once by the difficulty that the work of production is everywhere followed by death and dissolution ; that the generations of mankind appear and disappear like a passing dream, and that not only the benefits, pleasures, 42 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. and enjoyments of life, but strife, discord, conflict, violence, wrong and crime, with their fruits of suffering, bloodshed, and desolation, go on in almost undiminished current as far back as human experience extends. Hence reason is forced to make an uneasy choice amongst seven or eight different alternatives. The first is that of pure Monotheism, the dominion of a good and wise Creator, leaving unexplained the long and fearful prevalence of moral evil and physical suffering. (2) The second is a theory of despair, which gives up the problem as inscrutable, and denies that there is any evi- dence at all for a good Creator distinct from the universe, in consequence of the dark and fearful prevalence of moral and physical evil. (3) The third is a doctrine of confusion, which denies any contrast between the self-existent Creator and the totality of existent things, which makes God and the universe the same, an immense total includ- ing all conceivable contrasts and disparities of Being, the Pan of old heathen mythology, fitly symbolized by a hideous and misshapen Satyr. (4) A fourth is Fetich- ism or Polytheism, which recognizes some supernatural power concealed behind, or included in, each natural object, or class of natural objects, which sacrifices unity, but retains diversity, and indulges the deep instinct of mystery, by peopling each class of objects with its own divinities, nymphs of the woods, of the rivers, and of the mountains, the gnomes of the ocean depth, and sportive, fairy-like denizens of the upper air or ether. (5) Fifthly, the Manichean doctrine, which cuts the knot reason fails to untie, by assuming two rival or balanced powers of Good and Evil, contending long for the mastery through successive ages. This may assume various forms, from that which recognizes a strict equality and co-eternity of these two powers, through many stages of subordination of the destructive Siva or REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 43 Demon, to the good and beneficent Power. Two other hypotheses may be included : (6) The sixth, which recognizes the strict and unlimited Omnipotence of the Creator, but ascribes to Him a very imperfect and limited goodness, with some predominence only of a benevolent over a malevolent disposition. (7) A seventh variety is that which recognizes a Creator of pure and perfect benevolence, but of limited and imperfect power, who is thwarted and defeated in His kindly intentions either by rival and malignant powers, or by the intract- able nature of the materials and the beings with which He has to deal. To these seven, we may add a last, and perhaps the worst : the doctrine of simple Fate ; blind, dark, fatal necessity. The difficulty then, of this grand problem, proposed to the reason of man, is no result of Christianity or the special revelations of the Bible. The Bible has certainly not created the diffi- culties of the problem ; the only reasonable charge that can be brought against it, is that it has failed to remove them, and throw full light upon the darkness. What are the conclusions of natural reason in the case of two of the most eminent of unbelieving philoso- phers of our own day ? One pronounces that Atheism, Deism and Pantheism are three equally untenable attempts to explain the great mystery of being, and that the power which the universe manifests (he should have said, conceals), is utterly inscrutable by us, and must ever so remain. The other comes to a conclusion which is in appearance a new kind of Manicheanism, but is really a closer approach to the teaching of the Bible than it is in appearance, summed up in these words : " The belief of Christians is not more absurd or immoral than the belief of Deists who acknowledge an Omnipotent Creator ; the morality of the Gospels is far higher and better than that which shews itself in the order of nature, and what is morally objectionable in the Christian 44 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. theory of the world, is objectionable only when taken in conjunction with the doctrine of an Omnipotent God, at least as understood by the majority of Christians 1 ." What then is the express claim of Christianity, as a Supernatural Revelation ? Is it simply and absolutely to solve that great problem, which has proved able to baffle, through successive ages, all the unassisted efforts of human reason, starting from the limited data of past experience ? Its claim is of a wholly different kind. It is to supply us with fresh facts attested by firm and distinct a posteriori evidence, like all the facts which form the stock of our previous knowledge, but intimately connected with this great mystery of the origin and destinies of the universe, and of the whole human race, and of each individual man, and throwing clear and distinct light upon the darkness. These facts all centre in the appearance of a fresh Person within the sphere of human observation ; a Person wholly unique in the world's history, by the admission of the most eminent unbelievers who reject the Christian view of His nature ; concerning Whom, when we combine all the elements as to the facts of His personal history on earth, and the later results that have flowed from it, the only conclusions consistent with any shew of reason, are, either that He was a Prophet singled out and commis- sioned by the unseen Creator, for the fuller exposition of His nature and purposes to men; or that He is One who shares in the Divine nature and prerogatives of the invisible God whom He came to reveal. The words and acts of such a Person are supernatural only in this sense, that they lie outside the very narrow and limited bounds of the previous experiences of indi- vidual men in their brief earthly lifetime. Instead 1 Mill's "Posthumous Essays," p. 214. REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 45 of lying outside the domain of Reason itself, they are those added experiences which raise man out of dark- ness into a region of dawning light. To confound those fetters by which the faculty of Reason in men in general is crippled and confined, in the usual conditions of their earthly life, with the glorious faculty itself, so that the gracious act of God, by which He removes the fetters, and calls reason to exercise itself on a wider range of facts, should be mistaken for its extinction, is a strange and prodigious error. He who has come near to us, and revealed Himself to the children of men in the Gospels, in the thirty-three years of an earthly lifetime, and in the glorious records of His sayings, and His works of Divine power, is Himself the Word, the Reason, the Truth, the " true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." All reason in others is only like a spark derived from this glorious " Sun of Righteous- ness." The first rising of the sun would be a stupendous miracle to a race of troglodytes, who had lived till then in subterranean caverns, yet not the less would that sun have been the secret source of whatever feeble rays of moonlight or candle-light had previously reached them in their gloomy abode. The relation of the facts revealed in the Gospels, \ to the great problem of natural and revealed religion, may be illustrated by the return of Columbus and his companions from their first voyage. The facts of their landing in Cuba and San Salvador have just the same re- lation to the great problem of the earth's geography, and the later discovery of the new world and its inhabitants. Those clever persons who refused to credit the report of Columbus and his crew, because ten thousand fisher- men and mariners, after skirting the western ocean for 46 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. hundreds of years, had never brought any information worthy of trust concerning its farther shore, have their exact counterpart in those sceptics who refuse to credit the testimony of the Apostles and their companions to the fact, that they saw and conversed with the Lord Jesus after His resurrection for forty days, because no such experience, or similar experience, had ever been recorded before. For long ages, the shore of the great ocean had seemed an impassable barrier to human know- ledge and exploration, towards the region of the setting sun ; and so too the grave, " that undiscovered bourn from which no traveller returns," had seemed to shut in and enclose all the children of men with a dark and impassable barrier. But with the return of Columbus, the ocean barrier was removed, the great problem was solved, and the landing of those few voyagers on the small islet, and their exploration of part of the coast of Cuba, secured an open pathway of discoveries which never ceased, till the whole of the American continent was explored and brought within the range of human knowledge, and " all the ends of the earth had seen the salvation of God." So too the facts in the Gospel, though few and simple, and unlike any previously re- corded experience, and in that sense supernatural, were the key facts to a new and wider range of human know- ledge, when man's acquaintance with the works and the ways of God should no longer be shut in by the darkness of the grave. " Life and immortality were brought to light" by the Gospel. The resurrection of Christ was never announced to the world as a solitary and unconnected fact, out of relation to all that had gone before, and all that was to follow. On the contrary, it was announced from the first as a great germinal fact, the fulfilment of voices of the prophets from the begin- REASON AND SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 47 ning of the world, and the pledge of the resurrection of all the dead. So St Paul proclaimed it to king Agrippa. " Saying none other things than those that the prophets and Moses did say before should come, that Christ should suffer, and that He should be the first that should rise from the dead, and shew light to the people and to the Gentiles." The resurrection of Jesus was announced as the first-fruits of a glorious harvest that should follow. So when Columbus and his companions announced their landing on the island of San Salvador, that fact was the pledge of the later discovery of the whole American continent. The resurrection of Jesus was the pledge and earnest of the truth of His words to Martha, " I am the Resurrection and the Life ; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." A new era of spiritual light began, when man's know- ledge of the character and purposes of the Creator ceased to be bounded by the darkness of the grave, and in- cluded the blessed certainty of a life beyond, of the resurrection and life everlasting. The new facts reported in the Gospels were beyond reason in this sense, that no process of abstract reasoning could have discovered them. They needed to be con- firmed by clear and full testimony, but when so con- firmed, there was nothing whatever to hinder the exercise of the reason and the conscience on their moral features, or to hinder the wayfaring man, though only a fool in natural wisdom, from seeing clearly and with the fullest conviction, that the Son of Man was no agent and accomplice of the father of lies, but a true messenger from the God of love and grace, nay, Himself the great Redeemer promised from the beginning of time. One would think that the sceptic who quotes 48 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. admissions of Christian Divines to prove that a message of supernatural truths is not credible unless supported by a supernatural guarantee, could scarcely be deceived by his own sophism, and confound together two things wholly different, because they are both sometimes ex- pressed by one and the same ambiguous phrase, that they lie " beyond the range of reason." CHAPTER V. REASON AND THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION. THE great falsehood that the facts of the Gospel history, because they are unprecedented, and do not come within the range of previous experience, are there- fore outside the range of human reason altogether, instead of forming the highest, noblest, and widest sphere for its perfect exercise, is reinforced by a special charge against the contents of that Revelation. The author affirms that a revelation of supernatural truths to promote the salvation of men from the consequences of their own sin is " antecedently incredible and contrary to reason." To prove this, he supplements the difficulties and myste- ries of natural religion by various misrepresentations of the doctrines of Christianity. He says first that the existence of Satan, and the Temptation and Fall are not accounted for, and are incredible. Yet the ablest and most candid of modern sceptics, in his latest efforts to solve the great problem of the universe by the light of natural reason alone, is brought back to the very verge of the doctrine thus proclaimed incredible, a mitigated Manicheanism ; or the doctrine of a God, vast and unsearchable both in wisdom and goodness, but, in some way we cannot understand or explain, limited in power, or counteracted and thwarted in His efforts B. 4 50 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. and intentions for the good and happiness of His creatures. The difficulty then is plainly in the facts themselves, not created by the statements of Scripture. But the writer adds this explication of those statements, that "the evil spirit succeeded in frustrating the designs of the Almighty," that the " sweeping purification of the world by the Flood was as futile as the original design." " We are asked to believe in the frustration of the Divine design in Creation, and the fall of man into a state of wickedness hateful to God, requiring and justifying the Divine design of a revelation, and such a revelation as this, as preliminary to the proposition, that on the supposition of such a design, miracles would not be contrary to reason." " Nothing," it is said, " can be more abso- lutely incredible or contrary to reason than these statements, or the supposition of such a design." P. 48. Dr Mozley is quoted as admitting that "as human announcements the doctrines of Christianity would be the wildest delusions, which we should not be justified in believing." He sums up in the words "incredible assumptions cannot give probability to incredible evi- dence ;" and concludes, " the whole theory of this abortive design of creation with such impotent efforts to amend it, is emphatically con- tradicted by the glorious perfection and invariability of Nature ; it is difficult to say whether the details of the scheme, or the circumstances which are supposed to have led to its adoption, are the more shocking to reason and to moral sense." P. 49. These additions of the author to the doctrines and teaching of the Bible, are in flagrant opposition to its own express and repeated statements. The whole scheme of redemption, instead of being a mere after- thought, a patchwork addition to a baffled scheme of creation, is expressly declared to have been " fore- ordained from before the foundation of the world." The fact is repeatedly proclaimed that unto God are " known all His works from the beginning of the creation ;" that the mystery of redemption from the beginning of the REASON AND THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION. 51 world had been " hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ ;" and that what this writer blasphe- mously calls, " incredible folly," is a declaration of " the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." The Scripture does indeed announce a power, inveteracy, and wide diffusion of moral evil among both men and angels, the rational and responsible creatures of God, which constitute a " mystery of iniquity," a kind of dark and malignant shadow and opposite of that great " mystery of godliness," the mystery of God the Father and of Christ, wherein are " hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." When these great and solemn mysteries are approached in the spirit of unbelief and of pride, the result is a most " dangerous downfall," as the Article says, For a time at least the same sentence lights upon such inquirers which fell once in Cyprus on Elymas in his laborious opposition to the Gospel message, "there fell upon him a mist and darkness, and he went about seeking for some one to lead him by the hand." May there be an opposite issue in the present case. May the unhappy man who sets out in his professed search for truth as a Sadducean Atheist, and ends almost exactly where he began yet receive from God " repentance to the acknowledgment of the truth." The words of Dr Mozley are quoted to convey a meaning almost the exact reverse of what he himself designed. Dr Mozley (p. 13) puts the case of a per- son of eminent integrity and loftiness of character, but unattested by any miracle, or similar guarantee beyond the statement itself, affirming that He had existed before His natural birth from all eternity, and that the world itself had been made by Him. He says that no rational being could accept a just, benevolent 42 52 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. life alone as proof of such astonishing announcements. The words of Dr Mozley, so strangely torn from their context, are merely the statement of our Lord Himself, cast into a different form ; that a naked assertion of the possession of Divine attributes, or of being the pro- mised Redeemer of the world, disjoined from acts of Divine power, and a fulfilment of predictions shewing the presence of superhuman wisdom, would have been undeserving of credence. Such would exactly be the contrast between the true Christ and a false antichrist. " I am come in my Father's name and ye receive me not ; if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive." Naked self-assertion, unsustained by the testi- monies and evidences which should fitly attend it and confirm its truth, would be the characteristic of anti- christ, and not of the true Christ. It is in the harmony of words of surpassing wisdom, purity and grace, of works surpassing the power of common men, and even the gifts of the old Prophets, and these works them- selves marked by features of surpassing bounty and grace ; and the fulfilment of manifold predictions, all centering in the world's promised Redeemer, from the days of Paradise to Malachi, John the Baptist and Caiaphas, and the Evangelists, and express and repeated claims to be that Messiah of whom Moses and the Prophets did write ; It is in the consilience of these various inductions, these converging streams of evidence, into one glorious and luminous centre, that the Christian faith is really founded. This threefold cord of super- human power, superhuman knowledge and superhuman goodness, has its strands so wonderfully and mysteriously interwoven, that no art of man, though they may be distinguished in thought, can practically sunder them from each other. The miracles are evidences of Divine grace and mercy as well as of Divine power ; the fulfilled REASON AND THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION. 53 prophecies are not only marks of superhuman wisdom but of Divine condescension and grace. The three glorious perfections of the Godhead all co-exist and must co-exist in every work of power, wisdom or good- ness, by which the Godhead is revealed, yet each attri- bute in turn may have a special prominence. The Trinity in Unity of the Divine Persons has its counterpart in the mysterious triunity of the Divine perfections. In a miracle, the Divine power of the Son of God is especially manifested ; in the fulfilment of the earlier prophecies, and their completion by His own prophecy on the Mount, and announcement of His own resurrec- tion, and the future resurrection of all men, the attribute of Divine Foreknowledge is specially revealed. In the rest of His discourses, through the Gospels, in the Sermon on the Mount, in the parables of the Prodigal Son and of the lost sheep and the lost piece of money, in the washing of the feet of the disciples, the discourses at the Last Supper, and in all the words full of grace and truth throughout the Gospels, such as the words spoken to the woman who was a sinner, the promises to Martha and her sister Mary, and the precedence given to Mary Magdalene among the witnesses of His resurrection, we have manifold and overflowing tokens of Divine goodness, grace and compassion. Well did He say to His Apostle, " Have I been so long time with you, and hast thou not known me, Philip ? he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." " I and my Father are one." And very solemn is His comment upon the sin of the Jews, and the equal or greater sin of those, who having received the full message of His love in the Gospels, and seen it confirmed and unfolded by the whole course of the world's history for 1800 years, can still shut their eyes to the light of His Divine glory, and strive to persuade their fellow-men to put 54 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. out the eyes of their soul, and involve themselves in utter darkness once more. " If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin ... but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father." CHAPTER VI. THE PERFECTION OF NATURE, AND FOUR MOCK DEITIES OF SCEPTICISM. THE conflict of Faith and Unbelief in the last times is often said in Scripture to be "like the day of Midian." There were two striking features of that day. The first was an extreme illustration of the impotence of mere numbers when opposed to faith and the fear of God. Gideon's little company of three hundred light-bearers went forth by divine command to encounter the Midian- ite host, four hundred times more numerous, who were slumbering in darkness, and the overthrow was complete and entire. " The host ran and cried and fled . . . and every man's sword was set against his fellow throughout all the host." In the hour of panic they perished by mutual self-destruction. So, in the immense confede- racy of unbelief in the last times, there is no unity, but endless self-contradiction, and all the materials are already prepared for the overthrow of sceptical speculations through intestine collision and conflict. Thus one lead- ing sceptic prophesies that "the reign of matter must extend till it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and action." Another, still more eminent, assures us, that " Philosophy refuses to admit the very existence of matter," and that there exist nothing but " permanent possibilities of sensation." M. Comte tells us that the era of forces and causes is past with the childhood of 56 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. science, that faith in God and in supernatural powers is only the stage of its infancy, and that Positivism, which simply registers phenomena, is its full manhood. Dr Tyndal assures us the exact reverse : that to pass from phenomena to the forces by which they are pro- duced, is the first requisite of philosophic thought. The author of Positivism in the very work where he repro- bates the introduction of forces, laws and causes, con- tradicts his own principle two hundred times within ninety pages. Mr Spencer refers all theology to the Unknowable, and says that the " power which the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable." Mr Mill re- joins, and tells him that he admits an immense amount of knowledge of the Unknowable. What is equally clear is that he lays down the indestructibility of motion as an a priori truth, and tells us in the same work that the universe, by evolution and the law of equilibration, is tending to a state of perfect rest, and to the reign of omnipresent death. " If equilibration must end in complete rest, what is the fate towards which all things tend ? The solar system is slowly dissipating its forces, the sun is losing its heat at a rate which will tell in millions of years. If man and society are similarly dependent on this supply of force which is gradually coming to an end, are we not manifestly progressing towards Omnipresent Death ? That such must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on seems beyond doubt... That the proxi- mate end of all the changes we have traced is a state of quiescence, this admits of & priori proof." Spencer's First Principles, p. 514. These contradictions of different sceptical theories, and different parts of the same theory, might be multi- plied almost without limit. Never perhaps, since the beginning of time, was there so large a brevet as in Mr Spencer's philosophical works, by which direct self- contradictions are promoted to the rank of a priori truths. One German atheistic theory professes to build THE PERFECTION OF NATURE. 57 up the universe without a God out of atoms which are not atoms at all, but little whirlpools of revolving matter. With regard to Nature, and its perfection, we have the like antithesis. The writer before us, haying cor- rupted the Christian faith by patchwork additions of his own, directly opposed to the statements of Scrip- ture, then contrasts the compound, with what he calls the " glorious perfection of nature." This anti-super- naturalism encounters its direct opposite, in what may be called the hypo-physicism of Mr Mill. " Nearly all the ' things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, nature does once to every creature that lives. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this nature does, with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and justice, emptying her shafts on the best and the noblest, indifferently with the meanest and worst. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to them- selves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature's dealings with life... A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season ; a flight of locusts, or an inundation desolates a district ; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people ; everything, in short, which the worst of men commit either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire-damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poisoned cups of the Borgias. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as disorder and its consequences, is pre- cisely a counterpart of nature's ways : anarchy and the reign of terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death by the hurricane and the pestilence." Mill's Posthumous Essays, p. 31. 58 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. Such, according to Mr Mill, is that " glorious per- fection of nature," which the author of " Supernatural Religion" uses as a foil, to demonstrate by contrast, that the Christian faith is a contradiction to reason and the moral sense. Mr Mill, on the contrary, insists strongly that " the morality of the Gospels is far higher and hetter than that which shews itself in the order of nature." What is nature in the creed of Atheism, and apart from the vicegerent rule and action of man, ruling over the earth, and bringing outward things into subjection to his own will ? Mr Mill gives only two meanings to the word, nature ; the first is "the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things, of all phenomena and the causes which produce them." " In another sense nature means, not every thing which happens, but only what takes place without the voluntary and intentional agency of man." "This distinction," he adds, "is far from exhausting the ambiguities of the word." It does not in fact include the most fundamental meaning ; it leaves Mr Mill quite unable to explain why " unnatural " in every language should be a term of strong reprobation ; or why the foremost school of Greek philosophy came to make " living according to nature," the first and chief maxim of duty and wisdom. Nature, by its derivation, does not properly apply at all to mere matter, but to things that are born and live. It may be extended, by analogy, to God, the self-existent, who does not come into being ; and by a further analogy, it may be extended, in the opposite direction, to things that are not born, such as lifeless atoms. The nature of any particular thing or being is properly that dis- tinctive character wherein its being consists ; the fun- damental law imposed on it in the hour of its birth, the THE PERFECTION OF NATURE. 59 specific gift of being it has received from the Creator ; when Nature is spoken of as a collective whole, it is plainly a term of extreme ambiguity. It may either include or exclude the perfect being and nature of the self-existent Creator. It may include or exclude the being and dominion of man, the vice-gerent of the Creator in this lower world. It may include all the unknown worlds throughout the universe, or be limited to the world of human experience alone in this terres- trial life ; it may include only that which is known, shut in by the grave on the one side, and by two or three thousand years of known history on the other ; or it may comprehend both all past ages and a coming eternity. When both the nature of God and of man are excluded, all the unknown future, all the unknown or unseen regions of the universe, and earthly life and experience for the last two or three thousand years alone is considered, it is plain that Nature so defined denotes a very small and infinitesimal part of the vast scheme of universal Being. When Nature within these narrow limits, is extolled as " invariable and perfect," and its " glorious perfection " is made the warrant for the rejection of the Christian faith, the moral teaching of the Gospel, the doctrine of the resurrection and the blessed hope of immortal life beyond the grave, this is indeed an illusion as well as a blasphemy, ft shocking both to reason and to moral sense." How far is Mr Mill's counter indictment of the utter immorality, injustice and cruelty of nature, valid and well-founded ? The constancy and perfection of nature to which the appeal is made in the sceptical argument, is really nothing more than our limited human experience of terrestrial changes on the earth's surface from the dispersion of the sons of Noah till the birth of Christ for two thousand years ; excluding the beginning, and 60 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the flood of Noah and all previous ages, the resur- rection and the life to come, the future judgment, and all the prospects of a coming eternity ; all that is unseen, or visible only in other worlds beyond our own planet, and all the actings of the will of men through succes- sive generations, to subdue the earth and bring it into subservience to the wants, and desires, and spiritual instincts and aspirations of their own nature. This terrestrial nature, shut in by these narrow limits, is a minute and almost infinitesimal fragment of the great scheme of universal being. The information which it supplies may be clear and express, and adequate, to the present guidance of life, with regard to individual men, animals and plants; and supply also some glimpses and vistas of thought leading us onward into the abysses that lie beyond. But to complete it into an adequate key to the future hopes of man, and prospects of the human race, and the vast scheme of universal providence, it needs to be pieced out and completed, if supernatural revelation be excluded, by infinite guesswork, blind con- jecture, and baseless speculation. An inverted pyramid has to be constructed of prodigious dimensions, resting on a minute apex, little more than a mathematical point, of certain truth and well-attested experience. As we recede from this apex, conjecture is heaped on conjecture, and Pelion is piled on Ossa, in the vain attempt to scale the skies, and pull down the Almighty Creator from the throne of the universe, where He sits enthroned in glory for evermore. A hundred shadowy and spectral coun- terfeits are set up by the pride of unbelieving philosophy, to take the place of the Supreme and Eternal King. One of these is M. Comte's new Supreme Being, col- lective Humanity, that is the sum total of all the sinners of mankind, who have fought with and murdered each other through the last 6000 years, or fallen under the THE MOCK DEITIES OF SCEPTICISM. 6 1 stroke of death by wasting disease, and includes almost every variety of moral enormity, with bright exceptional instances of imperfect goodness and nobleness of being. What a hideous folly is this worship of collective humanity, this new god that has lately come up ! A second counterfeit is physical force, a mock trinity of indestructible matter, persistent motion, and continuous force, and undiminished and unalterable solar energy. A third counterfeit makes this new divinity of Solar Force dissipate and waste itself continually in the regions of infinite space, till at length, after millions of ages, the new god of physical science is reduced to utter bank- ruptcy, and the Sun will become a stagnant mass, drained of light, and heat, and all its life-sustaining stores of energy, and nature sink under a reign of utter darkness and omnipresent death. A fourth counterfeit and rival of the Living God has two different names " Evolution " and " Natural Se- lection." The first, as one of its main worshippers allows, ought rather to be called Involution, and denotes the process by which a diffused nebulous mass gradually condenses, while the light and heat that may result from this condensation are dissipated, and lost in infinite space. It is a process of cooling carried on slowly through millions of ages, till instead of sun, stars, and planets, and animated worlds, the universe becomes one vast, inert, black mass of lifeless matter. The other name of .this modern Divinity is " Natural Selection," that is, as expounded by its own author, " the course and sequence of events as perceived by us," choosing out through suc- cessive ages, what forms of life are fittest to endure ; then, like Saturn, devouring all its children in swift succession; a selection in which there is no one who selects, and no real existence to be selected, and the lives selected for endurance disappear like bubbles in 62 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the great ocean of being, as soon as the selection is made. A " survival of the fittest," where no one is fit to survive at all except for a few passing moments, and then each has to melt away in its turn into the " in- finite azure of the future," the gulf of evanescent and perishable being. The true and self-existent Jehovah being denied, there is set up in His place the Buddhist Maya, or universal illusion, an endless phantasmagoria of evanescent sensations, without beginning and without end, an infinite waste of empty shadows. The author of " Supernatural Religion," after de- faming the Gospel of Christ, the glorious message by which principalities and powers in heavenly places learn the manifold wisdom of God, and are lost in adoring wonder, as " shocking to reason and moral sense," takes up the first substitute that comes to hand. This happens to be the third of Mr Spencer's three a priori schemes of the knowledge of the Unknowable, and the mode of action of the Unknowable through countless ages to come. The theory thus adopted is a climax of unreason. CHAPTER VII. MR SPENCER'S THREE THEORIES OF THE UNIVERSE. MR SPENCER defines Philosophy as "completely unified knowledge. This is the meaning we must give to the word philosophy if we use it at all." (R P. p. 134.) "This," he says, " is tacitly asserted by the simultaneous inclusion of God, Nature, and Man within its scope." (P. 131.) His next step is wholly to exclude the knowledge of God, and he then attempts to frame a philosophy or scheme of completely unified knowledge, from which the principle and source of unity is wholly excluded. Total ignorance of God, is the first maxim of this philosophy. He claims for it to be more religious than any actual religion. " Those religions," he says, " are partially irreligious, because they profess to have some knowledge of that which transcends knowledge, and so contradict the teachings of religion." (Ib.) This monstrous folly, that there is no medium between Omniscience and utter Nescience is the foundation and corner-stone of the whole system. The author cannot even state his own first principle without a plain self- contradiction. " Religion has established the doctrine that all things are manifesta- tions of a power that transcends our knowledge" (p. 100), but a power of which we can know nothing at all plainly cannot be manifested. 64 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. " Religion," he adds, " has ever been more or less irreligious, because it has claimed to know something of a power which transcends know- ledge," or cannot be exhaustively known. Having thus rejected Christianity as irreligious, be- cause it does profess to teach us definite truth with regard to the nature and purposes of the great First Cause, how does the author build on this negative foun- dation ? He offers his readers confidently, not one only, but three alternative theories of the universe, that is of the plans and purposes of this Unknowable God through ages to come. The first is the theory of endless Involu- tion or condensation. It is a process by which satellites drop into their suns, and the suns by successive collisions fall into each other, till the whole universe will become one great mass of dull, dead matter, a monstrous extin- guished sun, from which heat and light have disappeared and lost themselves in infinite space. " We are manifestly progressing towards Omnipresent death. That such a state must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on, seems beyond doubt... That the proximate end of all the transforma- tions we have traced is a state of quiescence, this admits of a priori proof." (P. 514.) This " prodigious amount of knowledge of the un- knowable," that all the changes of nature are beyond doubt tending to a reign of Omnipresent death, is Mr Spencer's first offered substitute for the Gospel. It is made up of two a priori truths, that motion is indestructible, and that all things are certainly tending to a state of perfect quiescence. His second theory in the same work, replaces the first by an endless oscillation theory "An unmeasurable period, during which attractive forces predomi- nating cause universal concentration ; and then an unmeasurable period, during which the repulsive forces predominating cause universal dif- fusion, alternate eras of evolution and dissolution." (P. 537.) MR SPENCER'S THREE THEORIES. 65 Thus the whole scheme of universal Being is sup- posed, like the stone of Sisyphus, through millions of years or ages to be raised to a higher pitch of dig- nity, perfection, and multiplied vitality, and then when it has nearly reached some summit of ideal perfec- tion, to bound downward, by a reverse process, and dash itself to pieces at the foot of the mountain, the whole creation resolving itself into diffused nebulous vapour and nothingness once more. This reverse pro- cess, it should be observed, is introduced purely by guess, in contradiction to all the laws of mechanics, to provide some escape from the dreary monotony of the first theory. In " Social Statics," Mr Spencer propounds a third a priori theory of the universe distinct from, and incon- sistent with, both the others. This is the self-perfecting theory of nature. It is embodied in these maxims : "Advancement is due to the working of universal law, and, in virtue of that law, must continue till the state we call perfection is reached. These are the steps of the argument. All imperfection is unfitness to the conditions of existence. This unfitness must consist in having a faculty or faculties in excess, or deficient, or in both. A faculty in excess is one which has no opportunity for full exercise ; and a deficient faculty is one from which circumstances demand more than it can perform. The principle of life is, that a faculty which cannot obtain full exercise diminishes, and one on which excessive demands are made, increases ; while this excess and deficiency continue, there must be decrease on one hand and growth on the other. Finally, then, all excess and deficiency, and unfitness and imperfection, must disappear. Thus the - ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain. Humanity must, in the end, become completely adapted to its conditions; pro- gress therefore is not an accident, but a necessity ;... As surely as a passion grows by indulgence, and diminishes when restrained, so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear, and man must become perfect." (S. R. from S. S., p. 50, 51.) This demonstration, Mr Spencer says, removes the doctrine "out of the region of probability into that of B- 5 66 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. certainty." Let us now examine the data and premises of which this grand discovery consists. First, a novel definition of moral evil and immorality; that it consists in a living creature having one or more faculties with no opportunity for their exercise, or not having all the senses or faculties he could exercise if he had them. The ridiculous and entire falsehood of such a definition is so plain that it is needless to develope it further. The one grain of truth in the mock demonstration is, that a faculty is commonly strengthened by repeated exercise, "as the eye tends to become long-sighted in the sailor, and short-sighted in the student, and a clerk acquires rapidity in writing and calculation." But another assumption is required to set the argument on its feet ; that every living creature acquires instinctively, and of course, all the senses and faculties for the exercise of which there is a present opportunity. By this rule all animals should have a faculty of articulate speech. Ac- cording to all experience man alone has this faculty, while different kinds of beasts and birds have their distinctive notes, cries, and inarticulate sounds. Next, men so far as experience goes, have five senses only, sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste ; and these within narrowly defined limits. If every one possessed, by natural necessity, every faculty he could exercise if he had it, every one must have a natural telescope for seeing objects more distant, and a microscope for seeing objects more minute, than come within the range of ordinary eyesight. He must have also a natural thermometer, hygrometer, anemometer, and micrometer. All these represent faculties which never would want opportunities for their exercise, but their spontaneous growth is flatly opposed to uni- versal experience. If all living creatures had this prodigal supply of all conceivable senses and faculties, there would be nothing in this to secure their right use and applica- MR SPENCER'S THREE THEORIES. 67 tion. Many senses and faculties must be still more liable to abuse than a few only. If circumstances underwent no change, some faculties might be enfeebled by lack of exercise, and others be quickened and made more perfect and acute. If circumstances changed, even this limited amount of variation would be suspended or re- versed. The decay of faculties or senses, either by lack of opportunity or of will to exert them, would be likely to have a wider range than the perfecting of others under the concurrence of three conditions ; the will to exercise them to the utmost, circumstances favourable to their exercise, and the continuance of those circumstances unaltered for a long course of time. The demonstration starts from a definition of moral evil so prodigiously absurd, and involves an assumption with regard to the senses and faculties of men and living creatures, so utterly opposed to all experience, that the acceptance on such grounds of a self-perfecting tendency in all nature, seems the furthest possible limit of unreasoning credulity. When propounded as an a priori demonstra- tion by the same author who assures us, as another a priori truth beyond doubt, that all nature is progressing towards the reign of Omnipresent Death, and as another a priori truth, that the power working behind all pheno- mena is wholly "unknowable," and that it is the main defect of all religious creeds to pretend to know something of a Being of whom nothing can be known, the ridiculous folly of these assertions seems scarcely to admit of in- crease. We may know, it seems, how "the unknowable" will act, through countless ages to come, and may know as "an a priori truth" that He or it will act in three different ways, each contradicting the two others. He will crush up the whole universe, with all its suns and planets., into one vast mass, which will cool down into icy frost and blackness of darkness, so that the self-perfecting 52 68 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. tendency of Nature will result in the extinction of all life, leaving behind utter wasteness and desolation. Or He will perad venture assume the task of Sisyphus, and go on through countless ages laboriously raising the universe near to some mountain summit of ideal per- fection, only to see it roll down and bury itself in an abyss of ruin and darkness in a later period of utter dissolution. Of such theorists it may well be said in the indignant words of the Prophet, "They have rejected the word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them." Mr Spencer's third theory of the universe is further unfolded in the following passage, in which a great truth of Scripture is so misconstrued, as to change it into its own exact reverse. " The survival only of the fittest is the stern decree of nature. The invariable action of law of itself eliminates the unfit. Progress is necessary to existence, extinction is the doom of retrogression. The highest effect contemplated by the supposed revelation is to bring man into perfect harmony with law, and this is ensured by law itself acting upon intelligence. Only in obedience to law is there life and safety. Knowledge of law is imperatively demanded by nature. Igno- rance of it is a capital offence. If we ignore the law of gravitation, we are dashed to pieces at the foot of a precipice, or are crushed by a falling rock ; if we neglect sanitary law, we are destroyed by a pesti- lence ; if we disregard chemical laws, we are poisoned by a vapour. There is not, in reality, a gradation of breach of law that is not fol- lowed by an equivalent gradation of punishment. Civilization is nothing but the knowledge and observance of natural laws. The savage must learn them or be extinguished : the cultivated must observe them or die. The balance of moral and physical development cannot be deranged with impunity. In the spiritual as well as the physical sense, only the fittest eventually can survive in the struggle for existence. There is, in fact, an absolute upward impulse to the whole human race supplied by the invariable operation of the laws of nature acting upon the common instinct of self-preservation. As on the one hand, the highest human conception of infinite wisdom and power is derived from the universality and invariability of law, so that universality and in- variability, on the other hand, exclude the idea of interruption or occa- MR SPENCER'S THREE THEORIES. 69 sional suspension of law for 'any purpose whatever, and more especially for the correction of supposed original errors of design, which cannot have existed, or for the attainment of objects already provided for in the order of nature." (S. R, from S. S. 51, 52.) Now in a scheme which pronounces God to be un- knowable, and minds and material objects unknowable also, so that what are called phenomena of matter or of mind, are only "faint" and "vivid" manifestations of "the unknowable," (which is a self-contradiction,) so that human action is the fatal and inevitable result of material circumstances, there are no laws but those of matter and physical change. Now these laws are never broken, and never can be. The man who is dashed to pieces at the foot of a precipice, or crushed by a falling rock, obeys the law of gravitation just as much as the person who lies quietly in his bed. The laws of chemistry are obeyed as much by the choke-damp or fire-damp which causes the death of hundreds, as by the atmo- sphere which sustains the life of millions. Physical laws, the only laws which exist under the theory, are never broken, and never can be, because their subjects are atoms or masses of matter devoid of choice and reason. The only laws which can be broken are those which the theory excludes as unreal fictions, moral laws imposed by God on rational, conscious, and responsible creatures. Transferred to these real laws which can be broken, and have been broken on the largest scale, the remark is true, "only in obedience to law is there life and safety." Such is the statement of Christ Himself. " I know that His commandment is life everlasting." Ignorance of these real laws of God for man is "a capital offence." Such ignorance, utter and complete, is the start- ing-point and boast of this wretched mock philosophy. Breaches of the laws which it admits, are impossible, and have never occurred ; breaches of the moral law which it 7O SUPERNATURAL REVELATION, refuses to recognize, and of which it counts the know- ledge impossible, have occurred and do occur continually, and to these transgressions the words do apply, "there is no gradation of the breach of God's law that is not followed by an equivalent gradation of punishment." A great Scriptural truth is borrowed by a godless and immoral philosophy in which it has no real place, and then, is so disguised as hardly to be recognizable. " The wages of sin is death." "In the way of right- eousness is life, in the pathway thereof there is no death." " The righteous shall be recompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner." " The commandment of God is life everlasting." CHAPTER VIII. NATURE WITHOUT MAN OR GOD. THE indictment of immorality which Mr Mill has brought against Nature, that idol of modern physicists, suggests a deep inquiry, which may throw light on the whole question of anti-supernaturalism. There are four classes of action of which we can conceive, (i) The direct action of God Himself, the supreme intelligence and perfect goodness, doing as He will among the inhabitants of heaven and the dwellers upon earth. The exclusion of all such direct action of God Him- self, as unreasonable if not impossible, is the main dogma of anti-supernaturalism. (2) The second class of activity consists of the conscious voluntary actions of good or bad men, who are subject to a law of moral duty, and the similar action of good or bad spirits, or rational beings in other parts of the universe, sup- posing us to have access to them, and means of ascer- taining their reality, and of discriminating them from all lower activities. (3) Thirdly, the actings of the animal creation, or of vegetable life. None of these can have a strictly moral or anti-moral character. It is not surprising that in brute nature no traces of moral action should be found, though there are near approaches to it, and close resemblances in the nobler animals, when humanized by association with man. (4) Fourthly, there are the 72 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. actings of all material creatures, things devoid either of animal or vegetable life, which yet are most intimately connected with the welfare or continued existence of living things. Many indeed hold that lifeless matter has no active power whatever ; that action is the dis- tinctive character of conscious mind ; so that what we popularly call the actings of material objects, are really the direct actings of the Creator Himself. This view, I think, is erroneous, and that activity of some kind is essential to a real existence. That which cannot act in some way or other cannot be acted upon, and that very passivity and sluggishness which is imputed to lifeless matter, still requires us to admit in it activity of some kind. The wind acts when it blows upon us, fire when it burns us, a stone when it bruises us, the earth itself when it pinions us to its surface by its attraction. The difference is that in the actings of lifeless things, or material objects of all kinds, there is no spontaneity or element of choice, but the action is determined by distance and position alone. The immense disproportion, in amount, of unorganized matter in the universe as known to us, compensates in a certain sense for the inferior and more passive form of its activity. Its actings, because they are lower in kind than even those of the brutes them- selves, cannot possibly reveal moral features of choice or discrimination, with reference to moral ends or pur- poses. There seem to be three laws at least to which all matter is subject, (i) The first is that of universal appetency, each atom of matter tending to approach every other, with a force or intensity determined by the distance alone. (2) The second is a law of special appe- tency, determined by the union and interaction of matter and self- repulsive ether. On this second law, probably, all cohesion, electric affinity, and chemical structure depend. (3) The third is a law of ethereal repulsion, NATURE WITHOUT MAN OR GOD. 73 on which all the phenomena of light, electricity, mag- netism, heat, and the more subtle agencies of nature depend. If then we deny all direct action of God, the Supreme Intelligence, and shut out the Creator from His own universe, and then speak of nature in contrast to man, of the natural in contrast to the artificial, it is idle to look for moral qualities in the actings of brute crea- tures, or the limited activities which alone belong to unorganized creatures, or material objects in all their di- versities. At the same time, these lowest creatures must have had their limited powers defined by the Creator in the moment of their creation, and out of infinite possi- bilities, the same Creator must have decided all those conditions of place, number, mass, concentration, or dif- fusion, on which, by the very law of their being, all their later activities and operations one upon another, and upon the living things with which they co-exist, will really depend. So far then as any semblances of choice, moral purpose, or moral preference seem de- tected in the changes of mere matter, it can be due to no present purpose or choice in the things themselves, but only be a remote consequence of the wisdom of the Creator, in His wise arrangement of the material universe in the hour of its creation. Thus, brute or unorganized lifeless nature cannot possibly reveal moral preferences in its separate actings. Those actings are linked with each other by a law that extends through distant ages, and which is determined by distance and position alone ; but the actings of brute or inanimate nature are modified continually by the voluntary actions of all mankind, into which the elements of spontaneity, choice, love, and hate, or moral preference and aversion do continually enter. The same is true of the actings of all moral and spiritual intelligences, in whatever part 74 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. of the universe they may exist, and the laws which link together the whole material universe would make it impossible for such actings of spiritual being, in however remote a region, not to extend their influence to the earth and terrestrial changes. That changes on the earth should be determined solely by physical laws would require two great con- ditions; that the Living God should, by a self-denying ordinance, bind Himself never to stretch forth His Almighty hand, whether for judgment or for mercy, to interfere with the mechanical working of the laws of brute and inanimate nature, and that He should equally shut up in eternal inaction all rational and spiritual crea- tures, in every part of the created universe. It is not surprising then that Mr Mill should find Nature, as defined by himself, nature, that is, exclusive both of Man and God, guilty of strange enormities and moral crimes, when he tries each separate event in which ma- terial agents are concerned, by the same test as if they were the separate and independent actions of a moral agent. He exacts, in short, from nature the unnatural ; from things not endowed with the power of choice, the proper results of choice and spontaneity ; from creatures that cannot choose, the virtue of choosing well. It is not surprising, when God Himself and all moral and spiritual creatures, have been excluded from the defi- nition of nature, that the residuum should be found devoid of moral excellences and perfections. Two ques- tions alone remain. First, whether the general laws appointed for the lower creatures, and for the whole material universe devoid of life and moral preference, disclose any proofs of wisdom and goodness, in Him by whom they were first appointed. Now it is the wisdom and excellency of these laws which tempt atheistic speculators to embrace the strange hypothesis, NATURE WITHOUT MAN OR GOD. 75 that it is useless for the Creator Himself ever to inter- fere with their undisturbed operation. The other ques- tion is, whether the .special arrangement of the material constituents of the universe might have been so or- dained in their original creation, as to secure the bene- fits, and escape all the inconveniences and mischiefs, which result from time to time from their invariable operation. Those who affect to solve this great and mysterious problem more perfectly than the Allwise Creator has done, shew the extreme of folly and pre- sumption into which it is possible for sinful creatures to fall. They are well rebuked by that voice of God to the patriarch : " Hast thou an arm like God ? or canst thou thunder with a voice like Him ? Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct Him ? He that reproveth God, let him answer it." " Look on every one that is proud and bring him low, and tread down the wicked in their place, then will I also confess unto thee, that thine own right hand can save thee." Surely one glance on the grandeur, immensity, and mar- vellous variety of the wonderful works of God, ought to silence those rash and audacious speculators, who would affect to improve on the counsels and works of God the Only Wise ! The author of " Supernatural Religion " says that miracles, or the direct action of God Himself, are "em- phatically contradicted by the glorious perfection and the invariability of the order of nature ; the imperfec- tion thus ascribed to the Divine work is derogatory to the power and wisdom of the Creator." The hypo- physicism, as it may be called, of Mr Mill, is a curious contrast to this anti-supernaturalism. Having excluded from nature all direct agency of God Himself, and of all moral agents, men or spirits, and left only a residuum of unmoral agencies, we see what is his conclusion as 76 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. to the moral perfections of this residual nature. All the worst crimes recorded in history are surpassed, he says, by this idol of modern atheism. These two tribes of the great Midianite camp effectually destroy each other. CHAPTER IX. THE UNNATURAL IN CONTRAST TO THE SUPERNATURAL. THE term Nature when used comprehensively, in- cludes a vast variety of beings and of natures widely different from each other. We may distinguish six main classes of natures. First, the nature of material things ; secondly, of plants ; thirdly, of animals ; fourthly, of men ; fifthly, of rational beings not human; sixthly, the Nature of God, the Self-existent First Cause. Now in each of these there may be first, natural or normal actings; secondly, unnatural, and thirdly, supernatural actings, above or beyond the ordinary standard and mode of action. This last term may be extended, so as to include unusual and extraordinary actings of the Creator Himself. It will be enough to notice two forms of the Unnatural and two of the Supernatural. First, the brutish unnatural. " What they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves." Man may thus be self- degraded below his own nature to the level of brute beasts. Secondly, the animal preternatural, when some lower creature, plant, or animal, is raised to a mode of acting above the usual range of animal faculty, (i) " The dumb ass speaking with man's voice forbade the mad- ness of the prophet." (2) "The Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah on the dry land." (3) "Cast an hook and take up the fish that first cometh up, and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt 78 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. find a piece of money." (4) "Cast the net on the right side of the ship and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes." One form of the unnatural in contrast to the Super- natural is included as a main article of the Creed of Anti- Supernaturalism. The Nature, of which the " glorious perfection and invariability" are extolled, as excluding the miracles and truths of the Christian Faith, is a Nature, in which death reigns supreme and undisturbed from age to age. It is that nature of which Mr Mill says pithily, " Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives." It is that nature of which, according to Mr Spencer's first theory, the undoubted tendency is " to a reign of omnipresent death." This apotheosis of death is so com- plete that according to Strauss, "the statement that a dead man has returned to life is composed of two contradictory elements." Thus the living God is dethroned, and His existence is either denied, or thrust wholly beyond the reach of human knowledge, and DEATH, the last enemy, is enthroned in his place. This most monstrous and unnatural of all creeds, is gravely propounded as a pre- ferable substitute, more agreeable to reason and the moral sense, than the glorious and everlasting Gospel of redeeming love. Sinful man flings back the unspeak- able gift of God, in the face of Him who offers it, and chooses rather to sit down in blind and slavish subjec- tion to the worst and foulest of all false gods. The most degrading of all conceivable superstitions, is that which shuts out God from the right to interfere, by a message of redeeming grace, with a world over which death reigns supreme, the "lazar. house" of Milton's description. (Bk. XL 480.) 2. Another form of the Unnatural is the refusal to THE UNNATURAL. 79 see any signs or proofs of a superhuman Intelligence, or of the working and dominion of a conscious First Cause in the whole system of created things. The message of God to sinful men, by the Prophet whose lips were touched with a coal of fire from the heavenly altar, begins by denouncing the more than brutish blindness of this practical atheism, into which his own people had so widely fallen. "Hear O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken ; I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." (Is. i. 2, 3.) The speculative atheism which openly professes to know nothing at all with regard to the Being, works and character of God, is thus defined by His own lips, to be a degradation of man below the level of the brute creatures. The great Apostle of the Gentiles applies the same truth specially to the case of those with whom modern Agnostics would prefer to be classed, the old philosophers of the heathen world. " They are without excuse, because when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened ; professing them- selves to be wise, they became fools." Moral degra- dation, and the influx of a tide of degrading lusts and passions, is declared to be the Divine Nemesis on this ungrateful and foolish blindness. " Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind . . . filled with all un- righteousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, and malignity." Atheistic speculations, spreading like a canker in any one generation of mankind, are almost sure to breed gigantic and unnatural wickedness in the generation that 8o SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. follows. The mock philanthropy which sets out with atheistic contempt for the living God, will be sure to set in a sea of blood. And "when the kindness of God the Saviour towards man," has been despised and rejected, the "New Supreme Being" of M. Comte's blasphemous philosophy, will be sure ere long to de- velope his historical attributes, " foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another." (Tit. iii. 3.) The first form of the Supernatural is the Prophetic. This supposes that God, the Supreme Intelligence, singles out amongst men some individuals, through whom He would give messages of heavenly truth, and announcements of His will to their fellow-men : that He then bestows upon them gifts of power, or foresight, to attest and prove the commission which they have re- ceived. These supernatural gifts, exceeding the power or wisdom of ordinary men, are tests and signs of their divine commission. So it was said to Moses, " take this rod in thine hand wherewith thou shalt do signs." So St Paul writes to the Corinthians, "the signs of an Apostle were wrought among you, in all patience, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds." The idea that though MAN at his will can make known his thoughts and wishes to his fellow-man in writing, yet the Lord of Heaven and of earth, the Architect and Builder of all things, is unable so to do, is the strange paradox of some modern sceptics. If God is pleased to make known His will by speech or writing to men, reason requires that the messengers He em- ploys should have clear credentials to confirm their commission. So the same Apostle says at the close of his letter to Thessalonica, " The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle, so THE UNNATURAL. 8 I I write." Thus a distinct proof that the writing was his, and that he had a divine commission, attested by supernatural works, was given with each epistle. So " no prophecy," we are told, " came at any time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as moved (or borne along) by the Holy Ghost;" and of these mes- sengers we are further told that "God also bare them witness, both with signs and wonders, and divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to His own will." Such a witness then, either in works of superhuman power, directly wrought by them, or linked with their message, has been the constant law of revelation by prophets, from Adam in Paradise to the beloved dis- ciple in Patmos. To make the contrast more con- spicuous between Christ and His forerunner, "John did no miracle." But his birth was announced by the message of an angel, and his work and character by a second prophecy uttered by his own father, and his message was essentially only a preface to that of Christ Himself. Works and sayings, preternatural in common men, are natural, and essential to their work and cha- racter, in men singled out to be prophets, messengers, apostles, and ambassadors of the God of heaven. But beyond this prophetic form of the supernatural, there is one still higher. Should the living God Him- self appear in human form, the words and acts of such a Divine Person, conversing with men upon earth, must be supernatural in the highest sense. They must trans- cend not only the words and works of average men, and of righteous men, but even of prophets ; a wisdom, a power and a goodness surpassing those of human prophets would be needful to justify the claim to be such a Divine person. Such a claim, if advanced with an entire absence of any such proofs, would be incredi- ble. So our Lord says, " If I bear witness of myself B. 6 82 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. my witness is not true ; the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me." " Had ye believed Moses ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me." " If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin, but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father." And again when the messengers of the Jews were asked "why have ye not brought him?" they an- swered, " Never man spake like this man." Thus works of divine power, and words of divine wisdom, were joined with signal manifestations of divine good- ness. " Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet." " Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." "When He was come near, He beheld the city and wept over it." " Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." " He said, It is finished, and He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost." This threefold cord, of which the strands are, works of superhuman power, words of divine wisdom, and acts and tears of divine compassion, condescension, and grace, is intertwined to guarantee this glorious truth, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that "the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world;" and that "all men should honour the Son even as they honour the Father;" and again, that " He that honoureth not the Son, honoureth not the Father which hath sent Him." This great truth of the divine glory and perfection of the " Sun of Righteous- ness," the Incarnate Redeemer, shines out above all other truths, with a brightness like that of the vision THE UNNATURAL. 83 seen by Saul on the way to Damascus, "a light from heaven at midday, above the brightness of the sun." And whenever the eyes of men are closed to this divine and supernatural light, and they prefer to sit down con- tent with the thick darkness of that course of nature, in which death reigns supreme for evermore, the same Apostle has taught us the secret cause of a preference so unnatural. "If our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them which are perishing, in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." CHAPTER X. THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. THE Bampton Lectures of Dr Mozley on Miracles (1865) are, in the main, one of the most valuable con- tributions which Oxford has given within the last forty years to the defence of the Christian faith. I have shewn elsewhere, that Professor Tyndall, in his reply to them in " The Fortnightly," where he warns off the clergy as " noble savages" from the field of physical science, has himself committed two great errors, one with regard to the views of Newton, and the other with regard to the fundamental basis of all inductive science, as illus- trated and confirmed by the " Principia." But while he is thus wholly wrong in the issue he has raised, a serious defect mingles with that part of the Lectures which has occasioned his strictures. Dr Tyndall makes it the first principle of real science, that the forces of nature and the laws which men of science investigate, " are necessary," " that if the force be permanent, the phenomena are necessary, whether they do or do not resemble anything that has gone before." Dr Mozley says on the other hand, that our faith in the order of nature " is an impulse which rests on no rational grounds, and can be traced to no rational principle ; which possesses no intellectual character," and that "the proper function of the inductive principle, or belief in the order of nature, is to act as a practical basis for the affairs of life, and the carrying on of human society." THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 85 Professor Tyndall rejoins effectively by enumerating a series of scientific discoveries. "What," he asks, "has the planet Neptune, or the belt of Jupiter, or the whiteness about the poles of Mars, to do with the affairs of society, or how is society affected by the fact that the sun's atmosphere contains sodium, or that the nebula of Orion contains hydrogen gas? What practical interest has society in the fact that the spots on the sun have a decennial period, and that when a magnet is closely watched for half a century, it is' found to perform small motions which synchronize with the appearance and disappearance of the solar spots?" He continues, "We hold it to be an exercise of reason to explore the meaning of the universe to which we stand in relation, and the work accomplished is the proper commentary on the methods pursued." The truth lies almost midway between Dr Mozley and his critic ; though the error of Prof. Tyndall is the more complete, and is one which would extinguish that very process of induction on the value of which he so strongly insists. Prof. Tyndall's writ of eject- ment against all theologians, and nine-tenths of the clergy, as ignorant savages, from the field of physical science, as involving questions with which they are in- competent to deal, and where they are ill-informed, self- deluded, and likely to delude others, rests on two data. The first is a direct inversion of the facts with regard to Newton's own doctrine ; the other is an assertion of the necessary character of the laws of nature, which is opposed to every page of the reasoning in the Principia, and would turn that immortal work into a tissue of laborious folly. It affirms the laws of force to be ne- cessary truths, and thereby stultifies the whole course of experimental science, and reverses the plainest facts in the history of discovery. The other ground of the charge is the maxim, that "a truly scientific intellect can never be satisfied till it reaches the forces by which the succession is produced... In judging of the order of nature, our enquiries relate to the permanence of force." 86 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. This principle is true, but Prof. Tyndall has misdi- rected the writ of ejectment which he founds upon it ; its proper address is not to the Christian clergy, but to M. Comte and all the Positive Philosophers. His statement is a point blank contradiction of the funda- mental maxim of that philosophy. For its first prin- ciple is the exclusion, not only of supernatural powers, but of such abstractions as cause, force, substance, and vital power, from the researches of science, which in its positive stage must be confined to the bare classi- fication of phenomena. The whole course of reason- ing by which Dr Mozley has brought on himself and the clergy the reproach of being ignorant savages, is not drawn from theology, but wholly borrowed from the speculations of sceptical philosophers. By a rash acceptance of their premises, he has greatly impaired the value of lectures which contain much striking and valuable thought. Dr Mozley's conclusion is, that the inductive principle belongs to the irrational part of our nature, that it is an unreasoning impulse or mechanical instinct, by which we expect that future changes will be like the past ; that it is simply a " mechanical expectation of the likeness of the unknown to the known," that it is "unreasoning, and no part of the distinctive reason of man." He says that " step by step, philosophy has loosened the connection of the order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending in the same proportion the principle of miracles. Science has itself proclaimed the truth, that we see no causes in nature; that the whole chain of physical succession is to the eye of reason a rope of sand, consisting of antecedents and consequents, but without a rational link or trace of necessary connection between them; we know of law only in the sense of recurrences in nature." Here Dr Mozley starts with assuming the truth of the first principle of the positive philosophy, that science has to deal with phenomena and their recurrence alone, the relations of likeness and unlikeness. THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 87 The only connection of this view with theology is of a secondary and accidental kind. Bishop Berkeley deceived himself with the notion that, by adopting the current philosophy of ideas, and reasoning it out to the sceptical conclusion of the non-existence of matter and the material universe, he could gain a fresh argument for the existence of God. This strange paradox, by which he contradicted both Scripture and common sense, was taken up by successors of a very different spirit, and worked out to its natural issue. First, Hume adopted his reasoning, and applied it to all mental phenomena. Instead of material objects, Berkeley left us floating in an ocean of momentary and evanescent phenomena. Hume completed the process, and instead of minds, left nothing but an interminable series of states of consciousness, or sensations, or perceptions, or in- ternal phenomena, with no minds, any more than things, to which they belonged. The denial of the reality of matter being thus followed by a like denial of the ex- istence of mind, there could be no room left in this abyss of darkness, for faith in the existence and attri- butes of God, that is, of a creative and supreme In- telligence. Bishop Berkeley, unhappily, took the first step towards burying science and religion in this thick jungle of sceptical philosophy, a double contradiction of common sense and of Scripture. But its patrons have not been the Christian clergy or theologians, who have almost unanimously rejected it by a healthy instinct, but sceptical philosophers. From Hume onward, this phenomenalism has been the favourite creed of modern sceptics. Mr Mill, in his " Logic," makes this the main basis of his Metaphysics, and adopts it fully with regard to the non-existence of matter, which he would replace by the new term " permanent possibilities of sensa- 88 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. tion." With regard to mind, the phenomena of memory make him hesitate. He owns that philosophical con- sistency would make us deny the existence of minds, as well as of material objects. But the phenomena of memory forbid him fully to acquiesce in this view; so he counsels a compromise, by which we may use the popular language which implies their existence, with the reserve of a secret doubt and philosophical uncertainty whether they exist or not. Mr Spencer adopts the very same theory with a new phraseology. All the material phenomena which Berkeley left in their endless suc- cession, when matter itself was abolished, are with Mr Spencer an indefinite series of " vivid manifesta- tions of the Unknowable." Again, all the series of states of consciousness which Hume left to us after minds were abolished, are with Mr Spencer an inter- minable series of "faint manifestations of the Unknow- able." Thus, in this grand funeral procession, Bishop Berkeley led the way, under the guidance of a false philosophy, by abolishing the whole world of matter, Hume followed, and completed the funeral rites, by abolishing the whole world of created minds, leaving us floating in an abyss of material and mental changes, without any things or persons, material objects, or con- scious minds, to which they belong. Well may Mr Spencer say that " Metaphysics of this type usually produce a sceptical state of mind, and are ordinarily followed by a sense of universal illusion." His proposed remedy however for this great evil only aggravates the disease. It is to introduce a new definition of reality, that reality means only " persistence in con- sciousness," a definition truly "unthinkable," and never known or heard of till his "First Principles " appeared. Hume has frankly acknowledged this inevitable result THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 89 of his own extension of Berkeley's reasoning on the non-existence of matter to include mind also. "These principles," he says, "may flourish and triumph in the schools, where it is difficult to refute them, but as soon as they leave the shade, and by the presence of the REAL OBJECTS (!) are put in opposition to the more powerful principles of our nature, they vanish like smoke, and leave the most determined sceptic in the same con- dition as other mortals." The constancy of Nature has a different meaning with Prof. Tyndall, Mr Spencer, and the author of "Supernatural Religion." In the author of the Belfast address it means the necessary character of the laws of physical science : the doctrine that " Nature has never been crossed by spontaneous action, or a state of things ever existed which could not be rigorously deduced from the preceding state." Prof. Tyndall boldly ascribes this doctrine to Newton himself, and makes it the test of the scientific mind. A startling contradiction of notorious facts, since this is the very doctrine which Newton expressly denounces at the close of the Principia, as unscientific and unreasonable. The doctrine is indeed the most palpable of scientific errors : it destroys the deep contrast between abstract sciences, and concrete sciences which rest upon the evidence of facts, and deal with concrete realities ; it stultifies the whole course of experimental science as laborious trifling, and reverses the plainest facts in the history of dis- covery. It annuls that process which is the essence of scientific advance, a comparison of the results of different hypotheses with observed facts, so as to detect which out of several hypotheses is actually true. The binding of nature by modern science " in the bonds of fate," spoken of in the Belfast address, is nothing else than the contradiction of the fundamental principle of M. Comte and the positive philosophy, which bids us 90 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. set aside the research of forces and real entities, and classify phenomena alone. On this view, we have an infinite multitude of phenomena through successive moments of time, but the phenomena of each moment are quite independent of those of the previous or se- quent moments. The only indeterminateness which is set aside by the progress of physical science, is the false inde- pendence of the phenomena of each separate instant of time, which would result from the positivist or phenomenal philosophy. The indeterminateness which still remains, and which separates the actual universe and its physical laws, from that system of necessity with which Prof. Tyndall confounds it, consists of the places of all the atoms in the universe, containing three times as many indeterminates, as there are atoms of matter or of ether in the whole universe. These data cannot be supplied by the laws themselves. They must be supplied by the choice of a will, prior to and above the laws ; till they have been thus supplied, the law of gravitation, and any similar laws depending on the distances of the atoms, cannot operate. The atoms must exist, and be at definite distances from each other, and in definite direc- tions, before any one of these laws can take effect. The result of excluding all spontaneous action, of man or of God, is not to supersede will by physical laws, but to restrict the action of will to the first moment of crea- tion, and to confine the choice of the number, properties, and positions of all the atoms of the universe to that moment of creation. The whole infinite spontaneity or element of choice would be concentrated in one moment of time ; thenceforward will and choice in the Creator would be dormant and idle for evermore. And no will or choice in any creature would be permitted to interfere with the perfect and eternal development of the ever- THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 9 1 changing positions of the innumerable atoms. Such is the senseless view of the history of the universe which this mechanical theory sets before us. Its laws cannot work, or come into existence at all, without the pre- vious exercise of choice and will on the part of the Supreme Lawgiver, and this choice once made, the faculty of spontaneity is supposed to sink into an ever- lasting sleep ; and the blinded Samson of the material universe has to grind on in a prison-house of fated and inevitable change for evermore. Had Prof. Tyndall read with due care the Lectures he praises so justly, and followed this by a study of the Principia and the Scholium at its close, he would have escaped falling into these blunders. But Dr Mozley's statement, that the inductive principle, and our faith in the order of Nature, is an unreasoning impulse, a blind and " unreasoning instinct," and his further explanation in these words, that " our nature, though endowed with reason, contains constitutionally large irrational departments, and includes in it many processes which are entirely spontaneous, irresistible and of the automaton kind" (p. 46), seem to have provoked the rejoinder that "as regards the knowledge of Nature, which is here the one thing needful, nine-tenths of the clergy are noble savages and nothing more," with the further advice, " keep away from physical nature." The fault of Dr Mozley is, that he has adopted blindly the main principle of the phenomenal or idealistic school of sceptical philosophy, and has thereby greatly impaired and perplexed a course of argument, marked in other respects by much ingenuity and force of reasoning. Prof. Tyndall's writ of eject- ment from the studies and researches of physical science ought to have its superscription altered, and instead of being served on theologians and the Christian clergy, so as really to include with them Bacon, Newton, Milton, 92 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. Barrow, Faraday, Whewell, Sedgwick, and most physical discoverers of real eminence, should be addressed to his own allies, the positive philosophers and Nihilists of modern times. The "inductive principle according to Dr Mozley is the expectation that the future will be like the past ; this he regards as a blind instinct, having nothing to do with the reason, and implanted to assist us in the practical conduct of life. Now, in- stead of settling whether this expectation belongs to the rational or irrational part of our nature, there is a prior question whether it exists at all. No one, either peasant, philosopher or divine, really expects that to- morrow will be exactly like to-day in all its events, and the third day exactly like both. As the Bishop of Exeter has well said, in the first Essay (p. 2), " A series of recurring cycles, however conceivable to the logical under- standing, is inconceivable to the spirit, for every later cycle must be different from every earlier by the mere fact of coming after it and embodying its results." No one ever did believe the course of Nature, or any portions of it, to be mere facsimiles, and perfect repe- titions of previous events without any change. On the other hand, to suppose that the events of to-morrow or any later day will be wholly different from the events that are past, with no elements common to both, is incredible and inconceivable. It would imply the annihilation of the actual universe around us, and of ourselves, and the creation of another wholly new. Since no one, then, expects the future to be like the past in all respects, and every one expects it to be like the past in some respects, there is plainly a wide range for the exercise of reason, to decide how far it is probable the likeness will extend, and what will be the degree of unlikeness, variation, and change. The first step in the exercise of reason on this subject, is to renounce as wholly false THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 93 the first principle of the positive philosophy ; that we have to deal with a vast phantasmagoria of phenomena alone, and not with real entities, things, persons and places. The element of permanence, on which we con- fidently and reasonably rely, has this ground, that the persons, the animals, the trees and plants, and the places and material objects of which we have had experience to-day, will form the main part of our experiences to- morrow, unless we travel away from our present to a wholly different locality. There are various changes on which we reasonably calculate amidst this general identity ; death and dissolution in the case of some ; growth and insensible vital progress in all ; and births, introducing fresh persons, animals, and plants, besides those which were known before. There are other changes of a periodic kind. The regular succession of day and night, of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, of seed-time and harvest; and besides these, changes which we cannot precisely predict or anticipate, of a more exceptional kind ; partial or complete catastrophes, such as sudden deaths, earthquakes, explosions, thun- derstorms, destruction of life by lightning, river-floods and oceanic inundations, and other violent and extreme changes, to which Nature is liable in every part of her wide dominion. The cultivation of our reason, and the practical habits of human life, depend on the permanent elements in Nature, and on those quiet and regular changes which come within the range of reasonable expectation and practical forecast. All exceptional changes, which we cannot foresee or anticipate by our knowledge of second causes, come practically under the head of the miraculous ; there is no blinding influence of custom to hinder our minds from passing at once, in these, to the recognition of that Divine Agent, on whom all second causes really depend. 94 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. " Miracles viewed as evidences for a revelation, are unusual events not within the ordinary power of man, nor capable of being foreseen by man's actual knowledge of second causes, and wrought or announced by some professed messenger of God, to confirm the reality of the message; the definition has a negative and a positive side. There must be no second causes, at least within human knowledge, that will account for the event, and there must be an apparent connection with a plain moral object or more professed message from God. Wherever these two conditions meet, we have a case of miraculous evidence; some of these, possibly, by an increase of man's insight into natural changes, or of his power over nature, in some later age might cease to be miraculous. Others may surpass not only human, but super- human power. ..Whenever, through the power of sin, creation has grown opaque to the eyes of men, and the physical course of nature conceals from them the presence of the great Lawgiver, miracles are needed to form an antidote to blind nature-worship, and to reverse the blinding spell of unbelief. This end may be secured either by acts of Divine power suspending or reversing some particular law of nature, or by combining these in such an unusual way, and with such marks of a moral purpose, as to force on reluctant minds the conviction that Nature is only the servant and handmaid of the Living God, the Creator and moral Governor of the universe." (Bible and Modern Thought, p. 76.) The Most High, when He answers the patriarch out of the whirlwind, speaks of these extraordinary changes in Nature, as His own treasures, "which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war " (Job xxxviii. 23). And again, with regard to the bounds of the ocean, the circuits of the earth, the ordinances of heaven, and the lightnings, " Who brake up for it a decreed place, and set bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, here shall thy proud waves be stayed ? Hast thou commanded the morning, and caused the dayspring to know its place, that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, and that the wicked might be shaken out of it ? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee ? Canst thou send lightnings that they THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 95 may go and say unto thee, Here we are ? " All that is vast, unforeseen, unusual, and magnificent in Nature, constitutes the secret treasure-chamber of the Most High, that He may " withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man." The constancy of Nature, or as he styles it, "the perfection and invariability of Nature," with the author of " Supernatural Religion " is a third thing, distinct from both the extremes of Mozley and Tyndall. It is a passive adoption of the third of Mr Spencers three inconsistent theories of the future manifestation of the unknowable. It is neither the necessary character of natural laws, nor the likeness in all respects of the future to the past. The author of " Supernatural Religion " in accepting as a first principle the predicted Creed of the scoffers of the last days, that " all things continue as they were since the fathers fell asleep," under the title of the " glorious perfection and invariability of the order of Nature," seems never to have taken the least pains to analyze or define to himself that constancy of the laws of Nature to which he appeals. It is plain that the end- less variation of natural phenomena, and of the changes of the visible universe, is quite as conspicuous as that constancy of natural law to which the appeal is made. Let us consider the matter a little more closely. There may be said perhaps to be nine great laws or princi- ples which reveal themselves in the constitution and changes of the universe. (i) First, the law of Per- manence ; the continuous existence of all the creatures which God has made, and which come within the range of our observations ; man, animals, and plants, and the innumerable atoms of lifeless matter. Our knowledge refers to things and persons that do really exist, and not to perishable evanescent sensations or phenomena which 96 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. expire in the moment of their birth. The first step then of genuine science, is to renounce the Idealism of Berke- ley, and the Sensationalism of Mr Mill in his " Logic." This first law of permanence in all natural objects, results directly from the fact of creation. THINGS abide and endure, but sensations and phenomena expire from mo- ment to moment. There is an element of permanence in Nature, because "in the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth," and "they continue this day according to His ordinance." (2) The second law is that of Progression, or the successive stages of life and growth in all living things. Thus, all men, animals and plants, beginning with the embryo or the seed, pass on through successive stages to maturity and old age. This law of progress, and continual passage from infant weakness to mature strength and fully-developed life, extends through the whole range of animated being. It has its defined periods, which extend from the ephe- meral life of the insect tribes to the millennial duration of the trees of the forest. (3) A third law, which ac- companies the second, as a kind of negative counterpart or dark shadow, is the law of Death or dissolution, what the apostle calls " the law of sin and death." Life in all plants and animals and even in man himself, after a period of growth or maturity of varying length, is fol- lowed by disease, death, and dissolution of being. This law we accept as a fact, universal within the limits of terrestrial existence, but reason protests against the acceptance of it as a fundamental and absolute law of universal being. (4) Fourthly, there is a law of Pe- riodicity including three main elements, on which the course of human history and the measurement of time depend; i. The period and ceaseless alternation of day and night, resulting from the daily revolution of the earth, and revealing itself in every sunrise and sunset, THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 97 fulfilling the decree, "While the earth remaineth, day and night shall not cease." 2. The second period is that of the natural year, depending on the motion of the earth in its annual orbit, and revealing itself in the succession of the seasons ; this is ratified by the same divine decree, "While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, shall not cease." 3. A third period, less conspicuous than these, but still playing an important part in natural science and all human history, is the month, or lunation of the moon. With these are connected many secondary periods, of a more complex and dependent kind ; the tides and ocean currents, the trade winds and other changes of the ocean and the air. The heavens supply other periods in the revolutions of the planets and their satellites, and binary and variable stars. But all these are very subordinate, in practical importance, to the three fundamental periods of the day, the year and the month. Nearly all the cases of man's limited power of predicting future events depend on this law of periodicity. There are four other natural laws of mutation, de- pendent on the inter-action of the two elements of water and fire. First, the law of evaporation, by which water under the influence of heat evaporates and disappears, and the whole aqueous system of the earth is main- tained. Secondly, the law of freezing, by which water solidifies with cold, and the snows of winter and the mountain glaciers are formed. Thirdly, the law of indu- ration, by which bodies imperfectly solid are hardened, and changed to a rocky texture. Fourthly, the law of combustion, by which, under the application of intense heat, the texture of material masses, either great or small, is completely changed, and they are either en- tirely dissipated or assume wholly altered forms, while B. 7 98 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. life is extinguished in all living things. To these eight main principles or laws of material change, we may add a ninth, the law of occasional catastrophes, or non- periodic changes of an exceptional and peculiar kind. Phenomena of this kind are, explosions, sudden con- flagrations, floods and inundations, shipwrecks, earth- quakes, volcanic eruptions, pestilences, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Though not infractions of natural laws, they are exceptional results of a combination of those laws beyond the range of human foresight, but foreseen and pre-arranged by the great Governor of the universe. The constancy, then, of natural laws is an ambiguous term. The sameness of a law itself is one thing, and the sameness of the conditions under which it operates is something wholly different. While fundamental laws are the same, the conditions under which they operate, and by which their effects are determined, vary ever from hour to hour, from year to year, and still more from age to age. The geological reasonings of Sir C. Lyell are wholly based on a confusion of these two different things ; the sameness of laws, and of the conditions under which they operate. He professes to aim at explaining all geological changes through many past myriads of years, by causes that are now in operation, as inferred from the experience of the past hundred years. The causes themselves, now in operation, are the attractive, cohe- sive and ethereal forces of the actual atoms or masses of matter in the solar system. The action of the law of gravitation, and doubtless of cohesion and electric repulsion also, depends for its amount on the position of the different atoms or masses ; but those positions have changed and are changing from hour to hour, by the action of those laws themselves ; these changes in the course of long ages may have been, and indeed , THE CONSTANT ELEMENT IN NATURE. 99 in the course of long ages must have been, so great and various as practically to annul the sameness of the law, by utter diversity and entire contrast in the con- ditions under which it is exercised. To strive to account for all past changes, whether on the earth's surface, or throughout its entire mass, by "causes now in opera- tion," if by these are meant present laws, operating under present conditions, is an attempt which is sure to fail. It assumes sameness of conditions and circum- stances through myriads of past years, where all ex- perience and reason conspire to demonstrate the fact of a wide, indefinite and almost immeasurable diversity. It is true of the life of each individual man, that he " is cut down as a flower, and fleeth as it were a shadow," while it may be said of the universal frame of Nature, and of the earth itself in past ages of geolo- gical change, and in the promised ages of the world to come, that it " never continueth in one stay." "In the midst of life we are in death," and terrestrial experience since exact records began, is confined within far too narrow bounds, to allow us to determine thereby the working and the limits of the two contrasted laws of life and death. We need for this all the further light which Divine revelation can supply, and in part has supplied. When we go a little further back than three thousand years, we are confronted at once by the two great facts of which unbelievers are " willingly ignorant " the creation of "all things in the beginning by the word of God," and the Flood which came "upon the world of the ungodly." And for the last eighteen hundred years, the whole history of our world has been determined and moulded by those two facts which the Gospel history alone sets before us, the actual resurrection of Christ, and the promise which He has given of a future hour when "all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, IOO SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. and shall come forth." The moral and even the physical history of all Christian nations, that is, of the dominant and ruling part of the earth's population, has been de- termined and moulded by these two great facts, which the sceptic in his blind worship of the constancy of natural causes, would set aside as dreams of superstition. The course of Nature may be said to be compounded of three elements : the fixed or permanent, the periodic, and the ever varying. Man's power of forecast depends on the second. The elements of change and variation outnumber and exceed those of fixity and permanence. The further we recede from present time, the more complete is the change, and the fewer are the unchanged and abiding elements. In less than a hundred years, the whole generation of living men will have passed away, and in a thousand years, only a few forest trees and the everlasting hills will remain, of all the objects that now meet the eyes of man on the surface of the earth. What is permanent and enduring is a very small fraction indeed of that which existed once, and will soon have passed away. For permanence and constancy we need to mount higher, and look to Him who is the Self- existent and the Unchangeable, and to those elements of created being which partake most largely of these Divine attributes ; to the spiritual being of man, in those who, by partaking of a Divine nature, are raised above the sphere of death and corruption, and the darkness of the grave, into a higher region of blissful hope and expecta- tion of an immortal life to come. "He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." CHAPTER XI. THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT INVOLVED IN THE WHOLE COURSE OF NATURE. A DOUBLE confusion of thought with regard to the meaning of Nature, and of miraculous evidence, forms the basis of that monstrous tissue of sophistry, by which the author of " Supernatural Religion " seeks to blot out the light of the Gospel, and of the blessed Dayspring from on high, and to bury the whole world in midnight dark- ness once more. Let us examine the meaning of three cognate terms in connection with the whole course of Nature : the mysterious, the unusual, and the miraculous. Man's knowledge of the course of Nature, and of the universe around him, is a very small fragment of a vast and mighty whole. The little island of human know- ledge is shut in and surrounded by a vast ocean of the unknown, and that unknown ocean is the home of in- finite and unsearchable mysteries. The range of common and ordinary experience includes mainly two things : certain known objects or permanent existences ; human beings, animals, plants, portions of the earth's surface, the atmosphere, the lights of the sky, the sun, moon and stars ; and certain usual changes, of birth, growth and death, and of the circuits of the heavens, and that succes- sion of the seasons, and of day and night, of which he has constant experience. Within these narrow limits, custom, indolence, and moral torpor weaken the sense of mystery. IO2 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. and make it possible for men to forget the Author of their being, the great Cause on whom both they and all things around them depend. Our own existence, and that of the persons and things immediately around us, is itself a great mystery. Whenever we reflect upon it seriously, reason cannot pause, till it reaches the footstool of the throne of God. Since we and things around us exist, there must be self-existence somewhere, a First Cause of all things. Again, not only the existence of the things around us, but the ordinary circuit of changes which they undergo, is highly mysterious. To thoughtful minds "the Heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork/' When the Psalmist considered the sun, moon, and stars, he was lost in ad- miration of the greatness and glory of the Creator, and of His condescending goodness towards the children of men. " What is man, that Thou art mindful of him ? and the son of man, that Thou regardest him ?" The sense of mystery, though it may lie dormant for a time while we abide within the narrow sphere of man's daily experience, wakens up afresh when his understanding returns to him, and he begins to reflect seriously on the wonders of the universe which surround him on every side. Even the known and familiar objects of Nature, and their customary changes, are full of mystery, and ought to lead the thoughts of men upward to the presence of God. Still more is this true of that immense abyss of unknown, undiscovered truth, by which the islet of our actual knowledge of Nature and outward things is shut in and enclosed on every side. The unusual and unfamiliar in Nature has a far wider range than the familiar and the usual. As soon as men travel from place to place they become acquainted with fresh groups of terrestrial objects ; and the men, animals, and plants, of which any one has had a personal experience, THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN NATURE. 1 03 and gained a familiar knowledge, are a very small part of the whole range of earthly existence. Growing study of the skies opens a still wider range of celestial mysteries, of worlds and systems, wholly inaccessible to the foot- steps of man in his present state. The unusual, the un- familiar in Nature, is thus the appointed pathway, by which man is conducted out of the littleness of his own actual ignorance, into the contemplation of the infinite vastness of that universe which is on every side, and is raised to a growing apprehension of the wisdom, power, and goodness of the great Author and Parent of the whole. " All we behold is miracle, but seen so duly, all is miracle in vain." The unusual and unfamiliar, then, is that by which the deadening effect of custom and habit is overcome. It is God's surgical instrument for re- moving the scales and couching the cataract, by which the eyes of the soul are darkened ; till men are content to live on in thoughtless unconcern, in a constant round of day and night, seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, forgetful of all the mysteries of human life, and of the wonderful world around them, never asking, Whence am I, and whither am I going ? What means this gift of life, this " vapour, which appears for a little time and then vanishes away?" It is the unusual and unfamiliar which wakens man from the dull sleep of custom, to draw once more the conclusion of the wisest of men, " Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole business of man." The awakened conscience will then soon pass on to accept the further truth, " God will bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil." But this wide range of the unusual and unfamiliar in Nature, this Divine pathway, which leads man out of his own littleness into fellowship with the full grandeur and IO4 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. magnificence of the universe, admits of a twofold dis- tinction. It includes changes foreseen and anticipated, and changes wholly unforeseen, unexplained, and un- expected. These two classes of the unfamiliar and unusual are very dissimilar in their operation on the human mind. Changes however unusual, which man can foresee and anticipate, because he can trace them to some special concurrence of second causes in usual and daily operation, do not awaken in him the impression of witnessing an immediate operation of Divine power, a direct effect of supernatural agency ; the tendency is rather to enlarge and enrich his impressions of the order and method that reigns in the universe, and of the wide range and complexity of those laws by which the Creator governs and regulates all the works of His hands. The phenomena of a total eclipse of the sun are impressive and startling in the highest degree ; they must arrest and absorb the attention of all who witness them, and they even disturb the accustomed instincts of the lower creatures. But, when observed as a consequence of calculations made beforehand, which determine with the greatest accuracy the moment of its occurrence, and its short continuance, it can produce no such impression as it does amongst savages, on whom it bursts without any warning; an impression of the direct action of some malig- nant demon, blotting out the whole light of heaven in pure malice, and awakening a fear that this may never be restored. On the other hand, the strange occurrence, being foreseen, and referred to a specific combination of second causes, serves to crown and complete the evidence of the wide range of natural laws, and of the constancy of their operation, not only in the regular succession of day and night, and summer and winter, but in an immense variety of celestial changes that, on a superficial view, seem irregular and arbitrary. THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN NATURE. 105 But unusual and unfamiliar changes, not foreseen or anticipated, have an opposite effect. They waken men equally from the trance of custom, but their further lesson is not of the greatness of human knowledge, and the wide extent of natural laws, but on the contrary of the narrow limit of man's knowledge, and the vast range of Divine power, optional and not confined and fettered by any law that man can trace or discover, but still at the free disposal of the Almighty Creator, to hide pride from man, and bring him to worship in humble reverence at the footstool of the Almighty. Now what is the relation of the miraculous, in the scriptural sense of the phrase, to this wide range of un- familiar and unforeseen elements in the course of Nature ? It is a selection from amongst all the changes that might arrest attention, of a limited number, to connect them by some plain and specific marks with a moral pur- pose, and the manifest presence of the Supreme Creator. This connection may be secured in three different ways. First, by an alteration and modification of the instincts of the lower creatures, such as can only be reasonably assigned to a superhuman cause. Secondly, by special powers or gifts imparted to individual persons, the bearers of a Divine message ; or, thirdly, the Most High God may reveal Himself, as a Person, by personal acts of Divine power, or by words of Divine wisdom and goodness, speaking to men face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend, with a presence of condescending love in the midst of the creatures He has made. All these different forms of the miraculous are set before us in the messages of the Bible. First, we have cases of the miraculous control and elevation of instinct in the lower creatures. A wider range of Scripture miracles is that of signs and wonders, wrought by a long series of prophets, IO6 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. commissioned to bear God's messages to the people of Israel, from Moses to Malachi, and the prophets and apostles of the New Testament. Three signs were given to Moses at his first commission, as the pledges and proofs of its reality Then "he put forth his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand... that they may believe that Jehovah, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, hath appeared unto thee."..."Thou shalt take this rod in thine hand, wherewith thou shalt do signs." So St Paul says to the Corinthians, " Truly the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds." But the crowning glory of the Gospel, and the fullest form of miraculous self-manifestation of God, is in the person, ministry and presence on earth of the incarnate Son of God, and the like manifesta- tion of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, in the mani- fold gifts of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and in the later history of the Church. Hence reasons the Apostle, " How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him; God also bearing them witness with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to His own will." Thus, from the insect plagues of Egypt, through the barren fig-tree, and the fishes of the ocean depths, upward to the throne of God, all departments of the creation, and the Supreme Creator Himself, give consenting testimony, by signs, wonders and mighty deeds, to the truth, reality and excellency of the everlasting Gospel of the grace of God to sinful men. Those who venture to defame and denounce this glorious message of redeeming love and grace, as " shocking to their reason and moral sense," and contradicted by " the glorious perfection " of that THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN NATURE. IO*J order of Nature, in which death reigns supreme without a Redeemer ; show merely the depth of moral darkness into which it is possible for men to sink, even in the midst of the noonday brightness of "the Day-spring from on high," the " Sun of Righteousness," the only true and eternal Light of the souls of sinful men. CHAPTER XII. THE THREEFOLD INCONSTANCY OF TERRESTRIAL NATURE. THE free thinkers of the last days, who make the constancy of Nature, within the limits of earthly experi- ence, " since the fathers fell asleep," a warrant for their disbelief of the Creation and the Deluge in time past, and of the solemn warning of a Judgment to come, over- look three great limitations of that constancy to which they appeal as a first principle ; three scientific refutations of their uniformitarian philosophy. In our own days, a whole school of geological speculation, with many disci- ples, has been founded on the misconstruction of a single ambiguous phrase, "causes now in operation." First, the constancy of terrestrial nature for indefinite ages past, and countless ages to come, is disproved and forbidden by the nature of man, and the known course of human parentage and descent. The habitable surface of our earth is of known and definite extent, about fifty millions of square miles. The present population of our globe is either a thousand or twelve hundred millions of human beings ; or from twenty to twenty-four for every square mile, whether barren or fertile, locked in eternal frost or scorched with torrid heat, from the North to the South Pole. This surface is a fixed, invariable quantity, but the law of human life is one of geometrical pro- gression. THE INCONSTANCY OF TERRESTRIAL NATURE. IOQ It is not unlikely that the present population of our globe is ten times greater than at the beginning of the Christian era. With the same rate of increase forward, or decrease backward, the population might be from eight to ten millions, eighteen hundred years before Christ ; now it is quite easy to conceive of an increase a million-fold of the sons of Noah, in five centuries, when the unpeopled earth lay all before them, open for their oc- cupation. But such a relation between the earth's surface and its population is incapable of being produced in- definitely, either backward or forward, except under conditions quite contrary to this assumed constancy of terrestrial nature. One possible alternative is, that the whole race might be placed under a law of comparative barrenness and sterility, so that with few exceptions no parents should have more than one son and one daughter. But this, according to the past experience of human nature, could only be by a constant miracle, operating through successive millennia of the world's history, and therefore flatly opposed to the constancy of laws purely physical. The second alternative is, such an increased prevalence of pestilence, bloodshed, violent war, and other causes of human mortality, as might reverse and nullify from age to age, the tendency, in more peaceable and prosperous times, to a constant increase and overflow of the world's population. The third alternative is one, in which the moral and spiritual elevation of the whole race would bring the higher elements of our nature into such activity, as to overcome all its lower instincts and passions, and prevent all marriages but those guided by a Christian ideal, social forethought, and a full sense of paternal and maternal responsibility. In the absence of these three alternatives, none of which agrees with past experience, the constancy of Nature, instead of con- tinuing unbroken through many millennia of coming time, I 10 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. must terminate in a few centuries, or else require a communication to be opened miraculously with other worlds, to provide space for overflowing multitudes of the earth's population. The laws of human increase wholly exclude a doctrine of the constancy of terrestrial nature, even for a single millennium. They supply also a scientific presumption of great force, against that hypothesis of the extreme antiquity of the human race, for many myriads of years before the time of Moses and Noah, which many have lately espoused, in entire contradiction to the plain teaching of the word of God. A miraculous process by which men and women had been developed out of apes or monkeys, must have been succeeded by a law of unnatural sterility and barrenness, and by a further law of preternatural indolence and inaction, so that through successive ages many gene- rations were born and died like ephemera, without leaving behind them any visible and palpable signs of their existence. All the strongest instincts and charac- teristics of man, as unfolded in the last two or three thousand years, must have been reversed, or wholly wanting, in these thousand or ten thousand generations of pre-Adamite men, bred and reared in the fertile brains of a few inventive speculators of the present or the last century. A second limit to the constancy of terrestrial nature, is that which depends on the earth itself. The earth, as explored by modern science, seems to be throughout its crust, or the parts nearest the surface to the depth of a few miles, an immense cemetery, with strata superimposed one upon another, of systems of plants and animals which have existed in succession arid then passed away, whether through a great number of partial catastrophes and violent changes, or a smaller number almost total. Now, our earth being thus con- THE INCONSTANCY OF TERRESTRIAL NATURE. Ill stituted, a constancy of terrestrial nature for many past myriads of years, and still more, through myriads of past centuries, is a manifest contradiction of the known facts. The disciples of the uniformitarian scheme of geology, in striving to account for all changes of the earth through the eras of geology by causes now in operation, merely deceive themselves with an ambiguous phrase. The causes now in operation are certain atoms of matter which constitute the mass of the earth, and certain laws of terrestrial change, and relations of place, distance, density, rest or atomic motion, and heat, under which the forces operate at the present time. Now the known law of gravitation, and most probably the un- known laws of cohesion and repulsion, are functions of the distances. The force exercised by every atom or body, on every other, varies with every change of dis- tance. The causes in operation ten thousand, or a hundred thousand years ago, if the mass of the earth and its component atoms were the same, and the laws of force the same, must have been different, and could not have been the same as the forces which are in operation now. The theoretical sameness would be that of the atoms composing the mass of the earth, and of the abstract laws, but the forces would probably differ in all the following respects. First, the mean density of the earth must probably have varied from age to age, if it was condensed from a primitive nebula ; and if the moon, which is of less density, was parted from it many millennia ago. Also the mean temperature of the whole has plainly varied from age to age ; the pressure on every stratum from the surface to the centre ; the density of each stratum, resulting from that pressure ; the more or less intense resistance to further condensation, or the modulus of elasticity ; the coast lines, or separa- tions between land and sea, the bed or depression of I I 2 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the ocean ; the heights and position of all the different mountain ranges; the total amount of light and heat received from the sun ; the electric and magnetic con- ditions of every part of the surface, and of the whole mass. These are only a few of the elements which almost certainly have varied from age to age, through- out all past time, since the crust of our earth became solid. To found a scheme of geology, then, on the assump- tion that the causes in operation in all past time, were the same which operate at present in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, is to build a pyramid of guess-work on the foundation of a demonstrable false- hood. At the same time, within a limit of two cen- turies, it may be highly probable that the structure of the earth, and the main elements of its constitution, on which local changes, their nature and direction, would chiefly depend, would not differ much from those which operate at present. But with every century that we remove from the present time, the differences must in- crease ; probably at least in the ratio of the square, and more probably in the ratio of the cube, or some higher power of that interval. For the difference in each of a dozen different elements of the great problem reacts on all the rest, and multiplies their compound effect. Thus it will be probable that the differences a millennium ago, compared with those of a single century, are not tenfold but at least a thousand-fold, and more probably a million times greater. Never surely was a scientific theory built in the dark, on a more demonstrable falsehood, than the uniformitarian doctrine of some modern geologists, at least in its most extreme form. At present, the known and really scientific elements of the vast problem, to determine what was the state, configuration and chemical structure, of every part of the earth's crust, and its fauna and flora THE INCONSTANCY OF TERRESTRIAL NATURE. 113 to the depth of one mile from the sea level, a thousand or ten thousand years ago are only as one in a million, compared with the data which are purely conjectural and still unknown. The constancy then of terrestrial nature in past ages, is excluded and disproved by the whole structure of the crust of the earth, as far down as science has been able to penetrate. The lesson taught is the very opposite ; inconstancy, change and perpetual varia- tion, only with some fixed and permanent elements in the midst of a vast series of indefinite cKanges. But the elements of permanence bring out into fuller relief the predominence and manifold complexity of the causes of change which were in ceaseless operation. The whole structure then of the earth's crust, from the Laurentian strata of Canada upwards, is one continuous protest against that doctrine of the constancy of terrestrial nature, which the scoffers of the last days make the excuse for their rejection of the statements of Scripture with regard to the Creation and the Flood, and of its solemn warning of a future Day of Judgment, when the earth and the works therein shall be burned up and dissolved, and be followed by new heavens and a new earth according to the Divine promise. A third proof of the inconstancy of terrestrial nature may be drawn from the relation of our earth and its whole system to the sun, the great source of light, heat, and central attraction. On no reasonable view can we assume the thorough constancy of terrestrial nature, wholly dependent as it is on the sun, for immense and limited ages, either in the past or the future. In fact, several different theories and conjectures are prevalent among scientific men on this subject, and all of them alike are incompatible with an unlimited constancy of terrestrial nature. One very prevalent view, at the present time, is that the sun is a great spendthrift, send- B. 8 114 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. ing out his light and heat throughout space never to return to him, a prodigal wasting his substance in riotous living, the stock of primitive energy on which the light, warmth, and life of the whole system depend. They predict that in ten, twenty, or four hundred mil- lions of years, this stock will probably be exhausted, in which case the whole system must issue in a glacial period, very different from that which geologists think they have deciphered in the boulder drift age; and the whole planet remain covered for ever with a frozen ocean, or mountain glaciers, w r ith all life extinct, for evermore. This is the basis of the first of Mr Spencers three incompatible theories, or a priori conclusions, with regard to the future mode and scheme of action of the UNKNOWABLE through millions of ages to come. Half a dozen kindred theories might be named. The sun is speeding fast through the realms of space. He is rapidly losing energy, light and heat, by sending out his rays through all surrounding space. He is gaining fresh light and heat by the constant dropping in of streams of meteors. Or again, by a ceaseless condensation of his mass from age to age. Many think that his present light, heat, and mass have been attained in millions of years by condensation from a vast nebular cloud. Others conjecture that as the sun and Sirius are now approach- ing each other at the rate of some hundreds of millions of miles each year, they will probably, in less than a million of years, end their course by a violent collision, which certainly would involve the destruction of both systems ; of the Sirian planets, if any, and of the earth and all its sister planets as far as Neptune. Thus modern men of science offer us almost as many alternative theories of change, inconstancy, and probable destruction in store for the sun, as they have detected dark lines in the solar spectrum itself. THE INCONSTANCY OF TERRESTRIAL NATURE. 115 When therefore we consider the nature of man as a living being, the constitution of the earth's crust, and the probable past and future history of the sun, we have a threefold refutation of the maxim of the scoffers of the last days. " Since the fathers fell asleep, all things con- tinue as they were from the beginning of the Creation," and will so continue for ever. They further affirm that "the universe is unlimited and immeasurable, it is eternal and it is infinite," so that in fact there was no creation, and there has been no beginning, and will be no end 1 . Thus the physical theory of the bankruptcy of the sun some millions of years hence, has been anticipated in the higher sphere of morals. In the souls of some modern atheists a state of moral darkness has been reached already, in which the " Sun of Righteousness," the true Light of the world, is quenched in utter darkness. 1 Haeckel's " History of Creation," p. 324. CHAPTER XIII. THE WITNESS OF ALL NATURE TO THE BEING AND PERFECTIONS OF GOD. THE author of "Supernatural Religion " in his Intro- duction, professes to deplore the general eclipse of faith, and the inconsistencies of those Christian Divines, who pick out scraps and fragments from the Christian Reve- lation, and reject the rest, or dilute it into seeming agreement with modern currents of unbelieving thought. Yet the one great object of his work is to render that eclipse total, permanent and irreversible, and his chief implement in this melancholy task, is a gathering up and collecting into one focus of those concessions and partial surrenders of divine truth of which he complains. The apparent success is almost complete. The impres- sion left after reading his first chapter, is, that if Nature or revelation yield any evidence for the existence and perfections of a personal God, it has been so effectually disguised, frittered away, mixed up with confused thought, and surrendered or contradicted in detail, as to be robbed of all moral power, and practically to be equivalent to the entire absence of all real evidence whatever. The first step of his argument is a statement that faith in miracles and the supernatural is almost entirely rejected by con- tinental divines and philosophers, so that its defence is made to rest on English writers alone, and certainly THE WITNESS OF NATURE. I I 7 the admissions or contradictions which he quotes from these, are of a very startling kind. The concessions he affects to condemn, constitute the whole sinews and strength of his own argument. I will first state separately the negative elements, by the union of which the testi- mony of Nature to a God is wholly abolished, and then reverse the process, and expound briefly what is the cumulative force of that testimony. A first negative element is borrowed from Sir W. Hamilton and Dean Mansel. They both in their pe- culiar phraseology, do not hesitate to affirm "that the kind of cause we denominate a Deity is exclusively given in the phenomena of mind, and that the phenomena of matter do not warrant any inference to the existence of a God." (S. R., p. 55.) Here at one blow the whole universe, except the liv- ing generation of men, is pronounced to be destitute of any voice to bear witness to the existence of its Author, His power, wisdom, or goodness. In the second part, the author adopts the creed of the ancient Sadducee, and counts it a sufficient proof of the blind credulity of the apostles, that they believed in a resurrection, in angels and spirits. This increases the effect of the first admission, and confines the testimony for a God exclu- sively to the living generation of men upon earth, since it is held that no other minds, either spirits of men or angels, have any existence. The testimony, even of these, is limited to their minds alone, and excludes wholly their bodily organization. Meanwhile, another school of sceptical philosophers are busily engaged in striving to prove that mind is nothing whatever but a product of material organization, and that the phenomena of mind are only a sub-province of the phenomena of matter, and that the mind of man in fact is only a condensed bundle of transformed solar I 1 8 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. force. Dr Mozley next makes the strange admission that " the argument from miracles for the truth of a revelation begins and ends with an assumption ; we assume the existence of a personal Deity prior to the proof of miracles in a religious sense... the question of miracles is thus shut up within the enclosure of one assumption, that of the existence of a God... When we state this, it is replied that this very conception of God as a Personal, Omnipotent Being, is one for which there is no evidence in material nature. 5 ' Thus revelation, real or supposed, merely assumes His existence, and proves nothing; the idea it is said further, has never been practically derived from the Study of Nature, but has resulted from a supposed revela- tion, and that the philosophers who held a universal first cause never thought of that cause being a proper object for worship. He holds however that though the idea was never actually derived from reason and the works of Nature, and revelation never proves it, but begins by assuming it, still the idea, once possessed, is seen to rest on some ground of reason. This ground is thus explained, that when we see marks of design in Nature issuing in the production or existence of personal beings, " this implies a personal being at the othef end of the chain of causes ; from personality at one end, we may infer personality at the other. We cannot suppose that the existence of that which is contrived can be per- sonal, and the contriver a blind, irrational force." (B. L., pp. 24, 99.) This is certainly true, but the truth is so hemmed in by needless limitations, that the whole argument seems in danger of vanishing away. All Nature, except some individual human minds, is owned to yield no evidence for the being of a God. All revelation, true Or false, is owned to yield no evidence or proof, but to begin and end with assuming it to be true. If phy- siologists were to succeed in reducing mind itself to be THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 119 merely brain or cerebral organization, then the sole evidence for the Divine existence, according to these writers, would wholly disappear. But this is not the last step of surrender. We are carried still further by Dr Westcott's admission, apparently borrowed from Mansel and Hamilton, but expressly rejected by Dr Mozley, " the only approximately adequate conception we can form of a Divine Being is in the form of a contradiction." ("Gospel of Resurrection," p. 21, S. R. 69.) Now a contradiction is to say a thing, and straight- way to unsay it. If then human minds alone, with or without revelation, yield us any evidence for the exis- tence of a God, and the only idea of a God of which they yield any evidence, is made up of contradictions, a series of assertions completed by as many more as- sertions which contradict them, such evidence must be a mere zero. These human minds, which alone furnish any evidence for the existence of God, furnish no evidence of any real being whatever, but only of a blank of total darkness within them, as well as in the universe around them. Such is the logical issue of these various concessions and surrenders of truth when combined together. Let us now turn to the clear light and plain testi- monies of the word of God. " The invisible things of God from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead " (Rom. i. 20). The first step of the proof, is our knowledge of our own existence, and of that of our fellow men, and of the various objects and real existences of the world around us. From this real a posteriori knowledge, however limited and partial, of an actual universe, reason at once infers concerning each of these, that it must either be self-existent, or 120 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. formed by a self-existent Being. But all the things we know by experience, including ourselves and our fellow men, have many features of change, weakness, littleness, passiveness or recent birth, which exclude the notion that any one of them is a self-existent being, the cause of all other beings. Since then there must be a self-existent Cause, distinct from each and all the particular beings, things, or persons we know by ex- perience, what light do these supply with regard to the nature of that First Cause ? Our knowledge of all actual things is joined with a clear conviction, that there are many possible beings besides those which are actual, and that even of real existences, those known to us are only a very small part. Our knowledge of the First Cause, to be complete and exhaustive, would require a double extension of our thoughts, from the beings actually known to us to all the unknown, and from all actual existences known or unknown, so as to include also all unknown possibilities of being. Only then do we attain to a full conception of the universe of non self-existent being on the one side, or of the self-existent uncreated First Cause, the Author of all actual and possible creatures, on the other. What then are the steps by which we may rise from our limited and partial knowledge of ourselves and things around us, to a right and true con- ception, of the great First Cause ? There is no creature great or small, living or lifeless, which is not able to contribute some spark of light towards this, the final cause of its own creation, a fuller manifestation of the great Creator. Such is the consenting voice both of reason and of the word of God. " All Thy works shall praise Thee, O Lord." Some of those works may be mute for a time, or men may be deaf and fail to catch their heavenly melody. "Every creature which is in heaven and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 121 in the sea, heard I saying, " Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." A first prin- ciple of reason is that the Creator may be greater and nobler, but cannot be weaker and more imperfect than any of His creatures. The nature of each creature then, is a kind of inferior limit to our conception of the great Creator. We must sum up the separate elements of power, intelligence, or goodness of any kind, which each creature supplies, excluding in this summation whatever attaches to each of limitation, feebleness, littleness, and natural or moral evil, through this summation to gain the nearest approach to an adequate conception of the nature and character of the First Cause. First, what materials or elements for such a summa- tion, does matter and the whole lifeless universe supply ? We can resolve that universe imperfectly in our thoughts, into an immense multitude of atoms ; and these, so far as our present knowledge extends, are of two opposite kinds, self-attractive matter, and self-repulsive ether. All distinct and definite material objects are composed chiefly of the first ; and light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and all the more subtle influences of nature, usually classed as the imponderables, depend on the other. Now what is the testimony of this material world, by its bare exist- ence, apart from all the special features of its cosmical arrangement, with regard to the existence, works, and perfections, of the self- existent Being ? First, they bear a distinct and clear testimony that they are not them- selves, or any one of them, the self-existent Cause and Author of the universe. Not one of these atoms could possibly create itself, still less the trillions of its fellow atoms ; nor could any one of them choose for itself whether it should be an atom of matter or of ether. Two elements, it seems, must co-exist in each : a force, 122 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. or law of force, by which it acts on many or all the rest, and a place, or position, where it is at each particular moment of time. One of these is an active and the other a passive element of its being. The law of force and its variation can never determine itself, but must have been determined by the will and choice of the great Creator. The position, the passive element of its being, that it is in one particular spot or point of infinite space, in contrast to a threefold infinity, of other spots or points of infinite space, must equally be referred to the will, choice, and appointment, of the First Cause alone. We cannot conceive either a point or a mass of matter placed nowhere : but the place where it is, is a contrast to an infinite number of places where it might have been and is not. This contrast between the one actual place of each material object, and millions of possible places, where it might have been and is not, when multiplied by the whole number of those objects, and of their component parts, forms a vast and infinite abyss which separates our conception of the actual world, from that of a fatal necessity. For as Newton says, " blind necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things." From this first truth, that matter is created, and not self-existent, we may infer a second truth, the Divine Omnipresence. The Being who created all these count- less atoms, must be present wherever those atoms exist, and the words of the Psalmist must be absolutely true, " Thou knowest my downsitting, and mine uprising ; Thou understandest my thought afar off... whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there. And if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there ; if I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 123 uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." But a farther truth taught by the material universe and the atoms of lifeless matter, is the unity of a vast scheme of Providence which reaches to the farthest range of the stellar universe. This is why Mr Mill says, that " Monotheism is the only Theism which can claim for itself any footing on scientific ground ; every other supernatural theory is in- consistent either with the carrying on of the government of the universe according to fixed laws, or with the inter-dependence of each series of natural antecedents on all the rest, which are the two most general results of science." (P. E., p. 133.) The law of gravitation, reaching as far as the re- motest binary stars, proves a unity of plan, extending throughout a sphere with a radius of several billions of miles, and thus confirms strongly our conception of all material things, as creatures of one great super-mundane Intelligence. But the same facts teach a further lesson with regard to the range and vastness of that supreme Intelligence. The course from moment to moment, of each atom of matter, as determined by that law alone, depends on the position and distance, at the same moment, of every other atom in the universe. Now to know all these with infinitesimal accuracy at any one moment, would almost require Omniscience. But, sup- posing the fact known for that moment, what is the knowledge that would be required to calculate, according to that law, the motion of a single atom for a single hour? It would infinitely surpass the combined powers of all the ablest mathematicians who have ever lived, from Pythagoras down to Adams and Leverrier. The number of the atoms of matter included within the range of that law, must be many trillions, and probably many trillions of trillions. But it is notorious that the problem of tracing out the motions and courses of three 124 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. spheres or bodies only, when their initial places and motions are given, and they are acted on by the law of gravitation alone, baffles the efforts of all modern analysis to solve it, except by imperfect approximations. How clearly then, from the world of matter alone, which according to the foolish dictum of Sir W. Hamilton and Dean Mansel, can " teach us nothing whatever with regard to the cause we denominate a Deity," are we forced irresistibly to the conclusion that the Supreme Intelligence, who has ordained the law of gravitation, and thereby bound in unity countless worlds, and who is able to enforce that law in an ever changing uni- verse through successive ages, must correspond to the description of patriarchs, apostles, and prophets, " I know that no thought can be withholden from Thee." Job xlii. 2. "Thou knowest all things." Joh. xxi. 17. "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it." Ps. cxxxix. Let us pass on from the evidence of the Being and perfections of God, taught us even by the world of matter, to the higher and fuller message conveyed to us by all the varieties of living creatures, and most of all by man, created at first by God in His own image. It must be remembered that the world of matter itself cannot be known or studied without one mind at least, by whom that process of inquiry shall be carried on. The ques- tion, therefore, can never really arise, what lessons could be learned from the material universe wholly apart from the experience and consciousness of any mind whatever. But if the question be asked, What lessons may be learned from the material universe by any one rational intelligence, studying it without assistance from other minds ? Then the rational inferences from the contem- plation of the material universe cannot be confined to the intellectual perfections of God only, but must include THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 125 some knowledge of His moral perfections also. In the study of Nature we must have a Person at the lower end of the scale, before that study can begin, and there- fore the requirement of Dr Mozley is already satisfied. If there were only one person, one conscious intelligence capable of discerning moral truth, and recognizing a law of duty, this would be as sure a warrant for ascribing moral perfections to the author of that universe, as if there were a thousand such beings ; but of course the larger the number of known beings, endowed with these higher attributes and faculties, and the more important the influence which these have exercised on the whole course of known physical change, and the actual state of the world in which we live, the stronger is the pre- sumption for the prominence which moral truths, motives and aims may be expected to have from age to age in the whole scheme of universal being. That prominence, however, in the eye of reason must depend mainly on the essential dignity of moral truth, duty, and moral goodness in themselves, and only in a secondary degree on the number of individuals, within the range of our knowledge, who have this nobler and higher gift of moral being. Let us next consider the further inferences which may be drawn from a contemplation of the wide range of living creatures, plants, and animals, exclusive of man or creatures endowed with reason, and voluntary choice as well as life. Here we must seek to abide in the clear daylight of conspicuous facts, and avoid losing ourselves in the mists and jungle of modern physiology and meta- physics. What foothold for reason or inference of any kind can we find in this vast range of the living universe, by starting from Mr Spencer's proposed definition of life? "Life," he instructs us, "is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes, simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences." 126 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. Every word here is either an ambiguity, an unexplained assumption, or a self-contradiction. First, life is a com- bination of changes ; it is not the source or cause of changes, but those changes themselves ; how many of these changes then are needed to satisfy the definition? Through how many changes must a living plant or ani- mal have passed in order to be really alive ? Again, of what are they to be the changes? Of some millions of atoms, which had pre-existed for countless ages before the birth of this living creature, and have been changing ever since through every moment of their existence ? Next, life is said to be a "combination" of these changes. How is this possible ? How can these changes combine at all, since any one state of this set of atoms must have ceased before the next comes into being ? Life then it seems, is a combination of past, present, and future changes of countless atoms, all co-existing at the same moment. But if life is a combination of past, present, and future changes, who or what is to combine them ? The theory and definition are framed to exclude the need of any reference to a Creator. The phrase itself, " persistence of force/' instead of its preservation, is framed to avoid the risk of suggesting an idea foreign to this atheistic creed, of a Divine Preserver and Sustainer of all things. The definition further excludes the unity of a living plant or animal, distinct from the atoms that compose it. Do the changes combine themselves ? The successive changes then must either all exist before they combine, or combine themselves before they exist. Or is the com- bination nothing more than the bare fact of the successive occurrence of these different states ? What claim can such a series have to the title of combination ? Life again is a " definite " combination of changes. By whom or what is this to be defined ? What severs these special changes from an innumerable multitude of other changes THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 127 adjacent to them in place, and contemporaneous with them in time, which it is meant to exclude ? The changes which are to constitute life, when they have been com- bined, without any combiner, and defined, in the entire absence of any power able to define them, are further said to be " simultaneous and successive." This can be no special character of vital changes, but must be true alike of the changes of all things, living and lifeless. The millions of atoms cannot fail to have simultaneous changes, since they all co-exist throughout their suc- cessive changes. Those changes cannot be "heterogen- eous," or unlike in kind, unless we introduce surrep- titiously that idea of definite kinds or species, which forms one of the plainest elements in the Bible account of creation, but which it is one main object of the modern theory of evolution wholly to exclude. Let us return from this morass of obscure verbiage, where our feet sink deeper and deeper in contradiction at every step, when we attempt to tread upon it, and contemplate the facts themselves. A living plant or animal implies and requires a unit of some kind, associated with an organized system, composed of a vast multitude of material or ethereal atoms, in some special relation to that unit and to each other. The first question is, what is the characteristic feature of these various units, living plants and animals, as distinct from the multitude and manifoldness of the structures of material atoms with which they are asso- ciated ? Vegetable and animal life, except in their lowest forms, have many features of contrast with each other, and in each class the varieties are almost innumerable ; but in both, some kind or degree of spontaneity, or the power to originate certain changes at its own choice or pleasure, seems inseparable from the conception of life. The power of each living thing to originate changes 128 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. directly, is limited to its associate organism ; indirectly through the changes of its own organism, it may produce changes in other living creatures and in the lifeless world around. The amount or range of power to effect change may vary immensely, from the animalcule, of which there are millions in a drop of water, to the elephant, the hippo- potamus, the whale, or the mammoth. But a power of spontaneous motion seems as clearly revealed in the most minute, as in the most ponderous, and massive. Spontaneity then, or a power to vary the motions or positions of its own frame within certain limits, by an internal choice or preference, not determined from with- out, but depending on its own secret nature, seems to be the essential and defining feature of life in all living things. In plants, this character is more obscure and less developed than in animals, yet we speak in- stinctively of a tree struggling towards the light, and of the sun-flower as turning to seek and meet the rays of the sun, and of the sensitive plant, as shrinking, by a kind of instinct, from any contact of foreign bodies. Spontaneity, or action not determined by mechanical laws, seems to be a main feature in the whole universe of life, from the animalcule, detected only by the microscope, up to man himself, the lord and head of the visible universe. It is thus a startling assertion of Prof. Tyndall, in the advocacy of his statement in the Belfast address, that "modern science has bound nature fast in the bonds of fate to an extent before unsus- pected," that from Galileo and Newton to our own time, while eager eyes have been pondering the phenomena of the universe, "Nothing has ever intimated that nature has been crossed by spon- taneous action, or that a state of things at any time existed which could not be rigorously deduced from the preceding state." THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 1 29 One would have thought that to watch the sportive flutterings of a single butterfly on a summer day amidst the flowers and trees, or the gambols of a kitten, when it coils itself up for rest on some favoured spot, or starts up suddenly into fresh and free activity of manifest enjoyment, would be enough to shew the utter baseless- ness of this statement. Life, in all its forms, is one vast range of activity, chequered and intersected by countless conditions and laws of a mechanical and purely material kind, but intertwined in every part, and through the whole range of being, with the elements of choice, freedom, spontaneity ; and this vital action is determined in all its details by reasons and motives which are not mechanical, which indicate the internal preferences of conscious or semi-conscious existences, that is of things that live and feel and choose. The range of choice in many of these creatures is almost infinitesimally small, but internal choice and preference, and activity depend- ing upon it, seems almost inseparable from the very conception of a living creature. What then are the main inferences with regard to the Divine nature, which in the view of sound reason, result inevitably from the contemplation of the whole universe of living things ? The general conclusion must be that the great First Cause possesses in the fullest measure, and to the great- est extent, every excellence which may be seen in any of His creatures, but free from the endless imperfections and limitations and negative characters by which those different creatures are distinguished from, and contrasted with, each other. We are bound then to ascribe to the First Cause, in our thoughts, the highest conceivable degree of spontaneity, or freedom from bondage to cir- cumstances and physical determination from without, and a mode of activity as far removed as is possible or conceivable from dull, blind, unalterable, and fatal B. 9 130 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. necessity, without lapsing into the other extreme of mere caprice, or changes and mutations devoid of any kind of reason from within or from without ; the highest degree of liberty consistent with our ascribing to Him reason in its fullest perfection, and all-perfect goodness. Again, since we see throughout the whole universe of living things, instincts of various kinds, often of ex- treme complexity, which tend to the preservation of the individual life, and in many cases to the preservation of an association or fraternity of living things, as in the case of the hive-bee, and the ant, and colonies of the beaver, so we may reasonably attribute to the Author and Source of all these countless instincts, a will or purpose tending to the preservation or bettering of the whole community of living things, subject only to those conditions which may be involved in the nature of the gifts bestowed on each part, or such as may be involved in the nature of the whole, as a universe of derived and dependent existence. Each part of this universe, and all parts combined, must form a contrast in many unknown respects, to the perfect, indefectible goodness of the self-existent God from whom their existence is derived. Subject to this condition, the range and extent of which we can never determine by a priori reasoning, we may with the highest reason infer from the count- less instincts in the living universe of lower creatures, and their common tendency to the preservation of in- dividual life, or of partial communities of living things, the largest measure of the like instinct in the First Cause and Author of the great world of life, tending towards the preservation, comfort, and well being of the whole. Thus every sentient and intelligent creature has the highest warrant of reason for faith in the overflowing bounty and benevolence of God ; and for following the instruction of the Apostle, to those who suffer, -"to com- THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 131 mit the keeping- of their souls to God in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator." What conclusions with regard to the existence and perfections of God may be drawn from a contempla- tion of the moral universe ; that is, of all mankind, crea- tures endued with reason and choice, and with a power of discernment between good and evil, created at first in the image and after the likeness of God ? The first and simplest conclusion is of this kind. We are bound to ascribe to the Supreme God, a wisdom greater and more vast than the combined intelligence of the wisest and most gifted of His creatures ; a knowledge of mathe- matical truth far greater than that attained by man, from the earliest Greek geometers down to the latest French, German and British analysts, combined and summed up in one prodigious and superhuman intelligence ; and instinctive possession of a wide range of mathemati- cal truths, theorems, and certainties, compared with which their combined discoveries are only like a drop out of the abysses of an inexhaustible and infinite ocean. We are bound also to ascribe to Him as the supreme, uncreated Wisdom, a like pre-eminence over the com- bined knowledge of the various forms of animal life attained by modern naturalists, and over the knowledge of past changes in the depths of earth and ocean reached by all modern geologists. This is the true description of the uncreated Wisdom by the wisest of men : "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. When there were no depths, I was brought forth ; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth : while as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I was there : when He set a compass upon the face of 92 132 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the depth : when He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His command : when He appointed the foundations of the earth : then I was with Him; I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him ; rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth ; and my delights were with the sons of men." (Prov. vm. 22 31.) And we are bound to complete this sublime description of the uncreated Wisdom, who was w T ith the Father before all worlds, by the further statement of the Apostle, concerning this beloved Son of God, " in whom we have redemption through His blood," that " HE is BEFORE ALL THINGS, AND BY HlM ALL THINGS CONSIST," and "He is the Beginning, the First-born from the dead ...in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (Col. i. 14 18; n. i 3.) Reason, from a contemplation of the moral universe, compels us further to ascribe to the Creator, a moral goodness greater than that of the best man whom we have personally known, and greater even than the col- lective goodness, purified from all adherent faults and imperfections, of all the best men of whom we have learned by the testimony of others, and whose names meet us, as recorded in the ample scroll of human history from the beginning of time. The various sparks of goodness, benevolence, and virtuous activity, that have appeared separately in a Howard, a Livingstone, a Washington, an Aurelius ; in Cato, Socrates, Plato, Noah, Daniel, Job, Lycurgus, Justinian or Moses, must all, when combined and freed from their several imper- fections, faults and errors, be far exceeded by the good- ness of that Divine Being who is the secret fountain from which flows forth every rivulet of human virtue ; the Sun of Righteousness, to whose uncreated and in- exhaustible brightness all the stars of human and created excellence " repairing, in their golden urns draw light." THE WITNESS OF NATURE. 133 Full and various indeed is the testimony to His own greatness and Divine perfections, to His eternal power and Godhead, which the living God has provided for Himself in the things which are made. Truly says the Apostle, " He left not Himself without witness in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and glad- ness." There is indeed a strange blinding power, which may conceal the bright evidences of wisdom and good- ness in the whole range of creation, from the hearts of sinful men, an effect which in its worst and most extreme forms can only be fitly described by three dif- ferent figures of the Word of God. First, the second woe, when " there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke out of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit." The second, the "mist and darkness" which fell in Cyprus upon the unhappy Elymas, when he sought to turn away the deputy from the faith ; and the third, the same Apostle's description of the secret cause of the rejection and contempt of the Gospel by its open op- posers, " In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of -God, should shine unto them." The author of "Supernatural Religion," while ex- tolling the " glorious perfection " of the order of nature, which Mr Mill has so oppositely described, ventures to affirm of this glorious Gospel, "It is difficult to say whether the details of the scheme, or the circumstances which are supposed to have led to its adoption, are more shocking to reason or to moral sense." That "it is derogatory to the power and wisdom of the Creator, and degrading to the idea of His moral perfection." (P. 49.) 134 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. So thick is the darkness and mist which has fallen upon him with regard to that very message, of which the apostle, who had been caught up into Paradise, assures us, that therein "unto principalities and powers in heavenly places are made known by the church the manifold (many-varied) wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Jesus Christ our Lord," and of which he solemnly proclaims that "therein are hid all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge." CHAPTER XIV. THE CENTRIFUGAL AND CENTRIPETAL TENDENCIES OF FALSE AND GENUINE SCIENCE. A KIND of rival to the Christian doctrine of Creation, with its corollary in the unity of the whole universe, has been devised of late in the doctrine of Evolution. This, however loudly extolled, is very vague and indefinite, so that many of its disciples seem to attach no definite meaning to the phrase. Mr Spencer, one of its great admirers and patrons, confesses that it ought rather to be called a doctrine of involution, that is of the winding up and involving, rather than evolving, the great complex cotton- ball of the universe. By his definition, Evolution is really nothing more or less than a process of cooling, by which a primitive nebula, excessively rare at first, is condensed, and all the heat and motion generated by that condensa- tion are dissipated and lost in infinite space ; so that the result would be a great sluggish central mass, a kind of monstrous extinguished sun. If we strive to define the doctrine, as a substitute or rival for the doctrine of crea- tion, we must view it as shewing the necessary conse- quences of physical change in the whole universe of life and lifeless matter, when once the conceptions of a Creator, of a creation, of a Supreme and Guiding Intelli- gence, and all specific laws ordained by such a conscious intelligence have been set aside and excluded. Evolution will thus express the results of motion and perpetual 136 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. change in all actual existences, when special acts of crea- tion, and all special laws instituted by the wisdom of the Creator, have been excluded. Then the universe will exhibit to us nothing but a Proteus without reason or intelligence, going through a series of endless changes, without conscious design, or any intelligible end and purpose in those changes. Now what must be the demonstrable result of an evolution consisting in endless motion, without any guiding law or superior intelligence ? Let us conceive a universe consisting of an almost infinite number of mate- rial atoms; some associated in the forms of living things; the greater part not so aggregated, guided by no intelli- gence, and subject to no optional law appointed by such an intelligence, but simply moving on continually without rest, under the first law of motion alone. That law is that every atom or body, unless deflected by some force, will persevere in its actual motion uniformly in a straight line. To trace the result of Evolution, we must take every point or spot in which there is any atom of matter in the universe, and draw from it a straight line in the direction of the actual motion of that atom, reach- ing out infinitely into empty space. The effect then of evolution must be to transfer all the atoms of the uni- verse from their actual places, to some spot in the further extension of these lines, and to transform the whole into some semblance of an immense hedgehog piercing in- finite space with mathematical lines diverging from each other in all conceivable directions. The atoms in no finite time would reach any end of their expanding and diverging progress, but this must lead them farther and farther apart from each other, s'ince the directions of their actual motion are infinitely various. If any two were moving in parallel lines, and there were the least difference in their velocities, they might approach for a EVOLUTION. 137 short time, but must ultimately diverge, and be wider and wider apart. What then must be the result of an evolution in which there is simply continuous and inter- minable change, with no guiding and controlling law ? The whole universe would expand and separate into a rarity greater than that of the most rarified gas, and every part of it, severed from the rest, would be lost for ever in outer darkness. To escape from this inevitable result of a doctrine of pure evolution, we must re-introduce by stealth, some of the elements which the atheist professes himself able to dispense with ; either special acts of creation, or special laws ordained by a superior intelligence, or other theistic elements, introduced by mere caprice or blind guess- work, or from the inventive imagination of the specu- lator, to disguise the utter nakedness of a theory of evolution pure and simple. We must re-introduce the notion of a guiding intelligence, capable of choosing some one out of many alternative laws or positions, and of guiding changes towards definite and rational results. As for instance, a law of "natural selection," when there is no intelligence capable of an act of choice, and when selection of any kind must be a self-contradiction and a chimera. Or again, a law of the " survival of the fittest," when life has been pronounced to be a combina- tion of successive changes without any one to combine them, and any survival would be a continuance of one series of changes of ever-changing atoms, longer than another series, while neither series has any limit but a past or future eternity. Siirvival is impossible in a scheme of the universe where there is nothing but sets of atoms that have existed from eternity, and will co-exist for ever. A survival of the fittest is equally a contra- diction in the scheme of the atheist. There can be no degrees in the fitness of a set of atoms to fulfil any 138 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. definite purpose, when a creator, and special acts of creation, have been set aside as dreams of superstition; and a new term, "persistence of Force," is expressly in- vented, lest the phrase, preservation of Force, should let in the unwelcome idea of a Supreme Intelligence, who is at once the Creator of all things, and the Preserver of men. These phrases then are only fig-leaves stolen from the trees in the Paradise of God, that field where fitness, choice, life, intelligence, and beauty, are prodigally re- vealed on every side, so as to disguise the utter nakedness of a creed which admits no choice, or fitness, or moral beauty, no creative power, or providential wisdom. This is the latest birth of the spirit of unbelief, in which a uni- verse that had its beginning some way or other, without any First Cause or Beginner of its existence, is left by its unknown author, to evolve or involve itself through interminable ages of change ; and the wisdom of the Creator, if there be a Creator, is supposed to be best maintained, by denying His interference with the great machine which has proceeded from Him, when He has once set it going. He is thus likened to the bird which He singles out as lowest in the scale of animal in- telligence. " The ostrich which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them," and whose conduct He thus describes : "She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers ; her labour is in vain without fear ; because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath He imparted to her understanding." (Job xxxix. 13 17.) What is that glorious perfection and invariability of the order of nature, which the author before us says, is emphatically contradicted by the Christian doctrine of redemption, and by the Resurrection of Christ, and the promise of the life to come after death ? It consists in ATTRACTION AND APPETENCY. 139 imputing to the only wise God that very course of con- duct towards the noblest works of His hands, which He Himself pronounces to be the proof of a folly and lack of understanding which falls below the average standard of the birds of the air. There is a tendency towards unity in all true Science. No part of it can be wholly isolated from the rest ; any branch broken off from the common stem of truth withers and ceases to grow. The first and highest source of this unity is found in the doctrine of creation. The MANY are all made by ONE. The multitude of derived exist- ences, with all their laws, circumstances and conditions of being, are derived from the will of the one Perfect arid Self-existent Being. We find a reflection of this truth, this unity of all creation, as created, in the law of uni- versal gravitation. The usual mode of expressing this law seems to me doubly defective. It seems to place the action of every atom of matter in every place where it is not, and to represent the nature of that action as a selfish tendency to attract and absorb every other being or atom into itself. Newton did not give this name to the law he discovered. He expressly states it as capable of three different modes of expression, Impulse, Attraction, or Appetency. When A tends towards B, it is surely more natural to regard A than B as the seat and centre of that tendency, and that the tendency is not that of B to pull A into itself, but of A to transport itself out of its actual place, and unite itself with B. The law then of attraction is really a law of universal appetency, a tendency of each material atom to link itself in turn with every other atom of the material uni- verse, to travel out of itself into nearer fellowship with each of its neighbours in turn, and that in proportion to their nearness. It is thus analogous in the lowest field of nature to appetite in higher creatures, and to the moral I4O SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. law of universal love in those still higher. This great law, always observed in the material world, and existing in a higher form, whether obeyed or disobeyed, in the moral world also, is plainly a uniting principle that secures evermore the unity of the material and the moral universe. The same unity may be seen further in the great law of subordination. There are not only many creatures of one common Creator, but the multi- tude of each class of creatures seems to increase with our descent in the scale of being. The mass of dull lifeless matter in the universe immensely exceeds, so far as our knowledge extends, the mass of organized matter, or living objects; or to speak more exactly, the multi- tude or number of the atoms of lifeless matter or ether is immensely greater than the multitude of all living things. The multitude again of the lowest microscopic forms of vegetable and animal life, is far greater than that of the blades of grass, or of insects perceptible to our senses. The tribes of insects again, and of low parasitic forms of life, are far more numerous than the tribes of birds, and fishes, and living creatures upon the earth. The number of each class of creatures seems to diminish as we rise nearer to the great source and fountain of all Being. When we mount to man, the highest of God's creatures here on earth, though the actual num- ber of human beings is very great, we are compelled by the known laws of life, and human experience and parentage, to travel back in thought to a time when there were only a few pairs, or even a single pair of human beings. Thus even where the actual unity of the uni- verse is at present disguised and hidden by its vast- ness and multiplicity, it shines out more brightly, when we travel out of the present into past time. The unity of a common origin is linked with the unity of gradation, order, and subordination. The solar system has its one THE UNITY OF GENUINE SCIENCE. 14! central sun, its revolving planets, its satellites and aste- roids, its comets, meteoric streams, and diffused nebulous patches of unformed matter, in regular series, descend- ing from the one great central orb, to the innumerable multitude of loose, unformed, and floating atoms. This unity of gradation seems crowned and completed, by the further unity of a common aim and purpose extending throughout the whole creation. Unformed and lifeless matter, massed together throughout the universe, fulfils the evident purpose of supplying a dwelling-place for the various ranks and orders of the sentient and living creation. So we are taught by the Prophet, " Thus saith the Lord that created the heavens, God Himself that formed the earth and made it: He hath established it, He created it not in vain: He formed it to be inhabited.'* (Isa. XLV. 18.) The whole animal creation is sustained by nourishment, derived from the products and results of vegetable life. The higher orders of the animal world in their turn, depend for their nutriment on creatures below themselves in the great scheme of creation. The various fields of science are rather distinguished than severed from each other, and whenever a logical distinction is mistaken for a real severance, fresh truths come to light to correct the error, and establish the unity of the whole, once more. Thus theories of light, heat, electricity, galvanism and magnetism, of crystallization and chemical attraction, have been more and more traced to a common source by the successive advances of science. The wide contrast laid down by M. Comte, between Chemistry and Astronomy, began to disappear under the influence of new discoveries of the spectroscope, almost as soon as he had laid it down as a fundamental truth of science. All creatures, from the highest to the lowest, through all their gradations of being, as they 142 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. proceed from a common source, minister to one common purpose, and are sustained by the power, wisdom, and goodness, of one Supreme Intelligence. It is truly said of Christ our Lord, " He is before all things, and by Him all things consist; He upholdeth all things by the word of His power." And the tribute of praise ascends ever to the Lord of heaven in this double ascription, " Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are, and were created." " Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." CHAPTER XV. THREE HEADLESS PHILOSOPHIES. THE first of three Philosophies, which are alike head- less, by reason of their common Atheism, is Positivism, or the scheme of M. Comte and his disciples. Its first princi- ple is, that the manhood and perfection of science consists in rejecting all supernatural ideas, or faith in God, as the mark of a childish or puerile stage of thought. It pro- fesses further to exclude all metaphysical ideas, such as law, force, and causation, and pretends to restrict it- self to the registration and classification of phenomena alone. It thus not only excludes wholly Theology from the scheme of knowledge, but makes its admission the sign of intellectual childishness : excluding meta- physical ideas also, it brings on itself the curse of utter emptiness and vanity, even in those fields of thought with which it professes to deal. Professor Tyndal has truly said, that to pass from bare " sequences and phe- nomena, to forces or causes by which the succession is produced, is the first law and necessity of the scientific intellect." In fact, Mr Comte, in a hundred pages of the appendix, in which he lays down this absurd law of scientific progress, contradicts himself two hundred times, and by introducing one of the very ideas which he makes it a mark of manly science to exclude. The second headless system, misnamed philosophy, is the Agnosticism of Mr H. Spencer. This system, pre- tending to unify all human knowledge, and develope a 144 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. consistent theory of the universe, takes for its first principle a bold assertion that Theism, or faith in a First Cause and intelligent Governor of the world, is an untenable and unthinkable hypothesis, and that the nature of God is wholly and for ever inscrutable. Theology is thus made a synonym for nescience, and midnight dark- ness in which nothing can be seen or known. Besides Comtism or Positivism, the French variety of Atheistic philosophy, and Spencerism or Evolutionism, which may be called the English variety, there is a third, which Scotland has furnished, the Nihilism, or philosophy of the unconditioned, of Sir W. Hamilton. This philosophy, like the two others, pronounces Theology an impossible science, fruitful only in chimeras and direct contradictions. This theory, whatever the good intentions of its author, fixes a gulf of eternal separation between the Infinite God and every creature, across which no ray of genuine knowledge and real light can ever come. Let us inquire what are the social or physical merits of Positivism, the first form of godless philosophy. I know of no physical discovery that it can claim as its own. It plainly involves two great physical mistakes. First, in M. Comte's classification of the sciences, he placed a line of utter separation between Astronomy and Chemistry, and affirmed that we could never gain any light as to the chemical constitution of the heavenly bodies. Within a few years, this prediction was falsified by the researches of the spectroscope. Another great mistake was the denial and rejection of the existence of an ether, dis- tinct from ponderable matter. The admission of this, M. Comte placed in the same category with the vortices of Descartes. The whole course of later science has tended to prove the utter baselessness of this dictum of the Positive Philosophy. THREE HEADLESS PHILOSOPHIES. 145 Secondly, what is the result of Mr Spencer's ambitious attempt to build up a complete scheme of philosophy and history of the universe, setting out, as a first principle, from the extinction and denial of all theology, and an utter rejection, as unthinkable and unreasonable, of that fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom, and that knowledge of the Holy, which alone is under- standing ? His success in the field of zoology may be inferred from his definition of life already examined. His like success in the field of physics, or of lifeless matter, may be inferred from the utter inversion of notorious facts, and of logic, which stood sentinel fifteen years at the entrance to his physical speculations ; that Newton and men of science had adopted the law of the inverse square for that of gravitation, as an a priori truth, because any other was unthinkable. This was a plain warning to any thoughtful reader, that in this sys- tem the reign of darkness would not be confined to theology alone, but extend impartially to the whole range of material and physical science. The third variety of headless philosophy, that of Sir W. Hamilton, is equally barren of any trace or sign of success in the discovery of any new truth, in physics or sociology. This is the less surprising when we remember the profound contempt expressed by Sir W. Hamilton for mathematics, that one sphere of thought, below the region of morals, where clear and certain truth has been attained, and is still attained by all patient inquirers, and which alone supplies master keys for its progres- sive attainment in all the rest. All these three philo- sophies have supplied a large and indefinite amount of flat self-contradictions, thinly disguised and veiled from superficial readers by learned phrases and meta- physical abstractions ; but I doubt whether any one of the three has contributed a single grain to our know- B. 10 146 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. ledge of the laws of Nature and of the material universe. Certainly in every age the King of Heaven has reserved his chief gifts, of new insight into the laws of Nature and the system of the material universe, for men of a serious and reverent tone of mind. Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, the two Herschels, Lord Bacon, Boyle, Cavendish, Dalton, Davy, Faraday, Cuvier, are examples of this general law of the Divine government. The three Anti-theologies of Comte, Spencer, and Hamilton, have one common feature, a darkening and benumbing effect on the study of physical science. M. Comte's first principle with regard to the stages of science is the exact antithesis of the real truth. The only manly and mature stage of scientific thought is that which he defames as its puerile and infant stage ; when men cease to grovel on the ground like the brutes, or Nebuchadnezzar in his madness, and in their study of God's works lift up their eyes unto heaven, their understanding returns to them, and they bless, praise, and honour the Most High. Having mistaken the highest and only truly human stage of science for the lowest and worst, he inverts the relation of the two others, and honours with the name of youth that mere infancy in which men renounce the study of second causes, along with the knowledge of the great First Cause, and reason itself goes to sleep, and the mind of man is degraded to a mere camera obscura, to register passing phenomena as they occur. The stage M. Comte extols as the maturity of science, answers either to its mere babyhood, or its extreme old age and decrepi- tude, in which it has been smitten with utter palsy. The effect of the atheistic starting-point, in Spencer's system, is a like confusion, perplexity, and darkness. Even when he borrows facts from the discoveries of others to weave them into his system, they are so disguised by some cloak of metaphysical mist, that their definite ATHEISTIC PHILOSOPHY AND PHYSICS. 147 meaning is obscured. The same is true of the Hamil- tonian system. Some degree of light is needed even for the healthy growth of a plant, .and some clearness in the apprehension of fundamental ideas is essential to real progress in all natural science. What results can be expected to follow, when in the highest and noblest field of thought, the proper home of light, to multiply direct contradictions, to say things and straight unsay them, the fit character in Milton of the father of lies, is proclaimed to be the highest possible achievement of human reason. Now this is the common feature of the Scotch, French, and English varieties of atheistic speculation, and the same principle applies, doubtless, to other German theories. Thus the atheistic theory of Haeckel and Helmholz starts from a self-contradiction at the lowest point of its scheme of being, besides ending in a blank of darkness at the summit. It professes to build up the whole universe out of atoms, which are vortices of revolving matter, made unalterable by some artifice of mathematical calculation, when from their very definition it is plain that they are not atoms at all, but an im- mense multitude of smaller atoms, ever changing, and to which permanence can be ascribed by a blunder of rea- soning alone. The clearness of vision, on which progress in natural knowledge depends, can never be gained by putting out the eyes of the soul, till it becomes blind to the simplest and highest of all truths, that there must be Self-existence somewhere. So that it starts, like Mr Spen- cer, with affirming two opposites at the same moment, that to think of Self-existence anywhere is impossible, and yet that we cannot help thinking of Self-existence some- where. A philosophy which starts in such mental dizzi- ness, can hardly reach a greater depth of confusion at its close, than that with which it begins. 10 2 CHAPTER XVI. THE FOUR MAXIMS OF MODERN NATURE-WORSHIP. ANTI-SUPERNATURALISM, in striving to sweep away Christian faith and all revealed religion, as a fraud and gigantic delusion, and to prove the four Gospels forgeries of a late date, which gained general acceptance by some unaccountable delusion of the early Christians, has a rival creed of its own, based on four main principles. "Just are the ways of God... unless there be Who think not God at all, If any be, they walk obscure ; For of such doctrine never was there school But the heart of the fool, And no man therein doctor but himself." Sam. Agon. The first is the old doctrine of the " fool," who says in his heart, " There is no God." It is unfolded by the help of "Science falsely so called," into two great max- ims. First, that Theism, Belief in a personal God, is one of three untenable attempts to explain the mystery of the universe ; and that the great First Cause which sits concealed behind all phenomena is, and must ever remain, wholly inscrutable. Next, that all pretended revelation merely assumes without proof the existence of a God, and that all Nature is mute, and supplies no real evidence whatever. Its starting-point is thus the same which the Psalmist long ago described, " Understand, ye brutish among the people, and ye fools when will ye be wise?" THE FOUR MAXIMS OF MODERN NATURE- WORSHIP. 149 A second main principle of Nature- Worship, bor- rowed from the creed of the Sadducees, is the eternal and irreversible reign of death ; for it proclaims " the glorious perfection and invariability of the order of nature ;"' this order includes as a matter of fact the uni- versality of death ; and its sure tendency, according to one of its exponents, is to a reign of omnipresent death. Dr Strauss, in his " Life of Christ," tells us that the proposition, " 'A dead man has returned to life,' is composed of two contradictory elements ; that in the attempt to maintain the one, the other threatens to disappear ; if he has really returned to life, it is natural to conclude that he was not wholly dead; if he was really dead, it is difficult to believe that he has really become living." " Thus that unbelief alike in God's power and God's goodness, which it must be one main aim of revelation to remove, is found to centre in one gloomy doctrine, the omnipotence of death. The Christian revelation, in its central truth, the Resurrection of Jesus, directly meets this great evil, and thereby satisfies the moral conditions of a message of God. A revela- tion would be a mockery, which left men at liberty still to continue Sadducees, worshippers of the powers of Nature, believers in no supre- macy but that of death and the grave." (" Horae Evangelioe," p. 467.) How deep-rooted is the evil to be overcome, a slavish prostration of the mind before the despotism of Death, is clear from this statement of Strauss. The Gos- pel, according to the author of "Supernatural Religion," "is emphatically contradicted by the glorious perfection and invariability of the order of Nature." " That perfect and invariable order" by which death has reigned supreme from Adam to Moses, and from Moses to Christ ; of which he seems as enamoured, as Satan is described by Milton to have been, of SIN, before he saw her hideous offspring and his own. What an outrage on all reason ! to speak of the glorious perfection of an order of Nature, in which death reigns for ever supreme. What a blessed contrast are those gracious promises, " I will ransom 150 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues ; O grave, I will be thy destruction." " The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." The first principle then, of the Creed of Nature- Worship, is an expansion of the voice of the " fool " in Ps. xiv. into a developed theory of the non-existence of God, our Heavenly Father. The second is the glad tidings of the invariable and gloriously perfect supremacy of death and the grave. The third main principle is the other half of the Sad- ducean creed, or the doctrine that there is no angel or spirit. The Apostles are adjudged wholly incompetent witnesses of the fact, that they ate and drank with the Lord Jesus forty days after His crucifixion, because they shared with the other Jews in the belief that there are angels, and spirits, good angels, and demons. The sceptic, who after crawling on the surface of our earth like an insect for a few years, never able to leave it, assures us that there are no moral agents or rational intelligences in any part of the wide universe except himself, and his fellow insects on this one little globe, thereby evinces an audacious folly, hardly less than that of the " fool " who rejects the testimony of all Nature, when she bears witness to a supremely good and wise Creator. Surely, even apart from the express testimony of Him who is the Lord both of angels and of men, and who will assuredly return with His holy angels, to execute judgment "in flaming fire on those who know not God, and obey not the Gospel," there is every presumption from natural reason alone, that all the abysses of infinite space are not wholly bare and devoid of intelligent and rational existence, except this one little planet, which is a million times less than the central orb around which it revolves. There is no conceivable presumption of ab- stract reason, in favour of the doctrine that no spiritual THE FOUR MAXIMS OF MODERN NATURE- WORSHIP. intelligence exists in the universe, which is not weighted and tied down, by a few stones weight of material sub- stance, to one planetary prison. The fourth principle or pillar of the system of Nature- Worship, is the constancy or perfect uniformity of the course of Nature, as determined by the earthly experience of men for a few past generations, bounded and shut in by the grave ; and thence extended conjecturally to all ages of past time, and to a coming eternity; and from the surface of our own planet to the whole range of the material universe, but so as to exclude all faith in things beyond the range of our senses, "unseen, and eternal." This attempt to elevate the insect-like expe- riences of some myriads of men of the last two or three thousand years, ended in each case by the gloom and darkness of the grave, into the adequate foundation for a theory of universal being, and of the whole course of cosmical change through myriads of ages, and throughout myriads of starry systems, is surely almost the widest con- ceivable aberration of unreasoning folly. Especially when we remember that, even within these narrow limits, a constancy of variation, by which the past never repeats itself in the future, is still clearer than the partial resem- blance which links past with future changes. The partial constancy of Nature, even within the narrow limit of two or three generations, is chequered by many striking cata- strophes of various kinds. When we go further back, the whole globe of the earth from its surface to its centre seems, in the eye of science, like a stereotyped record of many catastrophes and changes, wholly different from the present quiet and orderly state of things, within the experience of the present or recent generations. The three first principles of the anti-christian creed, which denies the Father and the Son, are gigantic false- hoods of a negative kind. The first blots out and annuls 152 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the Living God, the good, wise, and intelligent Author and Disposer of the universe, and leaves the whole a sightless Samson, with no light either as to its own origin or issue. The second provides a gloomy sub- stitute for the Living God, whom the first has dethroned, the eternal prevalence and unlimited supremacy of Death, thus turning the universe into one gigantic valley of the shadow of death, one bottomless gulph of dissolu- tion and decay. The third is almost equally prodigious in its negative character. It affirms, without a grain of evidence, after abolishing the Creator, and enthroning Death in His stead, that nowhere in the wide universe, except on the surface of our planet, are spiritual and rational creatures to be found. The fourth principle degrades still further that little fragment of a godless, death-dominated universe, of which it admits the exist- ence, by making it repeat itself in cycles of unending recurrence to all eternity. The dethronement of God, the enthronement of death, and the extinction of all rational creatures but men now living upon the earth, needed only this further element, to complete its emptiness and degradation, as a creed of utter vanity and hopeless despair. CHAPTER XVII. THE ATTEMPT TO REVIVE HUME'S ARGUMENT. THE famous dictum of Hume, that it is not contrary to experience that testimony should be false, but is con- trary to experience that a miracle should be true, has been answered and refuted a dozen times by as many authors ; Campbell, Somerville, Penrose, Dr Chalmers, Bp. Mcllvaine, Dr Mozley, Archbp. Trench, Paley, myself, and many others. The author strives to revive it out of the grave, in which it had lain for forty years, after being pierced through and through many times. Dr Farrar says, " Its logical consistency has been shattered to pieces by a host of writers, as well sceptical as Christian." This is quite true. Our author retorts that "Apologists find it much more convenient to evade the arguments of Hume than to answer them, and where it is possible, they dismiss them with a sneer." This monstrous inversion of the facts is worthy of one who spends a thousand pages in the effort to prove the Gospels forgeries, and the Gospel itself a series of incredible falsehoods. Instead of apologists evading the argument they have repeatedly laid bare its emptiness. " The argument consists of two premises, that the falsehood of testi- mony is not improbable, since it is of frequent occurrence; and that 154 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the truth of a miracle is impossible, because it opposes a fixed and unalterable experience. Each of these is a sophism of the grossest kind. "And first, that some testimony is false, can never warrant the inference that all testimony alike is deceitful and uncertain. This is a return to worse than childish ignorance. It is the very test of growing wisdom to be able to discriminate between different kinds of testimony, according to the moral character of the witnesses and their means of information. But the force of the objection depends on a rejection of all these distinctions, the fruits of a ripe and manly reason. 1 The error,' Dr Chalmers observes, ' lies in this, that s all testimony is made responsible for all instances of falsehood, whereas each kind should be made responsible for its own. Divide the testimony into its kinds, and the sophistry is dispelled. It were thought a strange procedure in ordinary life to lay on a man of strict honesty any portion of the discredit which is attached to an habitual impostor, or even to one who has been detected in one instance of fraud or falsehood. It were equally strange to lay upon testimony, marked by all the characters, and accompanied by all the pledges of sincerity, the burden of that discredit which belongs to testimony of a different kind.' "The first sophism then of the sceptical argument has been answered long ago in that one brief sentence of the wisest of men, 'A faithful witness will not lie : but a false witness will utter lies.' To confound together these moral contrasts, in order to shake our faith in the Gospel, is not only a wicked perverseness, but a childish folly. The other premiss is, if possible, still more strange. Miracles are said to be impossible, because they contradict a firm and unalterable expe- rience. In other words, God cannot suspend any law of Nature, or reveal his will by supernatural tokens to mankind, because unalterable experience proves that this has never been done. This is the boasted argument against Divine revelation ; to assume it false, to derive from that assumed falsehood a most absurd inference, and then by that absurdity to prove the falsehood again ! The moral blindness implied in such reasoning seems almost incredible. To say that miracles con- tradict universal experience, is merely to beg the question that "they never have occurred, or can occur. To say that they contradict our experience is simply untrue. They may lie beyond it, as the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, or the death of Caesar ; but they contra- dict it only if they are asserted to have happened before our eyes, and we did not see them. Miracles are unlikely, prior to actual experience, only so far as it is unlikely that God should reveal His will to man- kind. They are likely to be frequent, only if it be likely that God MISREPRESENTATION OF PALEY. 155 will often suspend the laws of Nature to attest new revelations of His will, or to confirm others already given. And hence the fact, that none may have occurred within our own experience, yields not the slightest presumption against their reality in other cases. The sceptic can draw no just inference against them from his own limited expe- rience, unless there be good reason to suppose that God would select him, or some one in his circle of friends, for his agent or witness, in conveying a supernatural revelation to mankind. When it is said, however, that a fixed and unalterable experience disproves all miracles, it is plain that an inference from a partial and limited experience, is con- founded with the proper teaching of experience itself, whether particular or universal." (Appendix to Paley's Evidences, BIRKS, p. 376, 377.) Paley's two or three pages on this subject are marked by that lucid simplicity and clearness, and plain common sense, which are the characteristics of his style. In force of reasoning they immensely outweigh the twenty pages of confused thought which our author spends in a vain attempt to refute them. His self-satisfied comment on them is, " It seems almost incredible that arguments like these should for so many years have been tolerated in the text-book of a University." The ground of this censure is a gross misinterpreta- tion of one expression in Paley's statement of the case. Paley's words are these : " If twelve men whose probity and good sense I had long known, should seriously and circumstantially relate to me an account of a miracle wrought before their eyes, in which it was impossible they should be deceived, and if the governor of the country, hearing a rumour of this account, should call these men to his presence and offer them either to confess the imposture, or submit to be tied up to a gibbet, and if they should refuse with one voice to acknowledge that there existed any falsehood or imposture in the case; if this threat was communicated to them separately, yet with no different effect, and it was at last executed, and if I myself saw them one after another consenting to be racked, burned, or strangled rather than give up the truth of their account, still if Hume's rule be my guide, I am not to believe them. I undertake to say that there exists not a sceptic in 156 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the world who would not believe them, or who would defend such incredulity." The words of Paley " in which it was impossible they should be deceived," are interpreted by this writer to mean an ascription to the twelve witnesses of indefinite and unlimited infallibility on all subjects whatsoever. It is self-evident that Paley means nothing of the kind. What he means is plainly something very different : that their testimony in this particular case was based on such ample testimony of their own senses, so full and various that no suspicion of their being deceived would have arisen, if the fact to which they bore witness had not been of an exceptional and peculiar kind, and such as would commonly be called miraculous. The gloss of the writer, and his scoff at Cambridge University, proves nothing but the readiness with which a cloudy and pre- judiced writer may import his own mistiness of thought into a clear and simple statement. I have endeavoured to complete Paley's argument, and make the precise force of it plain in the following words : "What is the strength of the evidence which results from the con- currence of many distinct eye-witnesses, as in the fact of our Lord's Resurrection? Two alternatives have here to be considered, illusion or imposture. Now the first of these may be reckoned absolutely impossible. Let us suppose, what is far too great an admission, that our senses may commonly deceive us, in a single look, once in a thousand times. If now we combine all the appearances of our Lord that are men- tioned, the numbers present, and the time occupied in each appearance, the whole number of distinct observations by sight, hearing, and touch, will amount to some thousands. And hence the possibility of decep- tion will be expressed by the inverse of a number, formed of at least six thousand figures, a quantity inconceivably small, and practically nothing. Illusion, then, is absolutely impossible. The supposed con- flict of probabilities is thus reduced simply to these two questions. Is it more likely that the Almighty Creator would, or would not, reveal His will to mankind ? Is it more likely that the Apostles, who laid COMPLETION OF PALEY S ARGUMENT. 157 down their lives in spreading the Gospel, were honestly persuaded of our Lord's Resurrection, or all leagued in a wicked conspiracy of fraud and imposture. The answer to both inquiries is plain. There is here no contest of improbabilities, because they are both of them on the same side. It is most unlikely, a priori, that God would leave all mankind in sin and ignorance, without some message of warning or of mercy from on high. It is most unlikely, nay, morally impossible, that the witnesses who endured scorn and mockery for their faith, and laid down their lives for the sake of Jesus, were merely confederates in a vile imposture, and that they who denounced judgment speedily to come on all iniquity, were themselves monsters of fraud and deceit. The infidel, who rejects and denies the resurrection of our Lord, is thus guilty of a double folly. He prefers to believe that God is careless about the highest good of His creatures, rather than to own that He regards them with the compassion of a father and the vigilance of a sovereign. He imputes the foulest crime to good and upright men, rather than own himself so ignorant as to need a Divine Teacher, or so guilty as to require the atoning sacrifice of the Son of God. The charge he brings against the Christian believer applies fully to his own case. His unbelief in the midst of Gospel light is a miracle and a marvel which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a sullen determination to believe what is at once most dishonourable and blasphemous towards God, and most false and calumnious towards the best and holiest of his fellow men." (Appendix to Paley's Evidences, p. 381.) The sound part of Mr Mill's comment on Hume's argument ("Logic," Vol. n. pp. 170 180), consists in marking the contrast between the improbability of a mere guess being right, and of an alleged fact being true. "This," he says, "has been overlooked by Bishop Butler and several of the writers against Hume, in their anxiety to destroy what appeared to them a formidable weapon of assault against the Christian religion." Now in my appendix to Paley I have devoted three pages to an exposition of this very distinction between mathematical and historical probability, which Bishop Butler and Dr Price both felt, without clearly explaining it. Mr Mill says that 158 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. " Hume's argument is merely this very plain and harmless proposition that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible. That such a maxim as this should either be accounted a dangerous heresy, or mistaken for a great and recondite truth, speaks ill for the state of philosophic speculation on such subjects." (n. 262.) Hume's argument, if we accept Mr Mill's gloss is, as he owns, " in fact, a flagrant petitio principii, used to support a wholly unphilo- sophical assertion." What is astonishing is, that our author should charge Dr Farrar with misinterpreting and misstating Mr Mill's remarks, and say that "far from shattering to pieces the logical consistency of Hume's reasoning, Mr Mill substantially confirms it " ! Mr Mill has no right to despise Christian apologists for dealing with Hume's real argument and not with the fictitious substitute of his own invention, yet with the help of this friendly gloss, it still remains exactly what he says, "a flagrant petitio principii." Our author thinks it astonishing that Dr Farrar should take Mr Mill's own words, quoted verbatim, as expressing Mr Mill's verdict on the logical value of Hume's argument. What is really astonishing is the blindness with which he himself labours to prove the very opposite. Mr Mill's comment is a friendly attempt to attach some meaning not wholly ridiculous to Hume's maxim. After he has mended and tinkered it, he calls it a "flagrant petitio principii, used to support a wholly unphilosophical After this our author audaciously affirms that Mr Mill confirms Hume's reasoning. He rejects the true and sound part of that reasoning as quoted by Dr Farrar, and strives to neutralize it by quoting Mr Mill's ridicu- HUME'S ARGUMENT AS MODIFIED BY MILL. 1 95 lous censure of Christian apologists for not aiming their weapons against his own gloss instead of against the statement of Hume himself. Mr Mill's gloss on Hurne is that anything is incre- dible which is contrary to a complete induction. Now a complete induction must plainly include the disputed case itself. Mr Mill's phrase merely brings into full relief a sophism essentially involved in Hume's statement. Our author spends eight pages, (79 87,) in a vain effort to neutralize and undo the effect of Mr Mill's candid admission. But if he had not been blinded by his unbelief, he might have found in Mr Mill's later remarks a real key to the main question. Mr Mill specifies one or two cases in which a fact is loosely said to contradict experience. " One is the case in which the alleged fact appears to conflict with a real law of causation. But a more common case, perhaps, is that of its conflicting... with the properties of Kinds. It is with these prin- cipally that marvellous stories related by travellers are apt to be at variance : as of men with tails, or with wings, and (until confirmed by experience) of flying fish ; or of ice, in the celebrated anecdote of the Dutch travellers and the king of Siam. Facts of this description, pre- viously unheard of, but which could not, from any law of causation be pronounced impossible, are what Hume characterizes (elsewhere) as not contrary to experience, but merely unconformable to it.... In a case of this description, the fact asserted is the existence of a new Kind ; which in itself is not in the slightest degree incredible, and only to be rejected if the improbability that any variety of object existing at that particular place and time should not have been discovered sooner, be greater than that of error or mendacity in the witnesses. Accordingly, such assertions when made by credible persons, and of unexplored places, are not disbelieved, but at most regarded as requiring confirmation from subsequent observers.... Of reputed impossibilities which rest on no other grounds than our ignorance of any cause capable of producing the supposed effects ; very few are certainly im- possible, or permanently incredible. The facts of travelling seventy miles an hour, painless surgical operations, and conversing by instan- taneous signals between London and New York held a high place not 160 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. many years ago among such impossibilities." ("System of Logic," Vol. ii. pp. 167, 169.) Now the miracles of the Gospel clearly fall under Mr Mill's description. They are facts concerning a person wholly unique, who cannot be classed with or- dinary men, nor even adequately with human prophets ; who is essentially the God-man, " Emmanuel," "the man Christ Jesus," " God manifested in the flesh." Mr Mill admits that the prophet of Nazareth, " even in the esti- mation of those who have no belief in his inspiration/' is a unique man. " there is in his life and sayings a stamp of personal originality com- bined with profundity of insight, ... which must place him in the very first rank of men of sublime genius. ... When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer, and martyr to his mission, who ever existed on earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity." ("Three Essays," p. 254.) Thus this person is a KIND or species to himself. The miracles of Christ, His sayings, the fulfilments of prophecy in His life, the angelic messages which heralded His birth, His birth itself, His rejection by His own people, His death as the true Paschal Lamb, His lift- ing up from the earth, like the brazen serpent, to be a centre of moral attraction to all mankind through successive ages, His resurrection the third day from the dead, His appearance to chosen witnesses for forty days after His resurrection, His ascension into heaven in the view of those same witnesses, and the promise of His return in the clouds of heaven to be the Judge of all mankind ; these are not separate and independent facts out of relation to each other, contradicting that experi- ence by which individuals gain their knowledge of the characters and properties of the individual objects which THE AUTHOR'S ATTEMPT TO REVIVE HUME'S ARGUMENT. 161 come within the range of the separate experience of each one. They are supernatural facts only in this sense, that they are manifestations of a PERSON never manifested before, whose birth is the great central fact in the whole scheme of universal providence. It is in reality the fulfilment of a prophecy which completes and fills up the long series of the messages of God to man in the Old Testament Scriptures, flowing onward through four thousand years from the opening sentence, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," in an ever-widening stream of Divine truth, till it issues in the long-predicted rising of " the Sun of Righteousness with healing in his wings," to give light to those who were " sitting in- darkness and in the shadow of death," and by His own resurrection to " bring life and immor- tality to light." B. II CHAPTER XVIII. THE LAW OF GOD, AND THE CREATED UNIVERSE. THE laws of nature are a favourite topic with modern sceptical philosophers. But the phrase in their lips is extremely vague, obscure, and indefinite. The laws are without a Lawgiver, or at least he is removed to an infinite distance. They are not really laws at all, but vain attempts to classify ever changing phenomena, when the great Creator, all created minds, and all things, or material bodies, have alike been consigned to the common gulf of the UNKNOWABLE. The laws of God include: (i) first, a great law of the sub-moral universe. This is the Newtonian law, commonly styled the law of universal attraction, but more correctly named a law of universal appetency. It applies to all matter, living or lifeless, except so far as it is modified by other laws yet undetermined, of special affinity, or of repulsive self-preservation. It co- exists with, and its effects are modified by, higher laws of life in plants and animals, and by a still higher law of right, wrong, duty, and spontaneous choice of good or evil, in all moral and responsible creatures. (2) A second Law, higher than the self-attraction or mutual appetency of all material masses, is the law of self- preservation. The instinct of life in every plant or animal is to shrink from everything that pains, and to seek everything that pleases, or tends to perfect and THE LAW OF GOD, AND THE CREATED UNIVERSE. 163 expand its own conscious life, so far as the momentary consciousness extends. This instinct is the first germ of rational self-love. It passes into it only when mo- mentary sensation is exchanged for a rational appre- hension, on the part of each creature, of the true law and attainable limits of its own being. Then the in- stinctive shrinking from momentary pain, and pursuit of momentary pleasure, is succeeded by that rational self- love by which each recognizes the true law of its own being, and aims to realize and fulfil that ideal law. (3) Higher than this law or instinct of self-preserva- tion, is the great moral law, " Thou shalt love thy neigh- bour as thyself." This is a Divine law of duty expressly revealed, of eternal and irreversible obligation. The duty depends on two conditions only, the possession of a power of choice and faculty of reason by the individual, and the co-existence of a moral universe of creatures similarly endowed, susceptible of having their welfare increased or diminished by the actings of their fellow- creatures. This Divine law constitutes the one sound element in Benthamite Utilitarianism, or the greatest happiness principle, but its truth and Divine authority are there neutralized by transferring it from the heart, as a law prescribing a right state of inward feeling and desire, and turning it into a law of calculation alone. What is the calculation thus enjoined ? Supposing three alternatives open in any case, then three posi- tive totals or sums of pleasure would have to be cal- culated for the whole universe of being through a coming eternity, and as many negative totals of pain. Of the three differences A - D, B - E, C - F, the moral rule prescribed is, to adopt that alternative which makes the excess of pleasure above pain the largest. Each of the six sums is composed of terms not only doubly infinite, but incommensurable, and II 2 164 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. incapable of being accurately measured by any com- mon standard. Each sum also involves an infinite number of undetermined quantities, depending on the volitions of an almost countless number of free agents. Such a calculation could never be performed without Omniscience. Even when performed, it could have no binding authority, either from spontaneous instinct or reason, to enforce its fulfilment. The only effect of such a rule must be to throw back the individual on the instinct of self-preservation, or the avoidance of the pain, and the pursuit of the pleasure, of the moment. Still the mere attempt to perform this impossible calcula- tion might remind of the double truth that life is not the present moment, and that we are surrounded by fellow-creatures towards whom we ought to cherish feel- ings of good-will and not of ill-will. The Divine law applies itself directly to the spring of action, the desires of the heart, " Thou shalt LOVE thy neighbour as thyself." It does not, like its human parody, recommend a choice to be made on arithmetical grounds, after a wholly impossible calculation. The altruism alone is true, being borrowed from the Divine law, and exempts the Ben- thamite maxim from a charge of total error. The Divine law includes two elements ; the first is altruism in contrast to egoism ; that self is to be loved not as self, but " counting as one," on the same ground that every other also is to be loved, for his capacity of happiness. The second element is the law of neigh- bourhood, that is moral or physical nearness ; the law does not command us to love every one alike, but each according to the degree of nearness, that is, our op- portunity to do good and impart a blessing. It is so expounded by two apostles : " as we have opportunity let us do good unto all men, especially to them who are of the household of faith." " To him that knoweth THE LAW OF GOD, AND THE CREATED UNIVERSE. 165 to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." " Knoweth " seems here the same as "hath opportunity." The law thus explained is the exact moral counterpart of the natural law. Each atom seeks to approach, and so far to unite itself with every other atom, with a force varying inversely as the square of the distance. Not equality, but immense and eternal disparity is a funda- mental law of both the natural and the moral universe. The triad of the French Revolution, " Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," exalts a great falsehood between two fundamental truths of the Law of God. For, " where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty ; " and the Christian code is, " Love the brotherhood," "all ye are brethren." The real triad of Divine truth is, Liberty, Inequality, and Fraternity. (4) The supreme Law of duty is that which defines the relation between the Creator and all His moral and responsible creatures. It is "the first and great command- ment," " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." This law of religious duty, like the great law of social duty which resembles it, rests on two data ; the pre- sence in the individual to whom it applies, of the power of choice, will, and intelligent action, and the fact that in God the Creator, beyond any of His creatures, or all those creatures combined, there is a vast and im- measurable fulness of Being. Thus, to seek the glory of the Creator is a higher object than to seek the welfare of any one creature, or of all creatures combined. Therefore, love to being in general, Jonathan Edwards's definition of virtue, finds its true explication in both these great commandments of the perfect Law of God. There is first, Self-love, not excluded, but really in- cluded by the words, " as thyself." The unreal mysticism which would abolish self-love, must abolish along with it 1 66 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. philanthropy, or the love of our neighbour. Again, the second commandment, the love of our neighbour, or universal philanthropy, cannot be severed from the higher law and obligation of the love of God. Both are enforced by the same authority, and rest on a common principle, by which the soul travels out of itself, first into communion with all its fellow-creatures, and next into fellowship with the Creator, from whom all things proceed, and to whom they must return as to the proper end and purpose of their being. " For of Him, and to Him and through Him are all things; to whom be glory for ever and ever." The love of God, the supreme law of moral duty, has two opposite aspects, of which one is downward towards the whole world of possible or actual evil. This is that fear of the Lord, and keeping of His commandments, which is the whole duty of man. Of this the patriarch says, "The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding." This is that faith in the Divine warnings by which the soul is deterred from every evil way. The upward aspect of the same duty is the grace of hope, not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world of being, and has respect to the whole range of possible good to be expected or looked for from the hand of God. It is that grace of which the apostle says, " Ye are saved by hope," and, " rejoice in hope of the glory of God." This love of God, both in its Old Testament form, the holy fear of God by which men depart from evil, and dread all disobedience ; and its New Testament form, in which it has respect to the whole universe of possible good, the faith which accepts the Divine promises, and the hope which looks forward to the good things to come ; must rest on a common foundation, the knowledge of God as a God both of mercy and of judgment. This THE LAW OF GOD, AND THE CREATED UNIVERSE. 1 67 great truth that God may be known, and that in such knowledge alone is life, peace, and blessedness, pervades the whole of Scripture from its beginning to its close. " This is life eternal that they may KNOW Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." Again, " Ye worship ye know not what, we KNOW what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews." " God will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the KNOW- LEDGE of the truth." " The people that do KNOW their God shall be strong and do exploits." "There is no truth nor mercy, nor KNOWLEDGE OF GOD in the land." " Then shall we know if we follow on to KNOW the Lord." (f I desired mercy not sacrifice, and the KNOW- LEDGE OF GOD more than burnt-offering. " Then "when ye KNEW NOT GOD, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods, but now ye have KNOWN GOD, or rather are known of God." "He hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the KNOWLEDGE of Him who hath called us to glory and virtue." And all these testimonies of Scripture are crowned by the words of the beloved disciple, "We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an under- standing that we may KNOW Him that is true." The truth that the Infinite God cannot be exhaustively or comprehensively known, or understood by creatures who are finite, or the inquiry of the Patriarch, " Canst thou by searching find out God, or know the Almighty unto perfection?" is wide as the poles apart from that mon- strous falsehood which an unbelieving philosophy sub- stitutes for it. If nothing at all can be known of anything of which our knowledge is only partial, we must be shut up in utter nescience. The doctrine of the UNKNOWABLE in all its forms dethrones the Most High, annuls all religion natural or revealed, destroys the very foundations of morality, and is high treason I 68 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. against the dominion of the Living God, and the welfare of the whole Universe. No terms are strong enough to express the moral aversion and repugnance with which every disciple of Christ should turn away from it. Love towards God, the All-perfect Being, who is " blessed for ever," cannot have all the same characters as love towards creatures actually sinful and miserable, or at least exposed to the risk of natural or moral evil, or of both at once. The forms of goodwill and inward love of which the blessed God can be the object, are first, Adoration of His infinite goodness and majesty; next, the desire that His glory may be manifested, and His excellent goodness be owned and understood by every creature capable of such knowledge ; that His name may be hallowed, that His will may be done in earth as in heaven, that is, in every sphere of His wide dominion, as perfectly as it is done by those who stand before the presence of His glory. It must include in- tense gratitude for benefits received, "we love Him be- cause He first loved us." It must include unreserved obedience, or entire conformity of heart and mind to His revealed law. It must include fellowship with God, ac- cording to His charge to Abraham, "Walk before me and be thou perfect;" and the experience of Enoch, who walked with God, and "was translated that he should not see death," and before his translation "had this testimony that he pleased God." It should include adoration after the pattern of the Psalmist. "I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made ; marvellous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. How precious are Thy thoughts unto me, O God ! How great is the sum of them ; if I should count them, they are more than the sand ; they cannot be reckoned up in order unto Thee, they are more than can be numbered." THE LAW OF GOD, AND THE CREATED UNIVERSE. 169 Its perfect types may be found in those words of the apostle, " Unto the King Eternal, immortal, invisible, the Only Wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever." And in the fourfold ascription of praise from every creature. " Blessing and honour and glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." And still further, in the sevenfold anthem from the heavenly host, " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and blessing." CHAPTER XIX. FUNDAMENTAL FACTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE. THERE are five fundamental facts in the history of the moral universe which must be recognized by every one who would gain, whether from natural reason alone, or the Christian revelation, a consistent view of the whole scheme of Divine Providence, and attempt the great argument which Milton proposed to himself, "that... I may assert Eternal Providence And justify the ways of God to men." i. THE FALL OF MAN. The Fall is no obscure and esoteric doctrine of doubtful speculation, but results directly from a com- parison of the actual state of mankind, at present and as far back as the records of history extend, with the stand- ard of uprightness and sinless perfection in the perfect law of God. That law enjoins the love of God our Creator with all our strength, and the love of our neigh- bour as ourselves. When tried by this perfect standard, the testimony of experience in every age corresponds with and echoes the testimony of the word of God, " All have sinned, and do come short of the glory of God." The great law of love cannot be reversed or abro- gated to suit the practice and low moral state of sinful FACTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE. 171 creatures, but is a direct effluence from Him who is the Father of lights. The standard of perfect love in the stream, that is, in the revealed will and law of God, is a necessary corollary from the perfection of the Divine nature, the fountain from whence it flows. Thus the facts of human experience, if we receive the revealed truth of a judgment to come, point plainly to the further truth that "every mouth will be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God ; " and ought to sug- gest to each one the prayer of the Psalmist, " Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified." 2. GOOD AND EVIL ANGELS. The existence of other moral and spiritual beings besides men, some good and others evil, is a second main fact in the revealed history of the moral universe. Apart from express revelation, there is the strongest pre- sumption of reason, that men are not the only spiritual beings in the whole range of the created universe. There is also a like presumption of reason that the same conflict of moral good and evil which experience proves to exist amongst men, is not confined to them, but exists also in the other races which together with them constitute the universe of moral and rational being. The express teaching of Scripture that there are angels as well as men, and their number very great, "ten thousand times ten thousand," and that among these angels, some are morally evil, and others pure and sinless, is thus most agreeable to the presumptions of reason. Yet the author before us says it is "shocking both to reason and the moral sense." That among evil and malevolent beings there should be great disparity, both of natural gifts, and of degrees of guilt or wickedness, is in complete harmony with the analogies of universal nature. Now 172 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. since the nature of man is a little, though but a little, lower than the nature of angels, and the creation of angels was earlier than that of Adam, and the fall of the angels that first sinned was earlier than the fall of man, the foremost and chief of sinning angels must have a natural pre-eminence among all evil beings, whether angels or men, and deserve the titles which he receives in Scripture, " Satan," the great Adversary, the " Wicked One," the " Tempter," the " King over all the children of pride." This solemn truth, taught under a veil in the second page of the Old Testament, and expressly and openly throughout the New Testament, from the opening of the Gospels to the close of the Apocalypse, however repulsive to superficial and thoughtless minds, is in full harmony with the voice of sound reason. The most candid of modern Sceptics, in his latest thoughts, offers this as the nearest approach to an explanation of the actual course of the universe to which by his own reason alone he can attain, that "The author of the world, wise and knowing, but not all-wise and all-knowing, may always have done the best that was possible under the conditions of the problem; and the Creator, though not Omnipotent in the usual sense of the word, for some inscrutable reason tolerates the perpetual counteraction of his purposes by another being of opposite character, and of great though inferior power." Mill's " Posthumous Essays," p. 183. The dim guesses of natural reason thus lead men to the very verge of the doctrine expressly revealed in Scripture, and which even there is presented to us as a deep and unsearchable mystery. " The Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the Devil." " He went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the Devil;" and his crowning triumph is expressed in the words, " The prince of this world is judged." FACTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE. I 73 3. TEMPTATION AND THE TEMPTER. A third great fact, underlying the whole economy of providence, is that all moral and rational creatures, from the highest to the lowest, are liable to be tempted, and turned aside from the path of goodness and uprightness into a downward pathway of sin, corruption, and dis- obedience. God alone, the All-perfect Being, is in Him- self free from this great liability of all created intelligence. " God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempteth He any man." This is one part of the mysterious conde- scension involved in the Incarnation, that fundamental mystery of the Christian faith, that God in the Person of His Son, Emmanuel, the God-man, did come within the .sphere and range of possible temptation ; that the Son of God, our High priest, "can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." Temptation to all men through successive ages is set before us as having three distinct but confederate sources. First, the flesh, or the internal infirmity or wilful per- version of the individual himself, as expressed by the Apostle, " Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Lust when it has conceived bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death." The second great source of temptation is the world, by which is expressed the collective amount of moral evil, bad example, and corrupting or degrading influence from mankind at large, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." So that, " the friendship of the world is enmity with God." The third great source of temptation is the Devil, who has this very name, the Tempter. By this is expressed all temptation from unseen powers of evil, beyond the range of our senses and our actual contact with evil in our fel- low-men. Now since evil in individual men, through its 174 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. own self-contradiction and diversity, tends to conflict and endless antagonism ; hence all confederacies and long- lasting systems of error and delusion ; enduring forms and modes of idolatry, unbelief, and systematic opposition to the revealed word and will of God, are everywhere in Scripture referred to this secret and mighty ultra-mun- dane source of evil. When the servants of the heavenly householder inquire, " Didst not Thou sow good seed in Thy field, whence then hath it tares ? he said unto them, An enemy hath done this .... The tares are the children of the wicked one, the enemy that sowed them is the Devil." 4. THE CONFLICT OF GOOD AND EVIL. The whole course of God's providence through the ages of the world's history, in the word of God as in the book of human experience, is revealed as a ceaseless con- flict and warfare of moral good and moral evil, " Supernal grace contending with sinfulness of men." So in the first promise two classes are contrasted, and proclaimed to be in lasting opposition, " I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed." This enmity is then described as a striving of God's Spirit with sinful man. " The Lord said, My Spirit shall not alway strive with man, for that he also is flesh ; yet his days shall be 120 years." So again in later times. " Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse bit- terly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty." And the voice of the first Christian martyr proclaimed the same truth to his Jewish persecutors. " Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers did, so do ye." So the great Apostle found in every step of his labours for the spread of the truth ; " a great and effectual door is opened unto me and there are many acl- FACTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE. I 75 versaries." He gives this charge to all the disciples of Christ, " Ye wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places. Therefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand." So we are told by the Lord that " the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." The first great moral contrast is between the Holy and All-perfect God, who is love, and light, and "in whom there is no darkness at all," so perfectly and essen- tially good that He cannot even be tempted with evil ; and the whole universe of created Being, men and angels and any other unknown races of rational and responsible beings, who either have actually fallen under the power of moral evil, or at least are liable so to fall, but for whom also redemption and recovery are not impossible. But here again there is a second great moral contrast between the sinless and the fallen, or those who have actually wandered from God into the paths of sin ; and again, between the penitent and the impenitent, those who persevere in evil and sin presumptuously, and those who turn their face to God, and seek to return to the path from which they have wandered. This great contrast, among angels, between the elect angels and those who "sinned and left their first habitation;" and amongst men, between the "poor in spirit," the lowly and penitent, who are willing to learn of Him who is " meek and lowly in heart,'* knd the proud, the unbe- lieving and profane, who turn their back to the light, and walk on wilfully in darkness ; between the church of true believers and the world, is set before us through all Scripture as the summary of the moral history of our fallen race. The conflict, though it lasts for long ages, I 76 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. is to be followed by a sure and full triumph of redeeming mercy. The exalted Redeemer at God's right hand is now " expecting until His enemies be made His footstool," and we are taught that " the earnest expectation of the creature, (or, the whole creation with outstretched neck), waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God." 5. THE SUPREMACY OF DEATH, A last main feature and law of the economy of provi- dence from the days of Paradise, through 6000 years, is the reign and supremacy of death, summed up in the words, " By one man's offence death reigned by one," and " by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed through unto all men, for that all have sinned." This dark and gloomy reign of death and the grave from age to age, our author per- versely and blindly extols as the " glorious perfection and invariability of the order of nature." He is so enamoured of this " law of sin and death," that he counts any inter- ference with its unbroken sway, by the resurrection of the Son of God Himself from the grave, " shocking to reason and to moral sense." He seems so satisfied with the world in which death reigns supreme, that he reckons any communication with the higher world, where moral laws reign supreme, to be superfluous and incredible. How far more consistent with reason, and moral sense, and true philosophy, is the double description of death which Milton, in his striking allegory, has put into the mouth of Sin and Satan. " I fled, and cried out, Death. Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sigh'd From all her caves, and back resounded, Death. What thing art thou thus double form'd? I know thee not, nor ever saw till now Sight more detestable than him and thee." "Paradise Lost," B. ii. 788, 741. CHAPTER XX. THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. CHRISTIANITY, as expounded and distorted by this author, is a theory of an abortive design of creation, and of impotent efforts- to amend it. " Both the details of the scheme and the circumstances which are supposed to have led to its adoption, are shocking to reason and to moral sense, derogatory to the power and wisdom of the Creator, and degrading to the idea of His moral perfection."..." Not only is the assumption that any such revelation was necessary, excluded on philo- sophical grounds, but it is contradicted by the whole operation of natural laws." S. R. I. p. 49. Long ago the Apostle said, " We preach Christ cruci- fied, to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness," but he adds, "The foolishness of God is wiser than men." i Cor. i. 23, 25. He who had been caught up into Paradise, and " heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for man to utter," 2 Cor. xii. 4, thus describes the real character of that message which the 'bats and moles' of earth account so foolish and unreasonable. " To me is this grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places, might be known by the Church, the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which He pur- 15. 12 178 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. posed in Christ Jesus our Lord." Eph. iii. 8 n. He expounds the secret cause of the contemptuous rejection of this mystery by earthly minded Sadducees, " The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which be- lieve not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." 2 Cor. iv. 4. Not only the message itself, but the wisdom to discern its excellence, is a gift of Divine grace. "God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of th.e know- ledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." v. 6. The duty of the servants of God is, with patience and " meekness to instruct those who oppose themselves, if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth, that they may recover them- selves out of the snare of the devil." 2 Tim. ii. 25, 26. Creation is no abortive work, in which the expecta- tions of the Creator have been wholly frustrate and disappointed. The exact reverse is the express and re- peated statement of Scripture. (Acts xv. 18) " Known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world." The redemption of the Gospel is the " eternal purpose of God;" and Christ is the " Lamb of God, who verily was fore-ordained before the foundation of the world." i Pet. i. 20. It proclaims that " hope of eternal life which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began." Tit. i. 2. It is the " revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began," but then by " the commandment of the everlasting God," the " Only wise," to whom be "glory for ever, was made known to all nations for the obedience of faith," Rom. xvi. 25 27, and "this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." Joh. iii. 19. Let us turn from the follies and blasphemies of modern Sad- THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. I 79 ducees, enamoured of the reign of death ; and observe the revealed laws and principles of that Gospel, which is the highest and noblest exhibition of the perfect wisdom and love of God, and the subject of adoring praise and devout wonder to ten thousand times ten thousand pure and perfect spirits, dwelling in light and bliss before the throne of the " blessed and only Potentate ; whom no man hath seen or can see, to whom be glory and power everlasting." i Tim. vi. 15. (i) The first principle is the great truth proclaimed by Christ Himself, that God is the only Good Being; " there is none good but one, that is God." Matt. xix. 17. This glorious and primary truth, uttered by Christ in reply to a solemn inquiry, and transmitted by the con- senting evidence of more than 500 copies of each of three Evangelists, has been replaced in five copies only, of one of the three, by a human substitute which blots out this great truth and substitutes the pointless inquiry, "Why dost thou ask of me concerning the good ?" This seems to imply a censure on what is most lawful and praise- worthy, for to inquire after God is one of the first of re- vealed duties. The great truth proclaimed by our Lord is afterwards expounded by St James, into the double maxim, that all evil is from the creature, and all good from God alone : "God cannot be tempted with evil, nei- ther tempteth He any man. Every good and perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." Jas. i. 13, 17. The negative truth, of evil in the creature is expounded both by the apostle and the patriarch: Rom. iii. 23, "All have sinned;" v. 12, " Death passed through unto all men, for that all have sinned;" " Behold, He put no trust in His servants, and His angels He charged with folly." Job iv. 18. "The heavens are not clean in His sight." xv. 15. " It was ne- cessary" that " the heavenly things themselves "should be 12 2 l8o SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. " purified with better sacrifices than these." Heb. ix. 23. As the spots of the sun, though luminous, shew like blots of darkness in contrast with his still more luminous disc ; so every creature, compared with the Divine perfection, reveals either an actual presence of moral evil, or at least a mournful liability to rebel, and go astray. Redemption is a sequel of the truth, that God is the only Good Being, perfectly and indefectibly good, and of the solemn fact that both men and angels have sinned. A fallen creature is without strength to restore itself, and can be restored only by Divine power and grace. " O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in Me is thine help." Hos. xiii. 9. "Without Me ye can do nothing." John xv. 5. "When we were without strength, Christ died for the ungodly." Rom. v. 6. Such is a first great principle and law of the Gospel, growing out of the truth that " God is the only Good," and embodied by St Paul in the words, " By grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of your- 3elves, it is the gift of God." Eph. ii. 8. (2) The second great maxim and law of Provi- dence, is the truth that God is the Only Wise. Nothing, even the most minute, can escape from the vision of His Omniscience and from the control of His providence. " Even the hairs of your head are all numbered." Matt. x. 30. " Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." Joh. vi. 1 2. Evil men and angels may and do rebel against His will, and strive against Him, but the "counsel of His will," Eph. i. n, they cannot disappoint or annul : " there is no wisdom, nor understanding, nor counsel, against the Lord." Prov. xxi. 30. So was it announced to Pharaoh in the height of his rebellion. " For this cause have I raised thee up, to shew. in thee my power, and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth." Ex. ix. 16. And Solomon and David both proclaim the same truth : " The THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. iSl Lord hath made all things for Himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of evil." Prov. xvi. 4. " Surely the wrath o man shall praise Thee, and the remainder (or, excess) of wrath wilt Thou restrain." Ps. Ixxvi. 10. (3) The third principle or law of the whole economy of Redemption is that God is most Just, expressed by Abraham, in his intercession for Sodom. " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Gen. xviii. 25. This truth is guarded by the solemn oath, " As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked should turn from his way and live... why will ye die, O house of Israel?" Ezek. xxxiii. ii. So sternly does God repel the double false- hood that He takes pleasure in the destruction and moral ruin of His own creatures : or that His judgments, how- ever severe, shall exceed the measure of the most perfect equity, and the highest wisdom. " He will not lay upon man more than right, that he should enter into judgment with God," Job xxxiv. 23; and again, "Thou wilt be justified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou standest in judgment." Ps. li. 4. " Hear, ye strong foundations of the earth, for the Lord hath a controversy with His people, and He will plead with Israel." Mic. vi. 2. In His own time, God will make "all the hard speeches, which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him," Jude 15, to turn back upon themselves by the testimony of their own re-awakened conscience and rea- son, according to those words, " Why, even of yourselves, judge ye not what is right?" Lu. xii. 57. "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." Isa. xl. 5. And what that glory is, is thus ex- plained by another prophet: "Let him that glorieth, glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord, which execute lovingkindness, judg- ment, and righteousness in the earth ; for in these things I 82 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. 1 delight, saith the Lord." Jer. ix. 24. The long delay of judgment is ascribed to the " riches of God's forbear- ance." "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, but is long-suffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." 2 Pet. iii. 9. The certainty of judgment in its own appointed time is assured alike by the perfect truth, the holiness, and the wisdom of God. It is said of this message of solemn warning, "At the end it will speak and not lie ; though it tarry, wait for it ; because it will surely come, it will not tarry." Hab. ii. 3. " Yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry." Heb. x. 37. (4) The fourth revealed principle and law of all pro- vidence is the Omnipotence of God. The most candid, and one of the ablest of modern leaders of sceptical thought, in his latest work, comes much nearer to the Christian faith than most other sceptics. He holds that there is evidence for the existence of an intelligent and conscious creator of the Cosmos, and that " the morality of the Gospels is far higher and better than that which shews itself in the order of Nature, and that what is objectionable in the Christian theory, is only so when taken in connection with the doctrine of an Omnipotent God, at least as understood by most enlightened Christians. The grave error of Butler was that he shrank from ad- mitting the hypothesis of limited powers. His appeal amounts to this. The belief of Christians is not more absurd or immoral than that of Deists who acknowledge an Omnipotent Creator.'* Mill's "Three Essays on Religion," p. 214. He thinks that there is strong evidence for the ex- istence of a God of real dominion, great goodness, and great power, and that the goodness may be held perfect, if we admit the power to be limited. The stumbling-block which keeps him back from accepting the. Christian faith, when he has reached its very thresh- THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. 183 old, is an implicit and unreasoning adoption of current or popular impressions with regard to the true meaning of one Divine attribute. The construction of omnipo- tence which leaves him in a midway position, with one foot on the ground of Christian faith, and the other in a quagmire of scepticism, does not even pretend to have been derived from any direct and inductive study of the Bible itself. He takes it merely from current and popular notions, which he ascribes, in flagrant contrast to the scope of his own reasonings, to the most enlightened Christians, when he ought, to be consistent, to have said rather, the least enlightened Christians. On no better basis than this loose impression, he affirms that "the notion of a providential government by an omnipotent being, for the good of his creatures, must be entirely dismissed," and calls it " absurd and immoral." Yet Bishop Butler does virtually what he blames him for not doing, and offers thoughts which, if Mr Mill had followed them out, would have proved the rashness and utter baselessness of his own statement. "Many instances," Butler says, "may be alleged of suppositions utterly impossible, and reducible to palpable contradictions, which not every one could perceive to be such, or perhaps any one at first sight suspect. We are unacquainted with what is in the nature of things practicable in the case before us, and our ignorance is a satisfactory answer, for some unknown impossibility may render what is objected against just and good, nay good in the highest practicable degree." Dr Mozley, in his fourth Lecture, has developed the same thought a little further, marking the contrast between real and apparent limitations of the Divine power. "A contradiction to necessary truth being nothing, nothing is taken away in the abstraction of the power to effect it. ...It is no real limita- tion of Omnipotence to deny the power to contradict a mathematical truth." I 84 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. In the "Ways of God," I have quoted these words of Bishop Butler, and unfolded the same important truth still further, at some length. I have shewn by a full induction of Scripture, from the first to the last, that what Mill misnames the hypothesis of limited power, is the real doctrine of Scripture throughout that is, a power self-limited by the perfect wisdom and holiness of God, so as to discern and exclude every lie, self-contradiction, and chimera. Thus we are taught that " God cannot lie," that " He cannot deny Himself." There are many other such cases of moral contradictions, which do not reveal themselves as such at the first glance, to ignorant and sinful creatures. The Bible proclaims the two doc- trines side by side with equal clearness, that God is really Almighty, in the words of the patriarch, " I know that Thou canst do everything," Job xlii. 2 ; and in the words of the angel to the Virgin, that " with God nothing shall be impossible," Lu. ii. 37; and in the words of the heavenly elders, " They rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty," Rev. iv. 8. And still that there is a real warfare of good and evil between the thrice holy God, with holy angels and redeemed men on one side, and the world, the flesh, and the devil and his angels on the other ; a warfare so real and intense, that every warning and every promise in the word of God is based upon the fact of its deep reality. " To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God." Rev. ii. 7. " He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death." Rev. ii. n. "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me on my throne, even as I overcame and am set down with my Father on His throne." Rev. iii. 21. Power then, not wholly vague and indefinite, but self-limited by the eternal truth of things, by the es- sential nature and perfection of the Living God, and by THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. 185 the essential imperfection and variability of all created being, is that glorious attribute which is brightly revealed throughout the whole of Scripture. Any other view of the Divine Omnipotence would degrade the doctrine of the Cross, and of atonement through the sufferings of the Divine and Incarnate Saviour into a gratuitous folly and act of cruelty, instead of a most glorious mani- festation of the perfect love and wisdom and holiness of the Almighty. (5) A fifth main law and principle of Redemption, and of the whole scheme of providence, is taught us in the law of God, near its close. " He is the Rock : His work is perfect; all His ways are judgment; a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is He." The scheme of Divine providence, it is thus proclaimed, is a perfect work. It is a contrast to the vision of the prophet. " I went down to the potter's house, and be- hold he wrought a work upon the wheels ; and the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter, so he made it again another vessel as it seemed good to the potter to make it." Jer. xviii. 3, 4. But the scheme of universal providence, if once marred, could never be repaired. So, if our blessed Lord had committed one sin, the perfectness of His example and His Divine atonement, as the Lamb without blemish and without spot, would have been precluded for ever. So, any mistake, error or ignorance on God's part, in His dealing with the mighty problem of the government of the universe, could never be reversed. The whole would contract a flaw that could never be repaired. But such a failure is precluded and forbidden by the perfect wisdom, the perfect goodness, and the spotless holiness of the Most High. Because "He is the Rock, a God of truth and without iniquity ; just and right," therefore His "work" also is "perfect." Deut. xxxii. 4, 1 86 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. This Christian optimism, the faith that no man or creature can devise a better scheme of universal pro- vidence, than that which the all-wise God Himself has planned, foreseen, and appointed, and will assuredly bring to pass in the appointed season, is a direct and in- separable corollary from the revealed perfections of God. A recent Bampton Lecturer (1877) says, " It is un- questionable that the present order of the universe is not a perfect manifestation of justice. Every theist, "it is said, will deny that the impress of perfection must of necessity be stamped on all the works of a perfect Creator. It is assumed (by Mr Mill) that if a God of infinite power, wisdom and benevolence has made the universe, He was bound to realize our highest concep- tion of those attributes in every portion of His creative work. This we know as a matter of fact He has not done." p. 449. In Mr Mill's statements, of which the " unsparing logic " is praised by the Lecturer, to prove the error of a priori reasoning^ there is no a priori reasoning whatever. They consist of an a posteriori comparison between the actual course of providence as a whole, and current popular impressions of perfect goodness and Divine omnipotence, and affirm their utter inconsistency. Mr Mill fails to draw the only true conclusion, that loose popular im- pressions of the meaning of omnipotence are at variance with the actual facts of providence, and he might have added, contradict the consenting testimony of the whole word of God. Mr Mill's real premiss is, that perfection must be stamped, not on all the works of a perfect Creator, separately, one by one, but only upon crea- tion and providence as a whole, so far at least as knowledge of them is attainable. The Lecturer affirms this premiss to be unquestionably false. It is rather a truth, expressly revealed ; not of course that the moral order of the universe, so far as known to us, within the range of earthly experience, is a perfected or finished THE WISDOM OF GOD IN REDEMPTION. 187 manifestation of justice. A small infinitesimal part cannot have the qualities of the mighty whole. But those who deny that the past history of our world, with all its solemn mysteries of prevailing rebellion, wickedness, reigning death, wide-spread misery, wasting and destruction, can be one part of a scheme of provi- dence perfectly wise and good, if we could see the whole, and fathom the mysteries of the eternal ages to come, flatly contradict an express statement of the word of God, as well as the voice of sound reason. Thus Christian optimism, or the doctrine that God's real plan must be better than any fancied substitute, or imaginary improvement, devised by sinful and ignorant creatures, is a direct and sure inference from that maxim of the Apostle, " To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." It must be sin for the All-wise and All-good Creator to reject a greater good, and to choose a less, out of the manifold possibilities of being, in creation and providence, alike open to the gaze of His immeasurable wisdom and goodness. The glorious doctrine of Leibnitz that the actual scheme of universal providence, is the best out of an infinite diversity of alternatives, or of conceivable and possible universes, however ridiculed by frivolous scoffers like Voltaire, is a sure inference from a thorough faith in the two Divine attributes, of perfect wisdom and perfect goodness ; but it is equally certain that to judge of this scheme as a whole, from the limited past experience of men alone in their earthly life for a few thousand years, would be a prodigious folly. The' mysterious depths of evil in the totality of created being, like the depths of the Divine goodness, are unsearchable. The mighty scheme of providence as a whole, has a breadth, and length, and depth, and height, like that love from which it flows, which passeth all created knowledge. And its Divine I 88 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. author, out of His infinite fulness, "is able to do exceed- ing abundantly above all that we ask or think;" unto Him be "glory in the Church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end." Eph. iii. 20, 21. The long conflict and warfare between moral good and evil, so dark, mysterious, and perplexing to the thoughts of men from the beginning until now, will end, we are assured, in a full victory of redeeming mercy, holiness, and tri- umphant goodness. In that victory, the unsearchable riches of the Divine bounty and goodness, and also the eternal contrast between the glorious God, the Self- existent, the Unchangeable, and the mighty universe which He has called into being to manifest His perfec- tions ; both the depth and the height of divine holiness and redeeming love, must and will be displayed for ever more and more. CHAPTER XXI. THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLD'S REDEEMER. JESUS of Nazareth is the Christ of God. What this title really implies is often overlooked and forgotten even by Christians themselves. It is virtually denied, when we are told that Christians are at liberty not to believe any miracle of the Old Testament, which has not been con- firmed by direct reference to it in the Gospels. (Dr Irons, 'Supernatural Religion,' Vol. i. p. 95). The argument, it is truly said, is an amazing one. The " Christ" is a title which has a distinct and definite meaning. It means Him of whom Moses and the Prophets did write ; the Redeemer, promised at first as the Seed of the woman to bruise the head of the Serpent ; the Son of Abraham, the Son of David ; the Person on whom there converges a whole series of predictions in the Old Testament, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Malachi. Any attempt to get rid of the Old Testament, and retain faith in the Gospel, involves a moral and logical impos- sibility. If the writers of the Old Testament were not prophets commissioned by, God to be messengers of His truth to men ; if the Pentateuch is a forgery, the Book of Isaiah a second forgery, the Book of Daniel a third forgery, dating from the time of the Maccabees, a real Messiah could not exist ; he would be a wholly imagin- ary person, defined by self-contradictory characters, the fulfiller of prophecies which were not real prophecies, SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. supplying the keystone to a complete arch of forgeries composed of mistaken glosses and wicked frauds, per- petrated by unknown parties, who traded on Jewish credulity and superstition. Rejection of the Old Testa- ment, our Lord declares, makes real faith in Himself as the Christ impossible. " Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" Joh. v. 46, 47. And once again : " They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.... If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Lu. xvi. 29, 31. This title, the " Christ" sums up and embodies the fact, that God had before announced His will to men, from the be- ginning of the world, by a succession of prophets, commis- sioned to give messages in His name. The Christ is one " of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write." The Jews and Samaritans alike knew that such a person was to come. The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, " I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ; when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus said unto her, I that speak unto thee am He." Joh. iv. 26. The message of the prophets was a first stage in that Divine husbandry which Jesus sent the Apostles to complete into a perfect harvest. " Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest... and he that reapeth receive th wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal, that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. ... I have sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour ; other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours." vv. 36, 38. The Christ is one who continues, completes, and fulfils a message, which had been already given in the Law and by the Prophets. Thus taught the Apostles from the first chapter of the Book of Acts to its close. The Gospel was a fulfilment THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLDS REDEEMER. of all things "which God had spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began." Acts iii. 21. So St Paul at Rome "persuaded the Jews concerning Jesus out of the law of Moses, and out of the prophets, from morning till evening;... and some believed the things which were spoken, and some believed not ; and when they agreed not among themselves they departed, after that Paul had spoken one word, Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our fathers.'* Acts xxviii. 23 25. Thus the first message of the New Testament history is, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham; the final end and consummation of the whole history of the Old Testament ; also the fulfiller of distinct prophecies of Isaiah and Micah, and of implied predictions of Hosea, Jeremiah, and all the prophets. And the same history closes with the assurance by St Paul, that the words of Isaiah vi. were a voice of the Holy Spirit, by Isaiah the prophet, unto the fathers of the Jews. These testimonies are crowned by the words of the angel to St John, " The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." Rev. xix. 10. The Wisdom of the Lord Jesus as the Christ will be seen by reflecting on the truths implied in that title. His life from the cradle to the grave was the perfect fulfilment of a work, ordained before the foundation of the world, but revealed in part and only in part, in a series of divine predictions, ranging through 4000 years until His actual appearance. AH these predictions, and the true purport of each one of them, must have succes- sively been opened before the Son of God, from the hour of His birth at Bethlehem, to His ascension from Olivet. Their fulfilment occupied His thoughts in the hour of His extreme anguish on the cross. "Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture 1 92 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. ...When He had received the vinegar, He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost." Joh. xix. 28, 30. After His Resurrection, His first message revealed to His disciples this aspect of His finished work. " These,, are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me. Then opened He their understanding that they might under- stand the Scriptures." Lu. xxiv. 44, 45. Thus the Son of God, throughout His life, "set the Lord always before" Him, with the whole series of prophetic mes- sages, from the first record of creation, to the announce- ment in Malachi of His own rising on the benighted world, as the "Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings." Mai. iv. 2. His task was not only to discern and fulfil all the express predictions of His life, death, and resurrection, but to satisfy and accomplish all the various types of the sacred history, or of the Divine law which really pointed to Him, and converged on Him as their common centre. How vast and unsearchable is the wisdom implied in this one aspect of the Saviour's work, as taught in His own words : " I am not come to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfil." Matt. v. 1 7. " I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do." Joh. xvii. 4. " I have kept my Father's commandment, and abide in His love." Joh. xv. 10. "The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself; but the Father which dwelleth in me, He doeth the works." Joh. xiv. 10. Thus our Lord as the Christ, was consciously fulfilling a specific work of Redeeming grace, ordained and appointed by His Father from the foundation of the world, and largely unfolded, both in express predictions, and manifold types through four, thousand years. All of which lay open to THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLDS REDEEMER. 1 93 His clear and eagle gaze ; and were fulfilled in the midst of all the ''contradictions of sinners," and the malice of the powers of darkness, with strict, perfect, and un- swerving fidelity. "The Scripture," He said, "cannot be broken," Joh. x. 35. "Even the things concerning Me have an end" (re'Xo? e^et, or y must be fulfilled), Lu. xxii. 37. He rejects, in the hour of His sufferings, the angelic succours which were at His command, rather than one sentence of Scripture should fail of fulfilment. " Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He will presently give me more than twelve legions of angels ? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled that thus it must be ?" Matt. xxvi. 53, 54. So profound is the reverence of the Incarnate Son of God for those words of the prophets, which are the "sword of the Holy Spirit," Eph. vi. 17, "the Scripture of truth," Dan. x. 21, and the "true sayings of God," Rev. xviii. 9. What an utter contrast is this to the light and flippant manner in which they are too often treated by modern Sadducees, or half disciples, who degrade them to the level of their own writings, that is, fallible sayings, mixed up of truth and falsehood in uncertain proportions. If we accept their theories they are not words of the holy Prophets, but of anonymous and unscrupulous forgers, so that their real parent would not be the God of truth, but the Father of lies. But the perfect truthfulness of Scripture shines out in the whole teaching of our blessed Lord, from His first great conflict and victory in the wilder- ness, to His final session at the Father's right hand in heavenly glory. There He is now "expecting," until His voice on the cross, " It is finished," Joh. xix. 30, shall be completed by that later voice of His heavenly Father, "He that sat on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And He said unto me write, for these words B. 13 IQ4 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. are true and faithful, and he said unto me, "It is done." Rev. xxi. 6. Another aspect of the deep wisdom and love of the Gospel of Christ will be seen, when we consider the Kingly office of the Saviour, as specially revealed in the first Gospel. The world in all past ages has been groan- ing under the curse of selfish, despotic, and unrighteous government. Oppression has made even wise men mad, and men in the last days, recoiling from the curse of despotic rule, have been ready to fling themselves into a still lower gulf, of lawlessness and utter anarchy. The promised Redeemer was predicted from the first, under the character of a Righteous King, in whom would be realized what sinful men had vainly longed for through successive ages, but had never been able to attain per- manently by any devices of human wisdom. He was to be a King of the race of David, but better and greater than David ; a King of Peace, greater and better than Solomon, in whom the words should be fulfilled, " I will raise unto David a righteous branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and execute judgment in the earth," Jer. xxiii. 5. This Kingly glory of Christ is the truth specially revealed in the first Gospel, which begins with His line of royal descent, and with the message to the Wise Men, "Where is He that is born King of the Jews ? for we have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him." It is continued by the solemn mes- sage of His work of judgment, " When the Son of man shall come in His glory and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory." It is crowned and completed by His parting words, on the mountain in Galilee, " All power is given to me in heaven and in earth, Go and teach all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have commanded you." THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLD'S REDEEMER. IQ5 The unsearchable wisdom implied in this office of Christ is shewn in three things. It is all-inclusive as to the actions on which judgment is to be passed. "God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing whether it be good, or whether it be evil," Eccles. xii. 14. It is all inclusive as to the persons who are judged. "Before Him shall be gathered all nations,' 1 Matt. xxv. 32. "We must all appear before the judg- ment seat of Christ that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad," 2 Cor. v. 10. "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened . . . and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works," Rev. xx. 12. This judgment requires in Him who executes it, unsearchable wisdom, not only because it includes all mankind and all their actions, but has respect to all the principles on which righteous judgment depends. It is a judgment without respect of persons by one "who searcheth the reins and the hearts," who " will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts." It is the judgment of one who is able to weigh in scales of perfect equity, the varying opportunities, and degrees of light, which men have enjoyed or abused, and all the excuses by which they have sought to veil their guilt, from the time of the fig-leaves of Paradise, to the hour of the last judgment. And this Judge is also the great " High Priest, holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens," Heb. vii. 26, " who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin," Heb. iv. 15. The mingled folly and blasphemy of those sinners is extreme, who charge this glorious King of Righteousness, the future Judge of all mankind, with 132 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. utter and incredible folly, in that glorious Gospel of redeeming grace and love, which is really the brightest effluence of the wisdom and grace of the "Sun of Right- eousness," where it shines with a brightness above that of the sun at noonday. A third aspect of the glorious wisdom of Christ as revealed in the Gospels is seen in His character as the Lord of all nature, the unwearied and indefatigable Worker. This is the view of our Lord's character specially revealed in the second Gospel, which ends with this solemn message. " After that the Lord had spoken unto them, He was received up into heaven and sat at the right hand of God ; and they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following." The fact of this unwearied working of the Son of God, is ex- pressly stated by Himself, to justify his cure of the impotent man on the Sabbath day. " Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," Joh. v. 1 7. But it constitutes the main feature of the second Gospel, in which there are few discourses, but an un- wearied succession of acts of grace, swiftly following each other. " Straightway, coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens opened." " Immediately the Spirit driveth Him into the wilderness." " Straightway they forsook their nets and followed him ;" and " Straight- way He called them;" and "Straightway, on the Sab- bath day, He entered into the Synagogue and taught," Mk. i. 10, 12, 1 8, 20, 21, 29, 43. Along with this character of Christ, as the indefatig- able worker, answering to the symbol of the ox, there is here revealed His lordship over all nature. The double message is here given, "Is not this the carpenter? and they were offended at him." " Go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature," or to the whole THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLDS REDEEMER. 197 creation. The lordship of Christ over all nature, both material and spiritual, is further summed up in the words that follow, "These signs shall follow them that believe. In my name shall they cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover/' Mk. xvi. 17 20. All the actc of Him who is the Lord of nature, must in a certain sense be supernatural. The one supreme law to which they are subject is, "the counsel of His own will," or their subservience to the great ends of His universal providence. The common course of nature, as well as all that is rare and exceptional, proceeds from His supreme wisdom. The rising and setting of the sun, and the circuits of the seasons ; " they continue this day according to Thine ordinances, for all are Thy servants," Ps. cxix. 90, 91; and the stedfastness of the earth itself, lt Thou hast established the earth and it abideth." But so also, when He "said to the fig-tree, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever, and His disciples heard it;" " in the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig-tree dried up from the roots," Mk. xi. 14, 20. For, it was the word of Him by whom all things were made at the first, and who has said, " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away." The laws of nature include not only an element of permanence, but of immense and ceaseless variation. The supreme law to which all others must ever be subordinate, is the will of the Lord God of hosts ; and the nature of every seed and every plant and grain, and all the processes of human husbandry, in their profoundest wisdom, " come forth from the Lord of hosts, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working," Isa. xxviii. 29. The character of Christ, as the Son of Man and as 198 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. the true High Priest is especially set before us in the third Gospel. This Gospel is especially rich in its mani- festation of the human sympathies, grace, and compas- sion of the Saviour. He presents himself to us, as the Son of Man predicted by Daniel ; the ideal man, the perfect pattern and standard, not only of grace and com- passion, as in the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, but also of worship, reverence, and piety towards God. When " He was praying, the hea- vens were opened" at His Baptism, Lu. iii. 21. When He chose the Apostles, He "went out into the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God," Lu. vi. 12. As this Gospel begins with the vision to Zacha- rias, while ministering in the temple, so its close sets before us the Son of Man, ascending to the throne of God, in the very act of priestly benediction. " While He blessed them, He was parted from them and carried up into heaven, and they worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy," Lu. xxiv. 51, 52. In all these passages is implied the full and perfect wisdom of Christ as the Son of Man. In the "old Serpent," one name of the great adver- sary, is implied the greatness of that perverse and un- principled cunning, which forms the treasury of delusion and falsehood, on which the kingdom of darkness is founded. He is set before us in the word of God, as combining angelic and superhuman intelligence, the ut- most tortuosity, fertility in inventing ever varying delu- sions and falsehoods ; the utmost conceivable blindness to the superior wisdom of God ; an intense power of self- delusion, and along with all this the consciousness of power to wage a warfare against God and His truth, and a temper wholly devoid of fear and alarm, so as to harden himself against the Most High. Such are the characters in which he was revealed to that Patriarch who THE PERFECTIONS OF THE WORLDS REDEEMER. 199 was especially exposed to his temptations. He is the "king over all the children of pride, and beholdeth all high things : on earth there is not his like, who is made without fear .... his heart is as firm as a stone, yea, hard as a piece of the nether mill-stone : the sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold," Job xli. 24, 33, 34. As he is the foremost and chief of rebels against God, so he seems to be pronounced, in natural gifts, the foremost of created intelligences. " He is the chief of the ways of God, but He that made him, can make His sword to ap- proach unto him," Job xl. 19. The great day of Christ's judgment is that in which " the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish Leviathan the piercing and crooked serpent," Isa. xxvii. i. As in this enemy we have set before us, the sum and climax of all perverse cunning as figured in the ser- pent tribes, employed for the dishonour of God and the injury of man ; so this perfect cunning, perversity and malice of " the spirit who worketh in the children of disobedience," Eph. ii. 2, can only be overcome by the all-perfect wisdom of the God-man. " For this purpose was the Son of God manifested that He might destroy the works of the Devil," i Jo. iii. 8. " Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God," i Cor. i. 24. " The cross is that mystery of godliness and of redeem- ing grace, wherein Christ, the Son of Man, "spoiled principalities and made a show of them openly, triumph- ing over them in it," Col. ii, 15. The adversary is the " strong man armed" with seemingly interminable re- sources of delusion, which constitute the armoury of the kingdom of darkness. As human nature in its perfection is higher and nobler than the nature of the serpent, the Redeemer is that t( stronger than he," who can overcome him, " take from him all the armour wherein he trusted, and divide his spoils ;" because He is the Incarnate 2OO SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. Wisdom, the Word, " in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," ver. 3. Inexpressibly mournful and solemn are charges of folly, falsehood, and delusion, brought by guilty mortals against that glorious Gospel, in which omniscient Wis- dom, and inexpressible grace, and spotless holiness have conspired to reveal the choicest treasures of Divine good- ness, so as to rescue all but the more stubborn and perverse of the human race, from the ruin of that fall in which they were involved at first, by the malice of the great ringleader of evil. CHAPTER XXII. THE INCREASE OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE LAST DAYS, A SCRIPTURE PROPHECY. THE present century has witnessed the solution of a great problem, which awakened the curiosity, and baffled the researches of the ancients, from Herodotus onward through more than two thousand years, till it passed into a proverb. The sources of the Nile have been detected and explored, by the laborious researches of Livingstone, Krapf, Grant, Speke, Stanley, Cameron, and other travellers. They have been found to lie in a series of Lakes in the South of Africa, fed by the copious and abundant rains of the Tropics. From these hidden sources, for thousands of years, has flowed the fertilizing stream which formed the pride and glory of Egypt, the main source of its wealth, fertility, and greatness, through successive ages, when the land of the Pharaohs was the foremost of the world's empires. That stream of the Nile received on its bosom, almost four thousand years ago, in an ark of papyrus the infant Moses, the first and noblest in the series of those messengers by whom it has pleased God to give written messages of His will to mankind. On the side of this stream in later years, were built those pyramids, which are the most conspicuous and enduring products of man's skill and labour to be found on the face of the whole 202 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. earth. Both these, and their contents, are the record of his vain and earnest efforts to resist the reign of corrup- tion, to baffle death and the grave. There is another flood which in these days is pouring its broad and fertilizing stream, not over the valley of the Nile alone, but over the far wider range of all the civilized regions of the earth. That flood is the wide, and still widening stream of physical science, growing in depth and breadth from year to year, with its manifold contributions to the arts of life, and to the supply of human wants. Very wonderful and various are its dis- coveries of the secrets of nature, with its microscope, its telescope, steam engines, steam boats, locomotives, rail- ways, electric telegraphs, spectroscope, in the strata of the earth below, and throughout the starry universe to the farthest depths of space. This wide and fertilizing flood has changed the whole face of modern society, and by its mighty operation has introduced a new era in the history of our world. It has laid bare a thousand secrets in nature, long veiled in darkness, to the contemplation of the human reason, and made them minister to the supply of human wants, and to the development of the secret and mysterious faculties of the mind of man. Now it is a natural inquiry, Is there any lake on a mountain side near some mighty watershed, to which we can trace the secret origin of this fertilizing flood of modern scientific discovery? There is such a source. We find it in one sentence of the inspired word of God ; one verse near the close of the visions of the prophet Daniel, which Christ has given His disciples a special charge to read with understanding; given to him in vision 2,400 years ago. It is the prediction that in the time of the end, and in the near approach of a time of great politi- cal and national trouble, " many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Dan. xii. 4. BACONS MOTTO. 2O3 This verse was singled out by Lord Bacon as the motto of his immortal work, which gave the first great impulse to that revived energy of inductive search into nature which has gone on increasing ever since. The increase of travelling, or running to and fro in the earth, is here described as the first step in this predicted growth of knowledge. The knowledge of every child of man, has both its pedestal, and its commencement, in his familiar knowledge of a few persons, things, plants, animals, and material objects in that small spot of earth where he lives ; on his intimate knowledge of this small and narrow circle of the objects immediately around him, he founds the whole fabric and structure of his later knowledge. Thus an age of increased facilities for travelling and running to and fro in the earth, increases at once for every individual, the range of that circle of persons, things, spots, local relations, and material objects, which is the intellectual foundation upon which all his wider knowledge of the material universe, and his further speculations, or philosophical conjectures on the system of the universe, and on the nature of all his fellow crea- tures must be founded. Thus facilities for travelling, and a general habit of running to and fro in the earth, are a natural preparation for any further increase and development of man's knowledge of natural things. They provide a wider and broader basis than can exist, when each person is tied down, and limited, to the range of one day's foot journey on the face of the earth, and remains almost wholly ignorant, except by report, of all that lies beyond. It has been estimated, by statistical inquirers, that the amount of locomotion, or travelling to and fro upon the earth, has increased more than a hundredfold in the course of the present century. The Roman Empire in this respect had made a great advance on all earlier 204 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. ages. The Romans paid special attention to the construc- tion of roads, the building of bridges, and the formation of regular pathways between Rome itself, and every part of her widely extended empire. It is probable that the amount and ease of travelling was increased tenfold under the Roman Empire, as compared with all previous ages of the world. It is plain that running to and fro in the earth, and the increase of natural knowledge, and a de- velopment of zeal in the study of the works of God, have been marked features in the whole history of the world, from the date of Bacon's work, down to the present hour. What view did Lord Bacon himself take of his own work ? Plainly, he believed that he was one selected instrument, for the fulfilment of an express promise and prophecy, which God had already given so long before by His holy Prophet, to the children of men. Hence arose his strong faith in the success of his great effort, to open a clearer pathway into the fields of science. Hence also his warning against the deceptive shortcuts which human impatience is ever prone to make, when it substitutes mere guess-work of a pretentious kind, for a patient induction of particular facts, and that careful testing of hypotheses at every step, on which the whole efficacy and value of induction, in his opinion, depended. He had a firm and sublime faith in the suc- cess of his own labours, even when all past experience, from the slow and scanty increase of knowledge for nearly 2000 years, might have seemed most discouraging. Be- cause as man, he truly says, is the minister and inter- preter of nature, so he felt himself in this great work, of laying the foundations for a theory of the inductive study of nature, to be only a servant, an interpreter of a promise already given to men, by the Lord God of the holy prophets. This promise assured the arrival in the time of the end, (which he referred with good reason BACON S TWO PRAYERS. 2O5 to the times after the Reformation, and the fall of the Eastern empire of Rome), of an age when travelling and running to and fro in the earth should be greatly mul- tiplied. And when along with this increase in the stimulus and materials of science, science itself should also be increased. That increase he might well expect, would be twofold, like that of a river, spreading over a wider surface, and including a greater number of individuals ; and also piercing further into the secrets of nature than had ever been done before ; so as not only to increase the intellectual wealth of the race, but to furnish human life with a large variety of inventions, ministering to the hourly comfort of mankind. It was probably a deep, secret conviction of the true fountain from which his work derived its inspi- ration, that led Bacon, in the confidence of expected success, to append to his work the following prayer : THE STUDENT'S PRAYER. " To God the Father, God the Word, God the Spirit, we pour forth most humble and hearty supplications ; that he remembering the calamities of mankind, and the pilgrimage of this our life, in which we wear out days few and evil, would please to open to us new refreshments out of the fountains of his goodness, for the alleviating of our miseries. This also we humbly and earnestly beg, that human things may not prejudice such as are divine ; neither that from the unlocking of the gates of sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, any thing of incredulity, or intellectual night, may arise in our minds towards divine mysteries. But rather, that by our mind thoroughly cleansed and purged from fancy and vanities, and yet subject and perfectly given up to the divine oracles, there may be given unto faith the things that are faith's." Amen. The rash and ambitious hypotheses of many modern speculators in science, while they depart very widely from the strict and exact laws of Bacon's Inductive Philosophy, at the same time suggest the duty to all the friends of real science, as well as to every sincere disciple of Christ, 2O6 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. to offer up once more, with renewed earnestness, both for themselves, and for all their fellow students, this sim- ple and striking prayer of Bacon, and to follow it by adopting his prayer as a writer. THE WRITER'S PRAYER. " Thou, O Father, who gavest the visible light as the first-born of thy creatures, and didst pour into man the intellectual light as the top and consummation of thy workmanship, be pleased to protect and govern this work, which coming from thy goodness, returneth to thy glory. Thou, after thou hadst reviewed the works which thy hands had made, beheldest that every thing was very good, and thou didst rest with complacency in them. But man, reflecting on the works which he had made, saw that all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and could by no means acquiesce in them. Wherefore if we labour in thy works with the sweat of our brows, thou wilt make us partakers of thy vision and thy sabbath. We humbly beg that this mind may be steadfastly in us ; and that thou, by our hands, and also by the hands of others, on whom thou shalt bestow the same spirit, wilt please to convey a largess of new alms to thy family of mankind. These things we commend to thy everlasting love, by our Jesus, thy Christ, God with us." The true relation between Christian faith and genuine science, so often distorted or denied by sceptics or scio- lists, is well defined by the same great philosopher in " Filum Labyrinthi," and in the Essay on Truth. " There cannot be a greater and more evident truth than this, that all knowledge, specially that of natural philosophy, tendeth highly to the magnifying of the glory of God, in his power, providence and benefits;... as engraven in his works, which, without this knowledge, are beheld but as through a veil. If the heavens in the body of them, do declare the glory of God to the eye, much more do they in the rule and decrees of them, declare it to the understanding. And another reason (for its culture) not inferior to this, is that the same natural philosophy principally among all human knowledge, doth give an excellent defence against both extremes in religion, superstition and infidelity; for both it freeth the mind from a number of weak fancies and imaginations, and raiseth it to acknowledge that to God ' all things are possible.' To this purpose speaketh our Saviour in that first BACON'S TWO PRAYERS. 207 Canon against heresies ... ' Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God ' . . . So He saw well that natural philo- sophy was of excellent use to the exaltation of the Divine Majesty. And what is admirable, being a remedy for superstitions, it is never- theless a help to faith ... ' What is truth ? ' asked Pilate. Certainly there are that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in thinking as well as in acting. It is not only the difficulty and labour which men have in finding out of truth that doth bring lies into favour, but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself . . . This same truth is a naked and open daylight, which doth not shew the masks and mummeries of the world half so stately and daintily as candle-light. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any doubt that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, and false imaginations, it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and unpleasing to themselves ? But howsoever these things are in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that inquiry for truth, which is the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. " The first creature of God, in the works of the days, was the light of the sense : the last was the light of reason, and His Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of His Spirit. First, he breathed light on the face of the matter, or chaos ; then he breathed light into the face of man, and still he breatheth and inspireth light into the face of His chosen. The poet (Lucretius), that beautified the sect that otherwise was inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well, ' It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below : but no pleasure is comparable to the standing on the vantage-ground of truth, a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene : and to see the errors and wanderings, and mists and tempests in the vale below.' But so always that this prospect be with pity and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth. To pass from theological and philosophical truth to the truth of civil business ; it will be acknow- ledged even by those who practise it not, that clear and round dealing is the honour of man's nature, and the mixture of falsehood is like alloy that embaseth it." CHAPTER XXIII. THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN CHRISTIAN FAITH AND SCIENCE " FALSELY so CALLED," IN THE LAST DAYS. THE " Gospel of the Resurrection " by Dr Westcott contains two hundred pages developing the truths in- volved in, and growing out of, the Resurrection of Christ, which seem to me mainly true and beautiful. Still there are two drawbacks which do much to obscure the whole, and deprive it of practical power. The first is, the mis- taken transfer to the Son, God Incarnate, of the transcen- dental conception of God, as a Being above time and space, with whom there is no past, present, or future, but simply an ETERNAL NOW. It is one main feature of the great mystery of godliness, that God has condescended, in the person of His Son, not only to be tempted like as we are, but subject, like His creatures, to the con- ditions of time and place. This is the very central truth of the Christian creed, that God the Son became in- carnate at Bethlehem, a specific place, in the reign of Herod and Augustus, and during the government of Pilate, a specific time, in "the last days." To forget and overlook this great truth, instead of helping us to see deeper into sacred mysteries, spreads a veil of mist and confusion over the whole. The other drawback is the entire omission of the doctrine of a Judgment to come, and of the fundamental contrast between the CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE. 2OQ church and the world; and the double character of Christ as the " head of every man," and as the head of the body, the church. This is the truth which forms the woof of the whole message of Scripture, from the history of Cain and Abel to the last chapter of the Apocalypse. The entire pretermission of this great and fundamental truth, turns the whole discussion into a kind of luminous haze, where every part produces an effect, like that of the nebulous spaces in the milky way, instead of shed- ding a definite light, like that of the pole star or the southern cross. The Appendix of thirty pages, is an attempt to pro- claim a peace and friendship between Christian faith and the Positivism of M. Comte ; an attempt as hopeless as it is suicidal, in a Professor of Divinity. I have read it with intense surprise and regret, but it would require a book to unfold fully the reasons of my entire dissent from that Appendix. Positivism, in its fundamental law of progress, com- bines a fearful blasphemy, with a complete reversal of the very first principle of genuine philosophy. For that principle is the transition in our thoughts from momentary phenomena, to the causes, things, and per- sons, the real existences, mental or material, on which phenomena depend. The creed which denies the living God, and consigns Him to the 'moles and bats/ as a dream of the infancy of science, that must disappear with the daybreak, and then be replaced by M. Comte's NEW SUPREME BEING, COLLECTIVE HUMANITY, is exactly the creed of the last Antichrist, in that final stage in which he will have dropped every veil, or theological disguise, aud when openly, and no longer in a mystery, he "opposes and exalts himself against all that is called God, or that is worshipped, so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God," 2 Thess. ii. 4. B. 14 2IO SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. It is refreshing to escape from the mephitic neigh- bourhood of this Satanic religion without a God, which, when they approach it incautiously, seems able to con- fuse and dazzle the senses and instincts even of some Christian men. Let us listen to the clear and manly tes- timony of that Christian philosopher, who is the second great glory of Cantbridge. What a contrast to the blas- phemy of M. Comte, with his " new Supreme Being," collective humanity, or a total including all the sinners of mankind, who have murdered and tortured one another, from Cain and Abel to the orgies of the Commune of Paris, and the last Turkish or Bulgarian atrocities. Let us turn from this " new God " of Positivism which has "lately come up," to the words of that noble Scholium which closes the "Principia" of Newton. That work is the greatest single step of advance in the knowledge of nature which man has been permitted to attain ; and the Scholium is its fitting close. " This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. If the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these being formed by the like wise counsel, must all be subject to the dominion of One. From every system light passes into all the others, and lest the systems of the fixed stars should fall on each other, He hath placed them at immense distances one from another. This being governs all things, not as a soul of the world, but as Lord over all, and on account of His dominion he is wont to be called the Lord God, TravTOKparcDp, or universal ruler . . . " The supreme God is a being, eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect. But a being however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be the Lord God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which con- stitutes a God. A true, supreme or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme or imaginary God; and from His true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent and powerful being ; and from His other perfections that He is supreme or most perfect. He is eter- nal, infinite, omnipotent and omniscient. That is, His duration reaches from eternity to eternity, His presence from infinity to infinity. He CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE. 211 governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. God is the same God, always and everywhere. In Him are all things con- tained and moved, yet neither affects the other. God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies, and bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God . . . " We know Him only by His most wise and excellent contrivances of things and final causes; but we admire Him for His perfections, but we reverence and adore Him on account of His dominion ; for we adore Him as His servants; and a God without dominion, provi- dence and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every- where, could produce no variety of things; and that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places, could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a being necessarily existing. Thus much concerning God, to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to natural philosophy." The Agnosticism of the nineteenth century differs in two respects from the Gnosticism of the first century, and its " oppositions of science falsely so called/' to the truth of God and the glorious message of the everlasting Gospel, while it agrees with it in most of its other fea- tures. First, it strives to incorporate with itself the materials, provided by the progress of real science, in man's knowledge of the works of God, or the divine fulfilment of the gracious promise of God made by the prophet Daniel so long before, that in the time of the end knowledge should be increased. It seeks to in- terweave all these discoveries of science into the web of its own unbelieving speculations, and it uses them to form fresh weapons of assault against the true sayings of God, as well as to point afresh the blunted shafts that have recoiled, and aim them at the shield of truth again. It thus fulfils a real law of progress announced by the great Apostle of the Gentiles, in his parting mes- sage to the church of Christ; there is a law of moral development in the case of wilful and open opposers of the truth, no less real, than that progress of real science 142 212 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. which had been earlier assured to mankind by the Divine promise. " Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." But this down- ward progress is to receive a sudden arrest and reversal in the last times, when the blasphemous presumption of those who have succeeded to the task of Jannes and Jambres shall have reached its height. " As Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth, men of perverted understanding, devoid of dis- cernment as to the faith. They shall proceed no further, for their folly shall be manifest unto all men, as theirs also was." This climax seems almost reached in Positiv- ism, and its Satanic religion, if religion it is to be called, which consigns the true and living God to eternal oblivion and contempt, as one of the dreams of a childish and out- worn superstition, and would place upon His throne, for the worship of a coming and more enlightened genera- tion, the " new Supreme Being" of M. Comte, "collective humanity." Along with this downward moral progress of Agnos- ticism it has a second feature, in the reversal of the simple and noble prayer of Bacon, that "from the kindling of greater natural light, nothing of incredulity or intellec- tual night may arise toward the Divine mysteries." The warning prophecy of the Psalmist with regard to Judas has been fulfilled in its disciples, with regard to the higher intellectual food of the soul. " Their table is turned into a snare, a trap, a recompense, a stumblingblock to them." The words of the Psalmist do not refer mainly to the food of the body, but to the higher and richer food in the Divine discourses of Christ, and His multiplied acts of grace, the gift of working miracles, and the high privilege of the call to be an Apostle of Christ, all which the traitor abused and perverted to his own loss and shame. The celebrated saying of M. Comte, that to CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE. 213 the eyes of an enlightened philosopher, the heavens re- veal no glory but that of the astronomers by whom their laws are discovered, fulfils perfectly the description of Milton, the third great light and glory of Cambridge : " For swinish gluttony Ne'er looks to Heav'n amidst its gorgeous feast, But with besotted base ingratitude Crams and blasphemes its feeder." The words of Milton apply with still greater emphasis to the rich and abundant intellectual feast which science, by its manifold discoveries, has provided for all its dis- ciples and students in these last days, than to abuse and excess in the indulgence of the bodily appetites alone. CHAPTER XXIV. THE REVELATION IN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS ONE HARMONIOUS WHOLE. RATIONALISM may be defined as the abuse and per- version of human reason, in dealing with the claims of Divine Revelation. Its source is an undue confidence in man's unaided faculties, and an excessive estimate of his religious instincts and reasoning powers. Its effect is to set aside all the truths of Christianity, or else to choose out such as suit individual taste or fancy, and to de- preciate or deny the supernatural evidence by which they are all invested with Divine authority, and claim the reverence and submission of mankind. It ranges through many degrees of error, from the broad assertion that Christianity is a fraud, and supernatural revelation impos- sible, to the rejection of some secondary truths, or books of an inferior importance, or of particular passages or texts, on insufficient evidence, from their rightful place in the volume of inspired truth. If God has made a supernatural revelation of His will to mankind, it is plain that the gift may be per- verted in two opposite ways. Men may add to it, or take away from it. They may corrupt it by spurious additions, or mutilate it by either a partial or a total rejection. They may confound false interpretations, and human traditions or additions, with the message itself, so as to invest them with a like authority ; or RATIONALISM. 215 they may pare down and extenuate its meaning till only a scanty residuum is left, which few people would think worth the trouble, of being conveyed to men by a special revelation. The Pharisees and Sadducees in the time of our Lord are striking instances of these opposite evils. We have a warning against both, alike in the opening of Deutero- nomy, iv. 2, and at the close of the Apocalypse, Rev. xxii. 1 8, 19. The same charge was given by Christ Himself to his disciples. We are thus taught that under the Law and the Gospel these are two lasting sources of danger to the Church of God. Such is the natural rela- tion of these two errors, that every faithful Christian is likely to be charged in turn with each of them. Some will condemn him for believing too little, others for believing too much. He will seem a Rationalist or semi- Sadducee to superstitious devotees ; or again, a super- stitious bigot to the disciples of human reason. The best, wisest, and holiest Christians have only a partial and incomplete understanding of divine truth. The void left by an immature faith will either be filled up with opinions and misinterpretations which men mistake in their haste for parts of the divine message ; or else they may accept a maimed and imperfect creed, instead of including within the circle of their faith the full scope and compass of the whole word of God. In one case they will add to its teaching, in the other they will take away from it. We ought never to suppose that we ourselves are free from all participation in one or other of these evils, against both of which it is our duty to contend. Renouncing rational- ism we may fall easily into the arms of superstition ; in condemning formalism and a mere traditional creed, we may contract a captious and sceptical habit of thought, which must betray us into partial unbelief. In dealing with slighter departures, on either side, from the line of 2l6 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. truth, we need to be very guarded in our censures, lest the fault after all should prove to be our own. We may think that we have detected rationalism in others, when the real fault is some mixture of superstition in our own faith ; or, in other cases, we may charge men wrongfully with superstition, through a false and diseased estimate of our own powers of spiritual discernment. The arrows from both camps, that of the Sadducee and of the Pharisee, will be aimed, not less frequently against the truth which lies between them, than against each other. As Caiaphas and Pilate conspired together against the Lord of glory, a double reproach, both from the Pharisee and the Sad- ducee, is the natural consequence and usual price of a faithful adherence to the inspired word of God. The stage of Rationalism farthest removed from Christianity, is that which denies even the possibility of a supernatural revelation, either in an oral or written form. In Atheists of the French school, such as Helvetius, Con- dillac and Volney, in the last century, and M. Comte and the Positivists of our own day, this doctrine is only the natural consequence of their dreary creed. The " fool " who says in his heart " There is no God," must naturally infer, there can be no Divine Revelation. With such men, nature is an immense lumber-room of effects without a cause, and of laws without any lawgiver. Their barren theory makes every star in the firmament re-echo the boast ascribed by Milton to the arch-fiend in the hour of his rebellion : " We know no time when we were not as now, Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd, By our own quick'ning power, when fatal course Had circled its full orb, the birth mature Of this our native Heav'n, ethereal sons." But the paradox that all revelation is impossible, is not confined to Atheists, whose one great falsehood incor- VARIETIES OF RATIONALISM. 217 porates into itself a thousand lesser follies. It is held more or less fully by some who profess to be Theists, and even Christians of a high order, ardent lovers of "the absolute religion." It appears in F. Newman's works on "the Soul;" T. Parker's " Discourses on Religion;" and Strauss's " Mythical Theory of the Gospels." In the first, religion is a sentiment, not a conclusion of the intel- lect, and therefore can never be embodied in a creed, or conveyed by a " Book revelation." In the second, the perfections of God imply the certainty of a universal revelation of pure and absolute religion, and exclude any other of an historical, limited, and partial kind. In the last, the alleged proofs of Supernatural revelation are said to be proved impossible by the progress of sound metaphysics, and their inconsistency with the discoveries of modern science. The doctrine that miracles are impossible in their own nature, is itself a moral miracle, a marvellous ex- treme of presumptuous folly, veiled under a thin mantle of metaphysical subtleties. From the fact that God has richly displayed His wisdom in the universe, as the great architect and mechanician, it draws the inference that He can never manifest any nobler attributes as the Father of mercies, the supreme Judge and moral Governor of all reasonable beings. Creation, and the silent quiet course of daily providence, as man now experiences it here on earth, can never exhaust all the conceivable or probable modes of His operation, who is "wonderful in counsel and excellent in working." Man is able easily to con- vince his fellow-man of his own presence. And shall the Almighty God, who upholds all things by His power, and fills Heaven and earth by His presence, be unable to manifest Himself by means more decisive and effectual than those which, at the present hour, leave Atheists at full liberty to deride the superstition of His worshippers, 2l8 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. and to boast of their own superior wisdom, in their strenuous efforts to banish the Creator from His own universe ? How much wiser to say with the ancient patriarch, after all our fancied advances in metaphysics and real progress in natural science, " Lo ! these are a part of His ways ; but how faint a whisper is heard of Him ; the thunder of His power who can understand ?" But Supernatural religion, though not impossible, may perhaps be superfluous. Natural reason may be sufficient without the feeble help of historical records like those of the Gospels. The traditional saying of Omar has been applied to this subject by some modern writers. " If the doctrine of Scripture agree with the conclusions of sound reason, they are superfluous; if opposed to it they are untrue and ought to be thrown away. To ascertain what is absolute religion," (Mr Parker affirms) " is not difficult. It is perfect obedience to the law of God ; perfect love towards God and man exhibited in a life allowing the harmonious action of all the faculties. Christianity is either absolute religion and morality, or it is less; greater it cannot be. Jesus of Nazareth may either have taught absolute religion, or an imperfect form ; he may have omitted what was essential, or have added what was national, temporal and personal. But if His religion has none of these faults, then it is the absolute religion, eternally true before revelation." Parker's 'Discourses,' pp. 180 182. One would suppose that a single glance at the present state or past history of the world, would dispose at once of this strange wild fancy, that a supernatural revelation is entirely needless. A few jackdaws in Christian countries may strut about in borrowed feathers, and may boast of an "absolute religion" which they have stolen from the Bible, and then carved and mangled, till it is no better than a bleeding corpse. This residuum is a law without any sanction, a morality without life ; the worship of a Being wholly unknown, without any remedy for conscious guilt, or any clear hope of life beyond the grave, or of any deliverance from the dark despotism of death. There is VARIETIES OF RATIONALISM. in fact no myth so purely mythical, as this dream of some philosophers in their dotage, that the light of man's reason has made all supernatural revelation superfluous. If the sun of Christianity were once blotted out of the firmament, the dim feeble moonlight which these pre- tentious deists call " the absolute religion," a mere reflec- tion lighted by that sun, on the sterile plains and volcanic caverns of the human heart, in its ceaseless lunations, would also disappear and pass away for ever. Wherever the true sunlight from heaven has not dawned, the words of the prophet have been verified, " Darkness has covered the earth, and gross darkness the people." Amidst all these declamations on the virtue and clearness of the ab- solute religion, the words of the Apostle remain still as true as ever, " after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolish- ness (TOV /ajpuy/Ao/ros) of the preached word to save them that believe." Though a divine revelation be admitted to be both possible and desirable, it may still be maintained that it has never been actually given. When the evidences of the Gospel are pleaded in the court of reason, the verdict may be returned, ' It is either an imposture or a mere dream of excited imagination/ Rationalism, in its third form, admits that a divine message might be given to men, and be in some respects desirable, and affirms only, that the proof of the fact, in the case of the Gospel, and still more of other religions, is insufficient and defective. This view is common to the earlier rationalism of Ger- many, and to the mythical theory which has widely dis- placed it. In reality it is seldom found to be maintained on its own merits. In those who maintain it, there is commonly a secret conviction that the laws of Nature have, in some way or other, tied up the hands of the supreme lawgiver. Or else there is an evident desire to 22O SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. whitewash the religious history of the world, and to make it out that fetichism and devil-worship, human sacrifices and widow-burning, infanticide, the crocodile gods of Egypt, and the monster gods of India, are very fair and respectable varieties of the one universal religion. Once let the double truth be frankly admitted, that the living God can make a revelation of His own will, character and purposes, and that mankind greatly need it, and nine-tenths of the cavils brought against Christianity and its evidences will die away of themselves. The elder form of German rationalism, beginning with Semler, aimed its attacks solely against the miraculous ele- ments in the Scripture history. These were got rid of, by any expedients, however violent. According to Bahrdt, the angel who appeared to Zacharias was a flash of lightning; Paulus explains it as the light of lamps falling upon a cloud of incense, and followed by an apoplectic stroke ; his solution of the later history of the miraculous conception is too revolting to be repeated. The magi were common merchant travellers, and the star of Beth- lehem either a comet, or a conjunction of planets ; and the dreams were the accidental reflections of Joseph's own waking meditations. The opening of the heavens at our Lord's baptism was a parting of the clouds, or a flash of lightning, while Paulus gravely adduces examples of the tameness of birds, to shew that a real dove might have alighted on the head of Jesus. The angel who ap- peared to the shepherds, in one writer is a Jewish mes- senger, carrying a torch ; and the song, the merry notes of a party who were with him. In a second, it was an ignis fatuus, or a flash of lightning; and again, in a third a swoon, or mental vision. These examples, which weary us by their monotony of dull absurdity, shew the despe- rate efforts made by the elder rationalists to pare down the Gospel narratives to the level of common history. GERMAN RATIONALISM. 221 The features of the other system are equally strange. It admits that there was a person called John the Baptist, and a Jewish peasant called Jesus, who lived for some time at Nazareth, but all beyond these two facts is mythical invention, the result of a creative and legendary habit of thought in the early Christians. No miracles were wrought by this Jewish peasant, and no prophecy was fulfilled in him. He was perhaps condemned to death, but was either taken down from the cross while still alive, or never appeared again after his burial. But a small company of disciples resolved to treat him as the promised Messiah, in the teeth of all their deepest preju- dices as Jews, without one grain of real evidence, and yet without the least purpose of fraud. Through the vivid- ness of their fancy, and their faith in prophecies which they wholly misunderstood and misapplied, they ascribed to him cures he never wrought, and a resurrection which never occurred ; parables and discourses, rich with trea- sures of divine wisdom, which he never spoke ; and a character both in word and in deed, which was due to their own creative imagination alone. The very in- ventors of these fictions, according to the theory, mistook them for facts, and spent their lives in persuading others that they were facts, while the woof of the fiction was only half complete. The case is just the same as if Bunyan, when he had written one half of the Pilgrim's Progress, had founded a society to preach these doctrines ; that Christian, Obstinate, and Pliable, were three villagers of Bed- fordshire ; that the City of Destruction was Bedford, the county town ; that the Slough of Despond was one of the fens of Cambridgeshire ; and the castle of Giant Despair, the county jail ; and that while he and his friends were fined, imprisoned, and hunted out of society for teaching these strange doctrines, he calmly employed his intervals 222 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. of leisure in completing the allegory; and enriched his creed with the further dogma, that the Delectable moun- tains were a district somewhere in Wales. In short, on this mythical hypothesis, the Apostles turned the world upside down by proclaiming with the utmost zeal, self- sacrifice, and apparent conviction, the truth and immense importance of legends, which they were gradually weaving, at the very time, out of their own diseased and fertile imagination. It is some comfort to the plain Christian, that these two schools of rationalism flatly contradict each other, and thereby lend an indirect confirmation to the truth of the Gospel. From the school of Semler and Paulus we learn that the Gospel narrative is so deeply rooted in the his- tory of the times, and in the whole course of the known events of that age, that a thousand grossly absurd criti- cisms must be ventured on, rather than attempt the Her- culean task of uprooting the whole from its historical context by denying its reality. From the mythical school of Bauer, Gabler, and Strauss, we learn that the super- natural element is so closely interwoven in the whole tex- ture of the New Testament, that its exclusion is quite hopeless. When we combine these reluctant admissions, the evidence for the Gospel, as a revelation from heaven, is complete. The countless and absurd glosses of the naturalists bear witness that the substratum is true and real history; the late invented and laboured hypotheses of their rivals prove that this real history is indisputably miraculous. Thus, unless we revive the old blasphemy of the Pharisees, we must also own that it is truly and properly divine. We are thus landed> concerning our blessed Lord, in the confession of Nicodemus, which may ripen afterwards into fuller and clearer faith : " Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be GERMAN RATIONALISM. 223 with him/' The mythical theorists have thus, indirectly, done some service to truth, by sweeping away without compunction many cobwebs of criticism, which had been spun with much labour and perverse ingenuity by Ra- tionalists of the earlier school. But the scheme which they would substitute, from its very nature, must be still more ephemeral than its predecessor. No intelligent Englishman can read the " Horse Paulinae" with care, the Epistles of St Paul, and the Book of Acts, and not feel sure that the letters are genuine documents of the first century, and the narrative a contemporary history, true and faithful, at least in its main outlines. Let him read them again, comparing the letters with the narra- tive, and striving honestly to realize the course of actual history thus implied, both on the part of the apostle him- self, and of the early churches ; and he will discover clear evidence of a state of things, which, both in its moral features, its historical freshness, and the sparing, but yet inseparable admixture of a supernatural and miraculous element with the whole current of the history, involves, requires, and presupposes all the main facts, whether miraculous or not, which compose the substance of the four Gospels. The New Testament, which is a mine and treasury of truth to simple Christians, when it has to encounter the subtle theories of modern unbelief, will be found to pos- sess a further character. It is a golden chain of evidence, where every link is firm as the foundations of heaven and earth ; from the known history of the early church after the close of the Gospels to the twenty-one Epistles ; from these again to the later portion of the Book of Acts; and from the facts, doctrines, and allusions in all these, to the contents of the early chapters from the day of Pentecost ; and further, from all these combined, to the great fundamental facts of the Baptism, the moral 224 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. teaching, and the miracles of the Lord Jesus ; His trans- figuration, agony, crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension, as they are recorded in all the four evangelists. There is no crevice in this panoply of divine truth given to the church by the Spirit of God. " Without contro- versy great is the mystery of godliness ; God was mani- fested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." The history then is real, the facts are miraculous, the message is both divine and unspeakably glorious. Doctrinal Rationalism has three varieties. The first accounts Christ a mere fallible man, however good and wise ; it pretends to separate his mistakes and those of his followers from that "absolute religion" which was the sum of his teaching. The second teaches that Chris- tianity is a sentiment, and not a set of dogmas, so that if only we entertain a feeling of religious reverence to- wards Christ, all questions of doctrine are superfluous. The third sets aside particular doctrines, commonly held to be main parts of the Gospel, as due to Jewish preju- dices and misconceptions of the apostles and evangelists, which our more advanced and enlightened reason is bound to cast away. The first of these views is held by those pietists of unbelief who pretend to glorify the essence of Chris- tianity, and borrow largely from its phrases, while they discard its authority. In Parker's Discourses, we have such monstrous statements as these : " Did Jesus lay any stress on this watery baptism, then we must drop a tear for the weakness. If it came from him, we can only say, there is no perfect guide but the Father. It is apparent that he shared the erroneous notion of the times respecting devils and possessions. He never set up for a teacher of physiology. The acceptance of this error is no impeachment of his moral and religious excellence, more than his PARKERS ABSOLUTE RELIGION. 225 ignorance of the steam engine. The errors of great men are the glory of dunces alone. He was mistaken in his interpretation of the Old Testament, if we may believe the Gospels. If he supposed those earlier writers spoke of him, it is but a trifling mistake, affecting a man's head, not his heart (!). He is said to be an enthusiast, who hoped to found a visible kingdom, and to return in the clouds, and certainly a strong case may be made out to favour the charge (!). What then? If the dull evangelists have not thrust their fancies into his mouth, it does not militate against his morality and religion. How many a saint has been mistaken in such matters." How kind and generous are these half-believers, or demi-semi-believers, to extend their patronage to the Son of God, in spite of all these serious errors, with which " if the dull evangelists " are to be credited, He has disfigured the beauty of their "absolute religion." Such statements, however offensive, are quite natural, in those who reject the idea of any direct and supernatural revelation of God to man. The Gospel, in their view, is a surprising wind- fall of " absolute religion," covered with rotten twigs and branches of Jewish ignorance and prejudice, which, by some strange chance or other, found its way into a world where it was much needed, through a Galilean peasant. On any other view, such statements are not more offen- sive than absurd. If God has indeed spoken to man, what can be more unreasonable than to maintain that the message is filled up with Jewish prejudices, scientific errors, scraps of unmeaning ritual, and enthusiastic mis- takes and follies ? If the truth is allowed, that our Lord, at the least, is a teacher sent from God, without which the claim to be a Christian is a direct fraud, what a folly it must be to claim the right of instructing our teacher. What an extreme folly to pretend to enlighten Him, whose name and office has been revealed by His own lips, and sealed by signs and wonders, as the " Light of the world." We cannot be at once both patrons and dis- ciples of the Lord. We cannot claim to be possessors B. 15 226 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. of an "absolute religion," pure, perfect, and undefiled, and praise him for teaching so much of it, and profess piously to "drop a tear" of pity over his mistakes, and still pretend to believe even the first and lowest of his claims, that he is the prophet of God, commissioned to guide our feet into the way of peace. This mongrel Christianity, amidst all its spiritual phrases and pretences, is really less honest, and much more revolting to every sincere disciple, than open and avowed unbelief. Others admit vaguely the claim of Christ to be the Son of God, but they are possessed with the notion that dogmas have been the chief bane of true religion. Spiritual Christianity consists simply, in their view, in an undefined and mysterious reverence for the person and character of Christ. This view has its source in the recoil from a dry orthodoxy, and the critical follies of rationalism within the Lutheran church. This is the school of Schleiermacher, and in a less degree of the lamented Neander. However useful its protest against two great evils, and whatever the beauty with which it may have sometimes been clothed, its principle is fatally op- posite to the truth of the Gospel. There can be no deep reverence for Christ, without submission to the truth and authority of His own repeated sayings. He does insist strongly on the acceptance and belief of certain distinct and definite truths. He calls Himself "the way, the truth, and the life." Truth takes precedence even of life itself. We must first climb this steep hill-side, and gaze from this mountain-top on the glorious landscape, before the joy of spiritual life can take possession of our souls. The promise is express, " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Eternal life is solemnly declared to consist in the knowledge of God the Father and of Jesus Christ. In many sayings of our Lord we find the clear and distinct assertion of great religious UNDOGMATIC RATIONALISM. 22 7 truths, which every disciple is bound to receive on His authority. All professions of reverence must be in- sincere, while we evade this simple test of a genuine disciple, and try to steal away, under a mist of our own raising, from hearty submission to these true sayings of God. The view which denies all doctrine in Christianity is equally untenable on the ground of reason. The words of Solomon are true of the palace of the soul, and all its hidden chambers of emotion, sympathy, and affection : " Through wisdom a house is builded, and by under- standing it is established, and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches." It is knowledge of the truth which makes the Christian free, knowledge of sin which makes him humble, know r - ledge of the love of God which inspires him with love. To be " saved," and " to come to the knowledge of the truth," in the language of Christ and His Apostles, are equiva- lent expressions. It is foolish to suppose that a vague, misty sentiment, which dare not clothe itself in words, lest it should become a dogma, can serve for the basis of a new moral being. Light must precede life, both in the old and the new creation. The fact that a revelation from heaven is needed, implies that the conscience of man has been darkened by sin, and his reason greatly obscured in its perceptions of moral truth. This must also make him liable to err in his interpretation of the message. What then is his duty, when the first impressions of his reason, and his first notions as to the meaning of the revelation, are found to diverge ? Both alike must be re-examined. He must search more deeply both into the Bible and his own heart, till he discovers the real source of this seeming opposition. When we screen our conscience from this purifying process, and throw the blame at once on the 152 228 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. message, or at least on the divinely appointed vehicle of that message, we commit a double error ; we indulge both our pride and our unbelief; we defeat one main purpose for which the revelation is given, which is to purify and elevate the faculties of the soul, and we strike directly at the root of its authority as a message of God to man. Our present life is really a childhood, to prepare us for a life to come ; the law of childhood, under which alone its training can be carried on, is to receive many truths on authority, and to wait till riper years for more direct and full evidence. This is an imperfect state, when compared with the wisdom and insight of a later age ; but it is wisdom itself, when contrasted with the perverseness of the child who refuses to believe anything, of which the proof is not plain at once to his childish understanding. This mimicry of manly reason only shuts up the rebel of the nursery in hopeless ignorance. The price which has to be paid, for affecting to be wise before the time, is never to grow wise at all. The ac- ceptance of honest and well-informed testimony, in daily life as in religion, is the only bridge that can lead us from childish ignorance, across impassable perplexities, to a clear and full discernment, and firm possession, of heavenly truth. The love of God is deeper, sterner, and higher than what sentimentalists pass off under its name. It includes three distinct forms of goodness, answering to three main facts or principles of the moral universe. There is bene- volence to being as being; there is righteousness, or holiness, discriminating goodness to creatures as morally good or evil ; there is mercy and grace to creatures, as guilty, but still recoverable to goodness and holiness again. The maxim " God is Love," would seem simple, if it had to be applied only to a sinless world. But it is the pro- DEPRECIATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 22Q blem of problems, to know in what forms it will reveal itself in a world, where sin and rebellion have ploughed their deepest furrows. We need to learn how sinners may be translated from the outer court of simple benevolence, as shewn in the sunlight and fruitful seasons, into the high- est and innermost region of triumphant mercy. Who shall span and bridge over for us the region of infinite justice which lies between, and severs as with an im- passable gulf, the fallen, the proud, the impure, and the profligate, from the bright land of purity and unspotted holiness ? The religions of fear and superstition cannot solve the problem. They lead man within the edge of that sphere of justice by their penances and macerations and bloody or unbloody sacrifices, but they leave him only on the brink of this vast gulf, which the conscience feels it can never fathom or cross over by its own efforts. A voice is heard from beyond the abyss : " No man can by any means redeem his brother, or give to God a ran- som for him : the redemption of their soul is precious, and it ceaseth for ever." The doctrine of the atonement, revealed in the Gospel of Christ, can alone carry us across this dreary wilderness, in which reason is lost, and where remorse wanders up and down, seeking in vain for rest, with deep outcries and sorrowful waitings. There alone the three glorious elements are harmonized which compose the heavenly light of God's love. A benevo- lence wide as creation ; a righteousness and justice deep as hell ; and a mercy and grace reaching far above those clouds where reason is lost, vast and infinite as heaven. The form of Rationalism most prevalent among real Christians is that which denies, or greatly depreciates, the authority of the Old Testament. Its extreme is found in writers of the infidel school, who think no terms too strong to express their dislike of the Divine character, as pourtrayed in the Old Testament, and speak of the 230 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. "wrathful Jehovah of the Jews." Thus Theodore Parker gives this judgment on Num. xiv. : " If an unprejudiced Christian were to read this in a heathen author, related of Kronos or Moloch, he would say, ' What foul ideas these heathen had of God ! Thank heaven, we cannot believe in a Deity so terrible.' There are some things which may be true, but must be rejected for lack of evidence, but this story no amount of evidence could render possible." The moral darkness is indeed prodigious, which can utter such railings against the Bible history, in one of the most solemn, tender, noble, pathetic, and profoundly spi- ritual of its messages. But there are many Christians who would recoil from them with utter abhorrence, who yet betray a secret wish to sever Christianity from its connection with the Law and the Prophets, as if these, not only in particular passages, but in their general tone and character, were unworthy to be associated on a foot- ing of equal authority with the Christian revelation. It is very common, even with earnest and devout men, to speak of the New Testament alone, as the Christian Scriptures, binding on our faith. Coleridge says in the " Confessions of an inquiring spirit" that "it is the imagined contrast and diversity of spirit which many have believed themselves to find in the Old Testament and in the Gospel which has given occasion to the doubt, and in the heart of thousands supplies fuel to a fearful wish, that it were permitted to make a distinc- tion." So far as this feeling of a general dislike to the Old Tes- tament extends, it is clear that it cannot be relieved by the sacrifice of one or another obnoxious passage. The questions whether the books are genuine, and the canon free from spurious additions, are subordinate to one still higher and larger, whether the whole is defective in its general tone, opposed to the spirit of the Gospel, and the instincts of universal morality. The forms and degrees DEPRECIATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 231 of rejection, dislike, and partial approval, may vary widely. Parker, whose blasphemy we have just quoted, speaks also of "the sweet notes of David's prayers; his mystic hymn, full of rippling life ; his lofty Psalm, which unites the warbling music of the wind, the sun's glance, and the rush of the lightning ; and the stalwart character and masculine piety of the old prophets, that puts to shame our puny littleness." Coleridge writes vaguely of these same Scriptures, that we see in them " the first ferment of the great affections, the protoplastic waves of the microcosmic chaos, swelling up against the outspreadings of the Dove that lies brooding on the troubled waters." In this gentle and somewhat misty and poetic dis- claimer, the language of men's hearts may be thus ex- pounded. ' The New Testament, at least in the main, is a revelation worthy of God, which approves itself to our inmost conscience. We cannot deny the fact that it is closely linked with the Old Testament, and seems to recognise in it an origin and authority as Divine as its own. We can also admire and enjoy the greater part of the Psalms, and many passages of the Prophets ; but still the book, as a whole, jars greatly against our moral instincts. We could wish from our heart that Chris- tianity stood alone. We should love it more, and count it more worthy of a Divine author, if it were encum- bered by no connection with the Jewish law, and the trivial ceremonies, or stern and harsh features, of the Mosaic economy.' The two features of the Old Testament which bring down upon it the dislike of sentimental dreamers, are its minute ceremonial details and barren genealogies, and the severe, awful, and alarming tone of its messages. What can be wider apart than Kant's Treatise on the Pure Reason, Schelling's Theory of the .Absolute, or 232 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. Hegel's Scheme for the evolution of the Universe out of the possible, and the first chapters of the Chronicles, or the offerings of the Princes in the Book of Numbers ? What can be more opposite to that amiable, gentle, passive benevolence, which appears to sentimentalists the proper conception of Divine goodness, than the account of the plagues of Egypt, or the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire from heaven ? These very features of the Old Testament, by which it is contrasted with the Gospel, have not been left for modern objectors to discover, but are stated prominently in the Gospels themselves. The mention of them, in reality, forms the preface to the most gracious and tender, the most spiritual and heavenly, of the discourses of our Lord, in the gospel of the beloved disciple, who was chosen to announce the sublime doctrine, that God is Love : "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." Grace in contrast with the law's ju- dicial severity ; and truth in equal contrast with its copious historical details, and its multitude of outward rites and ceremonies. The difficulty is not eluded; nay, rather, the contrast is stated in such a manner, as to imply that no difficulty was felt by the Apostle. For we find in the same gospel those striking words of the Sa- viour: "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me : for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" Joh. v. 46. And a similar statement meets us in that gospel which of the three others is fullest of human gentleness and grace. Our Lord there puts the evidence of truth in the Old Testament on a level with- the approaching miracle of His own resurrection. "If they hear not Moses and the prophets* neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead," Lu. xvi. 31. The difficulty then is no sunken rock, on which our faith may be DEPRECIATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 233 stranded, because its first discovery is due to the in- genuity of unbelievers. It is rather a landmark on the wide sea of Divine revelation, which the New Testa- ment itself holds up prominently to our view. Again, the ceremonial features of the Old Testament, when we view it as an earlier revelation preparing for a later, are in full agreement with the favourite theories of these philosophical objectors themselves. They delight to represent mankind as self-educated, without any need for Divine interference. In their theory of progress, the race ascends through Fetichism of the most barbarous kind to Polytheism, then to Dualism and Pantheism, and finally to Monotheism. The history of all nations is carved into shape, to suit this fancied law of human development. The interval to be traversed,, then, is immense; whether man is left to the hopeful task of raising himself from the worship of rags, flies, and monkeys, to the pure " absolute religion"; or whether, as Christians believe, it has pleased God to carry on the gireat work, by Supernatural revela- tions of His will. The change is like the upheaving of a deep ocean-bed to form a Himalayan range, that may pierce far into the blue vault of heaven. Now if the All-Wise God undertakes this work, may we not expect that He will do it wisely? In His messages to mankind, must He not begin by stooping to their actual state, that He may raise them above it ? Will not the degree of light which He sees fit to impart depend, more or less, on the capacity of vision, which has been the result of pre- vious steps in the course of Divine revelation? If the Word of God be food, must not the milk be supplied earlier than the strong meat ? if light, must not the twi- light come before the day-break, and the day-break before the brilliance of noon-day? In short, are not the words of our great poet the sketch of a truer and juster philo- sophy of revelation, than that monotony of spiritual efful- 234 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. gence which these objectors would impose as a law to the messages of the Almighty ? "So law appears imperfect, and but given With purpose to resign them, in full time, Up to a better covenant, disciplined From shadowy types to truth, from flesh to spirit, From imposition of strict laws, to free Acceptance of large grace, from servile fear To filial, works of law to works of faith." " Par. Lost," Bk. xn. Nor will we refuse, however fanciful in the eye of dim- sighted theorists, the typical fore-shadowing of the same truth, by which the angel is made to confirm his own explanation. "And therefore shall not Moses, though of God Greatly beloved, being but the minister Of law, His people into Canaan lead : But Joshua, whom the Gentiles Jesus call ; His name and office bearing, who shall quell The Adversary Serpent, and bring back Thro' this world's wilderness, long-wandered man, Safe, to eternal Paradise of rest." Ib. The other feature in the Old Testament, which repels or perplexes many, is its sternness and severity. And this, too, admits of a full explanation, when we gaze with re- verence on the perfections of the Most High, or look thoughtfully into the hidden depths of our own being. Benevolence, justice, and mercy, it has been remarked already, are the three contrasted, yet harmonious elements of the Divine goodness. They answer to three possibi- lities affecting the rational creation, happiness, guilt, and recovery. Benevolence alone could be fully manifested to unfallen creatures, and it shone clearly upon man in the days of Paradise. Since the Fall, even this light has been obscured from his view. True, there is still a voice in the shower and the sunshine, in the beauty and fra- grance of the flowers, and in the quiet glory of the stars, HARMONY OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. 235 which whispers to him "The Lord is good to all; his tender mercies are over all his works." But it reaches his ears, mingled with sterner sounds which awaken fore- bodings of evil in the guilty conscience, the voice of the hurricane and the thunderstorm, and the deep sad howl- ing of wintry winds. Meanwhile there are fears and hopes within his heart, which utter confusedly the double and seemingly contradictory message, that God is terrible in justice, and also wonderful in mercy. But who can solve and reconcile these solemn and mysterious truths by the light of fallen reason alone ? Who shall quiet the fears of a darkened self-accusing conscience, or reduce the blind flatteries of hope into concord with the voice of righteousness ? Man alone never has done and never can do it. Many dim imperfect guesses he has made, and commonly with light borrowed from a higher source. But these dim guesses have had no sanction to assure him of their truth, and the little power they might else have gained has been lost by their inconsistency and contradic- tion. When the thought of God's justice has flashed out upon him, he has framed a creed of terror and darkness, like the dark rites of Egypt, or the Hindoo worship of Siva the Destroyer. When this sterner voice has slum- bered within him, he has resigned himself to the sportive illusions of childhood, and framed an airy creed, like the Grecian Polytheism ; though even here conscience has claimed its rights, and spoken to the soul of Nemesis and Tartarus, of awful Fates and avenging Furies. The pro- blem of life remained still unsolved. The mystery was too complex and too deep to be fathomed. The facts of Providence, even in this life, were confused and chequered, and there mingled with them strange and uncertain fore- bodings of a life to come. The soul of man could only utter its sorrowful complaint: " Behold I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive him; on the left hand where he doth work, but I cannot 236 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. behold him : he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him." What man was unable to do for himself, it has pleased God, in His love and wisdom, to do for him, by a super- natural revelation of His will. The fact of the Divine benevolence had already abundant voices to proclaim it, in the course of Providence, and the instincts of the heart, if only these were cleared from the pains and dissonant notes of care and sorrow, which sin had introduced in the world. It was justice and mercy which needed to be revealed, and all the more, because of their seeming con- tradiction, which the wisdom of men could never resolve into their true and hidden harmony. In the instincts of the heart, each seemed to interfere with the other, till no impression was left on the conscience, but a vague un- certainty, as when twilight and moonlight struggle with each other. Amidst the anomalies of Providence, justice ceased to be just; and amidst the sorrows of life, mercy itself, it might seem, had forgotten to be merciful. To disentangle the web, and bring out in full relief once more the Divine character which sin had entirely shroud- ed, each voice required to find a separate utterance. It was needful that God should, first of all, reveal His jus- tice, and then crown this by a further revelation of His grace. Revelation, to fulfil its great end, thus required to be parted into two main portions, of which the respective voices should be, severity to the sinner in his rebellion, and mercy to the prodigal, returning to seek rest in a Father's love. It is true that the separation could not be complete-. For since these three perfections all unite in the mind of God, they must all coexist in every part of His revelation, though one of them may form its predo- minant feature. The main feature of the old covenant is the voice of Law, denouncing death to the sinner, and " revealing the wrath of God from heaven, against all ungodliness, and unrighteousness of men." But even here, HARMONY OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. 237 there will be found a memory of Paradise, and a hope of Paradise to be restored, and undertones that speak of God's universal benevolence, wherever the dark clouds of sin come not in the way. And deeper notes resound first in types from the mercy-seat, and more plainly from the harp of prophecy, which tell of rich mercy, still in reserve, and shortly to be revealed to the sons of men. And thus we are brought to the conclusion, that the feature of the Old Testament which revolts the proud heart, and staggers the sentimental and the timorous, is the secret pledge of its Divine wisdom. The law with all its severity, as given by Moses, as well as the grace and truth which have come by Jesus Christ, are alike from the Lord of hosts, and the Father of mercies ; they are varied but harmonious exhibitions of His character "who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working." The first step towards a cure of Rationalism is to re- cognise, at the outset, the just claims and real dignity of human reason. No error can be effectually overcome, till we have made an ally of that truth, of which it is the parody. The superstition of the Romans, who began their wars or sieges by public ceremonies, inviting the gods of their enemies to a new and lasting home in the Capitol, conveys a deep lesson in every moral conflict. Truth, perverted and held down in unrighteousness, is the guardian-power in every citadel of error. This Palladium once removed, the walls will crumble to pieces. Now the truth on which Rationalism builds its strength, is that dignity of human reason, by which man is distinguished from the beasts that perish. We cannot advance the cause of Christianity by a blind attempt to depreciate this gift of God to man- kind. To found the claims of the Gospel on an utter denial of man's moral faculties, by whomsoever it may be attempted, is a suicidal course, and resigns us to the mercy of every superstition, which comes pretending to be a voice from heaven. The power of moral discern- 238 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. ment is not wholly lost, though grievously obscured. The Bible does not speak to us as stocks and stones, or brute creatures without reason, else its message would be in vain ; but simply as to children, whose reason is unripe, and whose ignorance is aggravated by moral per- verseness. But the faculty itself is recognised on every page. Its admitted presence gives keenness to every rebuke, and emphasis to every warning. " Yea, and why even of your own selves judge ye not what is right ? " Lu. xii. 57. "I speak as to wise men, judge ye what I say." i Cor. x. 15. " O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I pray you, between me and my vineyard." Isa. v. 3. Revelation never attempts to si- lence the voice of reason. It simply recalls it from heights and depths of speculation, where it loses all sure footing, that it may give its verdict on truths within its reach, and where the answer must be plain, unless pride falsifies it the two truths of the righteousness of God, and the guiltiness of man. But when the presence and excellence of this Divine faculty of the soul has been clearly recognised, we need, further, to have a just and clear perception of its actual weakness, when employed in the search for re- ligious truth. And for this we have only to review the history of the heathen world, or to consider the ignorance and spiritual darkness, which prevails every- where even in countries nominally Christian. Wherever the light of the Word of God is unknown, or criminally withheld by a priesthood who love darkness, what dense and deadly ignorance meets us on every side ! We have the worship of flies, of apes and crocodiles, of mon- keys and wafers of bread, of hideous images, or of bones and rags, to which superstition ascribes some magical virtue. A darkness that may be felt, like the plague of Egypt, settles down upon the nations. History in all ages has the same lesson, and tells us that reason, without HARMONY OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. 239 external revelation, and without Divine teaching to apply that revelation to the heart, is too feeble to restore mankind to the knowledge of God, and to the practice of true and solid piety. The result is uniform, from the philosophers of Greece and Rome, down to the savages of South Africa and the Fiji Islands. Another main help, in resisting the inroads of Ration- alism, and the pretences of that mock spiritual religion which disowns the authority of the Bible, consists in a familiar acquaintance with the historical aspect of Chris- tianity. There are many who treat the New Testament as a mere string of texts and mottoes, and lose sight of the connection of the parts, the object of each separate book, and the countless links by which it is connected with the history of the times, and the actual state and practical wants of the early churches. It stands midway, between a dry narrative of facts without soul or purpose, and speculative theories, which look in vain for any fact whatever to confirm their reality. In the New Testament we have a real message, addressed by real messengers to living men. The historical study of the New Testament is the practical remedy for every form of loose and floating un- belief, if it be honest. "If any man will do His will" (i.e. of the Father) " he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God." Joh. vii. 17. Let the Christian, who feels perplexity, and has clouds on some part of the wide hori- zon of his faith, practise what he feels to be duty, and meditate on the truths he clearly sees to be Divine, and then use a wise suspense, waiting for clearer light where - ever shadows are still round him. Then the promise will be fulfilled: "At the eventide there shall be light." Clouds will, by degrees, be rolled away ; difficulties, that once seemed formidable, will disappear. What once was mis- taken for a spectre of darkness, will prove to be a sign- post for the pilgrim on his homeward journey. If the father 240 SUPERNATURAL REVELATION. of the faithful had listened to the voice of the tempter, the God of love might have seemed to him, in the hour of his trial, a Moloch of cruelty ; and the blasphemies of modern disciples of the "absolute religion" would have been anticipated four thousand years ago. But obedience, and faith in the Divine goodness proved by long experience, had their full reward. " In the mountain, the Lord was seen." That trial of his faith, so dark and stern in pros- pect, became a window, through which he could see the day of Christ afar off; "and he saw it and was glad.'* Joh. viii. 56. His words of simple trust became a glo- rious prophecy, " My son, God will provide a lamb for a burnt-offering." Gen. xxii. 8. Mere unassisted reason, in its search for religious truth, is like a blear-eyed observer, gazing on a landscape veiled in mist or twilight shadow. He sees enough to convince him that there is a reality before him, but not enough to guide his footsteps aright. We need the reve- lation in the word of God, to roll away the mist from the landscape ; and the secret power of the Holy Spirit, to anoint our eyes, in order that we may see it clearly. Then, and not till then, doubt after doubt will vanish, and mystery after mystery be explained. We shall see the hills and valleys of a glorious land of promise, stand- ing out in full relief before us, clothed in heavenly beauty. And our spirits will be prepared, even in this vale of sorrow and twilight darkness, for that holier and happier world, where they " need no candle" of human reason, nor even the brighter sunshine of written revelation, " for the Lord God giveth them light, and they shall reign for ever and ever." Rev. xxii. 5. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. May, 1879. A CATALOGUE of THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, with a Short Account of their Character and Aim, Published by MACMILLAI^ AJSTD CO. Bedford Street, Strand, London, W.C. Abbott (Rev. E. A.) Works by the Rev. E. A. ABBOTT, D.D., Head Master of the City of London School : BIBLE LESSONS. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. $s.6d. " Wise, suggestive, and really profound initiation into religious thought" Guardian. The Bishop of St. David's, in his speech at the Education Conference at Abergwilly, says he thinks " nobody could read them without being the better for them himselj, and being also able to see how this difficult duty of imparting a sound religious education may be effected" THE GOOD VOICES: A Child's Guide to the Bible. With upwards of 50 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. cloth gilt. 5-r. " It would not be easy to combine simplicity with fulness and depth of meaning more successfully than Mr. Abbott has done." Spectator. The Times says "Afr. 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"Christianity and the Race" The subjects of the four Appendices are: A. " The Diversity of Christian Evidences." B. "Confucius." C. "Buddha." D. " Comte." SEEKERS AFTER GOD. The Lives of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. " A very interesting and valuable book." Saturday Review. THE SILENCE AND VOICES OF GOD : University and other Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. "We can most cordially recommend Dr. Farrar's singularly beautiful volume of Sermons For beauty of diction, felicity of style, aptness of illustration and earnest loving exhortation, the volume is without its parallel." John Bull. " They are marked by great ability, by an honesty which does not hesitate to acknowledge difficulties and by an earnestness which commands respect." Pall Mall Gazette. " IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH." Sermons on Prac- tical Subjects, preached at Marlborough College from 1871 76. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. gs. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 11 FARRAR (Rev. F. W.) continued. 11 All Dr. Farrar's peculiar charm of style is apparent here, all that care and subtleness of analysis, and an even-added distinctness and clear- ness of moral teaching, which is what every kind of sermon wants, and especially a sermon to boys" Literary Churchman. ETERNAL HOPE. Five Sermons preached in Westminster Abbey, in 1876. With Preface, Notes, etc. Contents : What Heaven is. Is Life Worth Living? ' Hell,' What it is not. Are there few that be saved ? Earthly and Future Consequences of Sin. Sixteenth Thousand. Crown 8vo. 6s. SAINTLY WORKERS. Lenten Lectures delivered in St. Andrew's, Holborn, March and April, 1878. Crown 8vo. 6s. Fellowship : LETTERS ADDRESSED TO MY SISTER MOURNERS. Fcap. 8vo. cloth gilt. 3^. 6d. Ferrar. A COLLECTION OF FOUR IMPORTANT MSS. OF THE GOSPELS, viz., 13, 69, 124, 346, with a view to prove their common origin, and to restore the Text of their Archetype. By the late W. H. FERRAR, M.A., Professor of Latin in the University of Dublin. Edited by T. K. ABBOTT, M.A., Professor of Biblical Greek, Dublin. 4to., half morocco. IGJ. 6d. f Forbes. Works by GRANVILLE H. FORBES, Rector of Broughton : THE VOICE OF GOD IN THE PSALMS. Cr. 8vo. 6s. 6d. VILLAGE SERMONS. By a Northamptonshire Rector. Crown 8vo. 6s. " Such a volume as the present . . . is as great an accession to the cause of a deep theology as the most refined exposition of its fundamental prin- ciples . . . We heartily accept his actual teaching as a true picture of what revelation teaches us, and thank him for it as one of the most profound that was ever made perfectly simple and popular . ... It is part of the beauty of these sermons that while they apply the old truth to the ne^v modes of feeling they seem to preserve the whiteness of its simplicity .... There will be plenty of critics to accuse this volume of inadequacy of doctrine because it says no more than Scripture about vicarious suffering and external retribution. For ourselves we welcome it most cordially as expressing adequately what we believe to be the true burden of the Gospel in a manner which may take hold either of the least or the most cultivated intellect. " Spectator. 12 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Hardwick. Works by the Ven. ARCHDEACON HARDWICK : CHRIST AND OTHER MASTERS. A Historical Inquiry into some of the Chief Parallelisms and Contrasts between Christ- ianity and the Religious Systems of the Ancient World. New Edition, revised, and a Prefatory Memoir by the Rev. FRANCIS PROCTER, M.A. New Edition. Cr. 8vo. ioj-. 6d. The plan of the work is boldly and almost nobly conceived. . . . We com- mend it to the perusal of all those who take interest in the study of ancient mythology, without losing their reverence for the supreme authority of the oracles of the living God."- Christian Observer. A HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Middle Age. From Gregory the Great to the Excommunication of Luther, Edited by WILLIAM STUBBS, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. With Four Maps constructed for this work by A. KEITH JOHNSTON. New Edition. Crown 8vo. ioj. 6d. " As a Mamial for the student of ecclesiastical history in the Middle Ages, we know no English work which can be compared to Mr. Hardwick's book. " Guardian. A HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH DURING THE REFORMATION. New Edition, revised by Professor STUBBS. Crown Svo. IO.T. 6d. This volume is intended as a sequel and companion to the "History of the Christian Church during the Middle Age." Hare. Works by the late ARCHDEACON HARE : THE VICTORY OF FAITH. By JULIUS CHARLES HARE, M. A., Archdeacon of Lewes. Edited by Prof. PLUMPTRE. With Introductory Notices by the late Prof. MAURICE and Dean STANLEY. Third Edition. Crown Svo. 6s. 6d. THE MISSION OF THE COMFORTER. With Notes. New Edition, edited by Prof. E. H. PLUMPTRE. Crn.Svo. 75. 6d. Harris. SERMONS. By the late GEORGE COLLYER HARRIS, Prebendary of Exeter, and Vicar of St. Luke's, Torquay. With Memoir by CHARLOTTE M. YONGE, and Portrait. Extra fcap. Svo. 6s. Hervey. THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST, as contained in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, reconciled with each other, and shown to be in harmony with the true Chronology of the Times. By Lord ARTHUR HERVEY, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Svo. los. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 13 Hort. TWO DISSERTATIONS. I. On MONOFENHS EOS in Scripture and Tradition. II. On the " Constantinopolitan" Creed and other Eastern Creeds of the Fourth Century. By F. J. A. HORT, D.D., Fellow and Divinity Lecturer of Emmanuel Col- lege, Cambridge. 8vo. 'js. 6d. Howson (Dean) Works by : BEFORE THE TABLE. An Inquiry, Historical and Theo- logical, into the True Meaning of the Consecration Rubric in the Communion Service of the Church of England. By the Very Rev. J. S. HOWSON, D.D., Dean of Chester. With an Appendix and Supplement containing Papers by the Right Rev. the Bishop of St. Andrew's and the Rev. R. W. KENNION, M.A. 8vo. "js. 6d. THE POSITION OF THE PRIEST DURING CON- SECRATION IN THE ENGLISH COMMUNION SERVICE. A Supplement and a Reply. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. Hymni Ecclesise. Fcap. Svo. js. 6d. This collection was edited by Dr. Newman while he lived at Oxford. Hyacinthe. CATHOLIC REFORM. By FATHER HYACINTHE. Letters, Fragments, Discourses. Translated by Madame HYACiNTHE-LoYSON. With a Preface by the Very Rev. A. P. STANLEY, D.D., Dean of Westminster. Cr. Svo. 7^. 6d. " A valuable contribution to the religious literature of the day, and is especially opportune at a time when a controversy of no ordinary import- ance upon the very subject it deals with is engaged in all over Europe." Daily Telegraph. Imitation of Christ. FOUR BOOKS. Translated from the Latin, with Preface by the Rev. W. BENHAM, B.D., Vicar of Margate. Printed with Borders in the Ancient Style after Holbein, Diirer, and other Old Masters. Containing Dances of Death, Acts of Mercy, Emblems, and a variety of curious ornamentation. Cr. Svo. gilt edges, "js. 6d. Jacob, BUILDING IN SCIENCE, AND OTHER SER- MONS. By J. A. JACOB, M.A., Minister of St. Thomas's, Pad- dington. Extra fcap. Svo. 6s. Jellett THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER : being the Don- nellan Lectures for 1877. By J. H. JELLETT, B.D., Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, formerly President of the Royal Irish Academy. Second Edition. Svo. 5-r. 14 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Jennings and Lowe. THE PSALMS, with Introduc- tions and Critical Notes. By A. C. JENNINGS, B.A., Jesus Col- lege, Cambridge, Tyrwhitt Scholar, Crosse Scholar, Hebrew University Scholar, and Fry Scholar of St. John's College ; helped in parts by W. H. LOWE, M. A., Hebrew Lecturer and late Scholar of Christ's College, Cambridge, and Tyrwhitt Scholar. Complete in two vols. crown Svo. los. 6d. each. Vol. I, Psalms i. Ixxii., with Prolegomena ; Vol. 2, Psalms Ixxiii. cl. Killen. THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF IRE- LAND from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. By W. D. KILLEN, D.D., President of Assembly's College, Belfast, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Two vols. 8vo. 25.?. " Those who have the leisure will do well to read these two volumes. They are full of interest, and are the result of great research" Spec- tator. Kingsley. Works by the late Rev. CHARLES KINGSLEY, M.A., Rector of Eversley, and Canon of Westminster : THE WATER OF LIFE, AND OTHER SERMONS. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH ; AND DAVID. New Edition. Crown. 8vo. 6s. GOOD NEWS OF GOD. Eighth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. SERMONS FOR THE TIMES. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. VILLAGE AND TOWN AND COUNTRY SERMONS. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. SERMONS on NATIONAL SUBJECTS. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. THE KING OF THE EARTH, and other Sermons, a Second Series of Sermons on National Subjects. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. DISCIPLINE, AND OTHER SERMONS. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. WESTMINSTER SERMONS. With Preface. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Kynaston. SERMONS PREACHED IN THE COL- LEGE CHAPEL, CHELTENHAM, during the First Year of his Office. By the Rev. HERBERT KYNASTON, M.A., Princi- pal of Cheltenham College. Crown 8vo. 6s. Lightfoot. Works by J. B. LIGHTFOOT, D.D., Bishop of Durham. S. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. A Re- vised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Fifth Edition, revised. 8vo. cloth. 12s. While the Author's object has been to make this commentary generally complete, he has paid special attention to everything relating to St. Paul's personal history and his intercourse with the Apostles and Church of the Circumcision, as it is this feature in the Epistle to the Galatians which has given it an overwhelming interest in recent theological controversy. The Spectator says, " There is no commentator at once of sounder judg- ment and more liberal than Dr. Lightfoot." ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. A Revised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Fourth Edition, revised. 8vo. I2s. "JVb commentary in the English language can be compared with it in regard to fulness of information, exact scholarship, and laboured attempts to settle everything about the epistle on a solid foundation. " Athenaeum. ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES Tfi THE COLOSSIANS AND TO PHILEMON. A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, etc. Third Edition, revised. 8vo. 12s. ' ' // bears marks of continued and extended reading and research, and of ampler materials at command. Indeed, it leaves nothing to be desired by those who seek to study thoroughly the epistles contained in it, and to do so with all known advantages presented in sufficient detail and in conve- nient form. " Guardian. S. CLEMENT OF ROME. An Appendix containing the newly discovered portions of the two Epistles to the Corinthians with Introductions and Notes, and a Translation of the whole. 8vo. 8j. 6d. ON A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. dr. The Author shews in detail the necessity for a fresh revision of the authorized version on the follcnving grounds: I. False Readings. 2. Artificial distinctions created. 3. Real distinctions obliterated. 4. Faults 16 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. of Grammar. 5. Fatdts of Lexicography. 6. Treatment of Proper Names, official titles, etc. J. Archaisms, defects in the English, errors of the press, etc. " The book is marked by careful scholarship, familiarity with the subject, sobriety, and circumspection" Athenseum. Lome. THE PSALMS LITERALLY RENDERED IN VERSE. By the MARQUIS OF LORNE. With three Illustrations. New Edition. Crown 8vo. TS. 6d. Luckock. THE TABLES OF STONE. A Course of Sermons preached in All Saints' Church, Cambridge, by H. M. LUCKOCK, M. A. , Canon of Ely. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. Maclaren. SERMONS PREACHED at MANCHESTER. By ALEXANDER MACLAREN. Sixth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4?. 6d. These Sermons represent no special school, but deal with the broad prin- ciples of Christian truth, especially in their bearing on practical, every day life. A few of the titles are: "The Stone of Stumbling" "Love and Forgiveness,' 1 '' "The Living Dead," "Memory in Another World," Faith in Christ," " Love and Fear," "The Choice of Wisdom ," "The Food of the World." A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4-r. 6S. 6d. 24 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. O'Brien. PRAYER. Five Sermons preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin. By JAMES THOMAS O'BRIEN, D.D., Bishop of Ossory and Ferns. 8vo. 6s. "It is with much pleasure and satisfaction that we render our humble tribute to the value of a publication whose author deserves to be remembered with such deep respect" Church Quarterly Review. Palgrave. HYMNS. By FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE. Third Edition, enlarged. i8mo. is. 6d. This is a collection of twenty original Hymns, which the Literary Churchman speaks of as "so choice, so perfect, and so refined, so tender in feeling, and so scholarly in expression" Paul of Tarsus. An Inquiry into the Times and the Gospel of the Apostle of the Gentiles. By a GRADUATE. 8vo. los. 6d. " Turn where we will throughout the volume, we find the best fruit of patient inquiry, sound scholarship, logical argument, and fairness oj conclusion. No thoughtful reader will rise from its perusal without a real and lasting profit to himself, and a sense of permanent addition to the cause of truth" Standard. Philochristus. MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF THE LORD. Second Edition. 8vo. 12s. "The winning beauty of this book and the fascinating power with which the subject of it appeals to all English minds will secure for it many readers" Contemporary Review. Picton. THE MYSTERY OF MATTER; and other Essays. By J. ALLANSON PICTON, Author of "New Theories and the Old Faith." Cheaper Edition. With New Preface. Crown 8vo. 6s. Contents The Mystery of Matter : The Philosophy of Ignorance : The Antithesis of Faith and Sight: The Essential Nature of Religion: Christian Pantheism. Plumptre MOVEMENTS IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge, Lent Term, 1879. By E. H. PLUMPTRE, D.D., Professor of Divinity, King's College, London, Prebendary of St. Paul's, etc. Fcap. 8vo. 3J. 6d. Prescott THE THREEFOLD CORD. Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge. By J. E. PRESCOTT, B.D. Fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. Procter. A HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER : With a Rationale of its Offices. By FRANCIS PROCTER, M.A. Thirteenth Edition, revised and enlarged. Cr. 8vo. los. 6d. The Athenaeum says: " The origin of every part of the Prayer-book has been diligently investigated, and there are few questions or facts con- nected with it which are not either sufficiently explained, or so referred to that persons interested may work out the trttfhfor themselves" THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 25 Procter and Maclear. AN ELEMENTARY INTRO- DUCTION TO THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. Re-arranged and Supplemented by an Explanation of the Morning and Evening Prayer and the Litany. By F. PROCTER, M.A., and G. F. MACLEAR, D.D. New Edition. Enlarged by the addition of the Communion Service and the Baptismal and Confirmation Offices. i8mo. 2s. 6d. The Literary Churchman characterizes it as " by far the completest and most satisfactory book of its kind -we know. We wish it were in the hands of every schoolboy and every schoolmaster in the kingdom." Psalms of David CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. An Amended Version, with Historical Introductions and Ex- planatory Notes. By FOUR FRIENDS. Second and Cheaper Edition, much enlarged. Crown 8vo. Ss. 6d. One of the chief designs of the Editors, in preparing this volume, was to restore the Psalter as far as possible to the order in which the Psalms were written. They give the division of each Psalm into strophes, and of each strophe into the lines which composed it, and amend the errors of translation. The Spectator calls it "one of the most instructive and valuable books that have been friblished for many years. " Psalter (Golden Treasury). THE STUDENT'S EDITION. Being an Edition of the above with briefer Notes. i8mo. $s. 6d. The aim of this edition is simply to put the reader as far as Possible in possession of the plain meaning of the writer. " It is a gem, " the Non- conformist says. Pulsford. SERMONS PREACHED IN TRINITY CHURCH, GLASGOW. By WILLIAM PULSFORD, D.D. Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 4*. 6d. Ramsay. THE CATECHISER'S MANUAL; or, the Church Catechism Illustrated and Explained, for the Use of Clergymen, Schoolmasters, and Teachers. By ARTHUR RAMSAY, M.A. Second Edition. i8mo. is. 6d. Rays of Sunlight for Dark Days. A Book of Selec- tions for the Suffering. With a Preface by C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D. i8mo. Eighth Edition. 3^. 6d. Also in morocco, old style. Dr. Vaughan says in the Preface, after speaking of the general run of Books of Comfort for Mourners, "It is because I think that the little volume now offered to the Christian sufferer is one of greater wisdom and 26 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. of deeper experience, that I have readily consented to the request that I would introduce it by a few words of Preface " The book consists of a series of very brief extracts from a great variety of authors, in prose and poetry, suited to the many moods of a mourning or suffering mind. "Mostly gems of the first water. " Clerical Journal. Reynolds. NOTES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. A Selection of Sermons by HENRY ROBERT REYNOLDS, B.A., President of Cheshunt College, and Fellow of University College, London. Crown 8vo. 7-r. 6d. Roberts. DISCUSSIONS ON THE GOSPELS. By the Rev. ALEXANDER ROBERTS, D.D. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. 8vo. i6s. Robinson. MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD ; and other Sermons preached in the Chapel of the Magdalen, Streatham, 187476. By H. G. ROBINSON, M.A., Prebendary of York. Crown 8vo. 7-y. 6d. Romanes. CHRISTIAN PRAYER AND GENERAL LAWS, being the Burney Prize Essay for 1873. With an Ap- pendix, examining the views of Messrs. Knight, Robertson, Brooke, Tyndall, and Galton. By GEORGE J. ROMANES, M.A. Crown 8vo. 5.?. Salmon. THE REIGN OF LAW, and other Sermons, preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin. By the Rev. GEORGE SALMON, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Dublin. Crown 8vo. 6s. "Well considered, learned, and powerful discourses. " Spectator. Sanday. THE GOSPELS IN THE SECOND CEN- TURY. An Examination of the Critical part of a Work entitled "Supernatural Religion." By WILLIAM SANDAY, M. A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. il A very important book for the critical side of the question as to the authenticity of the New Testament, and it is hardly possible to conceive a writer of greater fairness, candour, and scrupulousness." Spectator. Selborne. THE BOOK OF PRAISE : From the Best English Hymn Writers. Selected and arranged by Lord SELBORNE. With Vignette by WOOLNER. i8mo. 4.5-. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 27 SELBORNE (Lord) continued. It has been the Editor's desire and aim to adhere strictly, in all cases in which it could be ascertained, to the genuine uncorrupted text of the authors themselves. The names of the authors and date of composition of the hymns, when known, are affixed, while notes are added to the volume, giving further details. The Hymns are arranged according to subjects. ' ' There is not room for two opinions as to the value of the 'Book of Praise. ' " Guardian. " 'Approaches as nearly as one can conceive to perfection." Nonconformist. BOOK OF PRAISE HYMNAL. See end of this Catalogue. Service. SALVATION HERE AND HEREAFTER. Sermons and Essays. By the Rev. JOHN SERVICE, D.D., Minister of Inch. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. ' ' We have enjoyed to-day a rare pleasure, having just closed a volume of sermons which rings true metal from title page to finis, and proves that another and very powerful recruit has been added to that small band of ministers of the Gospel who are not only abreast of tlie religious thought of their time, but have faith enough and courage enough to handle the questions which are the most critical, and stir men's minds most deeply, with frankness and thoroughness." Spectator. Shipley. A THEORY ABOUT SIN, in relation to some Facts of Daily Life. Lent Lectures on the Seven Deadly Sins. By the Rev. ORBY SHIPLEY, M.A. Crown 8vo. js. 6d. "Two things Mr. Shipley has done, and each of them is of considerable worth. He has grouped these sins afresh on a philosophic principle and he has applied the touchstone to the fans of our moral life. . . so wisely and so searchingly as to constitute his treatise a powerful antidote to self- deception. " Literary Churchman. Smith. PROPHECY A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST. Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford, being the Bampton Lectures for 1869. By R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D., Dean of Canterbury. Second and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. The author's object in these Lectures is to shew that there exists in the Old Testament an element, which no criticism on naturalistic principles can either account for or explain away: that element is Prophecy. The author endeavours to prove that its force does not consist merely in its predictions. "These Lectures overflow with solid learning. " Record. Smith. CHRISTIAN FAITH. Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge. By W. SAUMAREZ SMITH, M.A., Principal of St. Aidan's College, Birkenhead. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. 28 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Stanley. Works by the Very Rev. A. P. STANLEY, D.D., Dean of Westminster : THE ATHANASIAN CREED, with a Preface on the General Recommendations of the RITUAL COMMISSION. Cr. 8vo. 2s. "Dr. Stanley puts with admirable force the objections which may be made to the Creed ; equally admirable, we think, in his statement of its advantages" Spectator. THE NATIONAL THANKSGIVING. Sermons preached in Westminster Abbey. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. ADDRESSES AND SERMONS AT ST. ANDREW'S in 1872, 1875 and 1876. Crown 8vo. $s. Stewart and Tait. THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE ; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State. By Professors BALFOUR STEWART and P. G. TAIT. Sixth Edition, Revised and Enlarged. Crown 8vo. 6s. "A most remarkable and most interesting volume, which, probably more than any that has appeared in modern times, will affect religioiis thought on many momentous questions insensibly it may be, but very largely and very beneficially." Church Quarterly. " This book is one which well deserves the attention of thoughtful and religious readers It is a perfectly safe enquiry, on scientific grounds, into the possibilities of a future existence. " Guardian. Swainson. Works by C. A. SWAINSON, D.D., Canon of Chichester : THE CREEDS OF THE CHURCH in their Relations to Holy Scripture and the Conscience of the Christian 8vo. cloth. 9-r. THE AUTHORITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, and other LECTURES, delivered before the University of Cam- bridge. 8vo. cloth. I2s. Taylor. THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF. New and Revised Edition. By ISAAC TAYLOR, Esq. Crown 8vo. Ss. 6d. Temple. SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL of RUGBY SCHOOL. By F. TEMPLE, D.D., Bishop of Exeter. New and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^. 6d. This volume contains Thirty-five Sermons on topics more or less inti- mately connected with every-day life. The following are a few of the subjects discoursed upon: "Love and Duty:" "Coming to Christ;" THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 29 TEMPLE (Dr. ) -continued. "Great Men;" "Faith;" "Doubts;" "Scruples;" "Original Sin;" "Friendship;" "Helping Others;" "The Discipline of Temptation;" "Strength a Duty;" " Worldliness ;" "III Temper;" "The Burial oj the Past." A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL OF RUGBY SCHOOL. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. This Second Series of Forty-two brief, pointed, practical Sermons, on topics intimately connected with the every-day life of young and old, will be acceptable to all who are acquainted with the First Series. The following are a few of the subjects treated of: ''''Disobedience," ''''Almsgiving," "The Unknown Guidance of God " " Apathy one of our Trials," "High Aims in Leaders," "Doing our Best," " The Use of Knowledge," "Use of Observances," "Martha and Mary" "John the Baptist," "Severity before Mercy ," "Even Mistakes Punished," ''''Morality and Religion," "Children," "Action the Test of Spiritual Life," "Self -Respect," "Too Late," f ' The Tercentenary. " A THIRD SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN RUGBY SCHOOL CHAPEL IN 18671869. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. This Third Series of Bishop Temples Rugby Sermons, contains thirty-six brief discourses, including the " Good-bye" sermon preached on his leaving Rugby to enter on the office he now holds. Thring. Works by Rev. EDWARD THRING, M.A. : SERMONS DELIVERED AT UPPINGHAM SCHOOL. Crown 8vo. 5*. THOUGHTS ON LIFE-SCIENCE. New Edition, en- larged and revised. Crown 8vo. "js. 6d. Trench. Works by R. CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D., Arch- bishop of Dublin : NOTES ON THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. Thirteenth Edition. 8vo. 12s. This work has taken its place as a standard exposition and interpreta- tion of Christ's Parables. The book is prefaced by an Introductory Essay in four chapters : /. On the definition of the Parable. II. On Teach- ing by Parables. III. On the Interpretation of the Parables. IV. On other Parables besides those in the Scriptures. The author then proceeds to take up the Parables one by one, and by the aid of philology, history, antiquities, and the researches of travellers, shews forth the significance, 30 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. TRENCH (Archbishop) continued. beauty ', and applicability of each, concluding with what he deems its true moral interpretation. In the numerous Notes are many valuable references, illustrative qitotations, critical and philological annotations, etc., and ap- pended to the volume is a classified list of fifty-six works on the Parables. NOTES ON THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. Eleventh Edition, revised. 8vo. I2s. In the ''Preliminary Essay 1 to this work, all the momentous and in- teresting questions that have been raised in connection with Miracles, are discussed with considerable fulness. The Essay consists of six chapters : /. On the Names of Miracles, i.e. the Greek words by which they are designated in the New Testament. II. The Miracles and Nature What is the difference between a Miracle and any event in the ordinary course of Nature ? III. The Authority of Miracles Is the Miracle to command absolute obedience ? IV. The Evangelical, compared with the other cycles of Miracles. V. The Assaults on the Miracles I. The Jewish. 2. The Heathen (Celsus etc.). 3. The Pantheistic (Spinosa etc.). 4. The Sceptical (Hume). 5. The Miracles only relatively miraculous ( Schleier- macher). 6. The Rationalistic (Paulus). 7. The Historico- Critical (Woolston, Strauss). VI. The Apologetic Worth of the Miracles. The author then treats the separate Miracles as he does the Parables. SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Eighth Edition, enlarged. 8vo. cloth. 12s. This Edition has been carefully revised, and a considerable number of new Synonyms added. Appended is an Index to the Synonyms, and an Index to many other words alluded to or explained throughout the work. "He is," the Athenaeum says, " a guide in this department of knowledge to whom his readers may intrust themselves with confidence. His sober judgment and sound sense are barriers against the misleading influence of arbitrary hypotheses." ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Second Edition. 8vo. JS. After some Introductory Remarks, in which the propriety of a revision is briefly discussed, the whole question of the merits of the present version is gone into in detail, in eleven chapters. Appended is a chronological list of works bearing on the subject, an Index of the principal Texts con- sidered, an Index of Greek Words, and an Index of other Words re- ferred to throughout the book. STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. Fourth Edition, revised. 8vo. ioj. 6d. This book is published under the conviction that the assertion often made is untrue, viz. that the Gospels are in the main plain and easy, THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 31 TRENCH (Archbishop) continued. and that all the chief difficulties of the Neiv Testament are to be founa in the Epistles. These "Studies" sixteen in number, are the fruit of a much larger scheme, and each Study deals with some important episodt mentioned in the Gospels, in a critical, philosophical, and practical man- ner. Many references and quotations are added to the Notes. Among the subjects treated are: The Temptation; Christ and the Samaritan Woman; The Three Aspirants ; The Transfiguration; Zacch&us ; The True Vine; The Penitent Malefactor; Christ and the Two Disciples on the way to Rmmaus. COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLES to the SEVEN CHURCHES IN ASIA. Third Edition, revised. 8vo. &r. 6d. The present work consists of an Introduction, being a commentary on Rev. i. 4 20, a detailed examination oj each of the Seven Epistles, in all its bearings, and an Excursus on the Historico- Prophetical Interpreta- tion of the Epistles. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. An Exposition drawn from the writings of St. Augustine, with an Essay on his merits as an Interpreter of Holy Scripture. Third Edition, en- larged. 8vo. ioj. 6d. The first half of the present work consists of a dissertation in eight chapters on "Augustine as an Interpreter of Scripture," the titles of the several chapters being as follow : /. Augustine's General Views of Scrip- ture and its Interpretation. II. The External Helps for the Interpreta- tion of Scripture possessed by Augustine. III. Augustine's Principles and Canons of Interpretation. IV. Augustine ''s Allegorical Interpretation of Scripture. V. Illustrations of ^ Augus'ine' s Skill as an Interpreter of Scripture. VI. Augustine on John the Baptist and on St. Stephen. VII. Augustine on the Epistle to the Romans. VIII. Miscellaneous Examples of Augustine 's Interpretation of Scripture. The latter half of the work consists of Augustine's Exposition of the Sei'mon on the Mount, not however a mere series of quotations from Augustine, but a connected account of his sentiments on the various passages of that Sermon, intei'- spersed with criticisms by Archbishop Trench. SHIPWRECKS OF FAITH. Three Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in May, 1867. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. These Sermons are especially addressed to young men. The are "Balaam," "Saul," and "Judas Iscariot," These lives are set forth as beacon-lights, ' ' to warn us off from perilous reefs and quick- sands, which have been the destruction of many, and which might only too easily be ours." The John Bull says, "they are, like all he writes, af- fectionate and earnest discourses. " 32 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. TRENCH (Archbishop) continued. SERMONS Preached for the most part in Ireland. 8vo. icw. 6d. This volume consists of Thirty-two Sermons, the greater part of which were preached in Ireland ', the subjects are as follow : Jacob, a Prince with God and with Men Agrippa The Woman that was a Sinner Secret Faults The Seven Worse Spirits Freedom in the Truth Joseph and his Brethren Bearing one another's Burdens Christ's Challenge to the World The Love of Money The Salt of the Earth The Armour of God Light in the Lord The Jailer ofPhilippi The Thorn in the Flesh Isaiah's Vision Selfishness Abraham interceding for Sodom Vain Thoughts Pontius Pilate The Brazen Serpent The Death and Burial of Moses A Word from the Cross The Church's Worship in the Beauty of Holiness Every Good Gift from Above On the Hearing of Prayer The Kingdom which comet h not %vith Observation Pressing towards the Mark Saul The Good Shepherd The Valley of Dry Bones All Saints. LECTURES ON MEDIEVAL CHURCH HISTORY. Being the Substance of Lectures delivered in Queen's College, London. Second Edition, revised. 8vo. 12s. Contents : The Middle Ages Beginning The Conversion of Eng- land Islam The Conversion of Germany The Iconoclasts The Crusades The Papacy at its Height The Sects of the Middle Ages The Mendicant Orders The Waldenses The Revival of Learning Christian Art in the Middle Ages, &=c., 6r. Tulloch. THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS AND THE CHRIST OF MODERN CRITICISM. Lectures on M. RENAN'S "Vie de Jesus." By JOHN TULLOCH, D.D., Principal of the College of St. Mary, in the University of St. Andrew's. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^. 6d. Vaughan. Works by the very Rev. CHARLES JOHN VAUGHAN, D.D., Dean of Llandaff and Master of the Temple : CHRIST SATISFYING THE INSTINCTS OF HU- MANITY. Eight Lectures delivered in the Temple Church. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. " We are convinced that there are congregations, in number unmistakably increasing, to whom such Essays as these, full of thought and learning, are infinitely more beneficial, for they are more acceptable, than the recog- nised type of sermons." John Bull. THE BOOK AND THE LIFE, and other Sermons, preached before the University of Cambridge. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. AfS. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 33 VAUGHAN (Dr. C. }.} continued. TWELVE DISCOURSES on SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH THE LITURGY and WORSHIP of the CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Fcap. 8vo. 6s. LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS. A Selection of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Fourth and Cheaper Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. This volume consists of Nineteen Sermons, mostly on subjects connected with the every-day walk and conversation of Christians. The Spectator styles them " earnest and human. They are adapted to every class and order in the social system, and will be read with wakeful interest by all who seek to amend whatever may be amiss in their natural disposition or in their acquired habits. " WORDS FROM THE GOSPELS. A Second Selection of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4^. 6d. The Nonconformist characterises these Sermons as ' ' of practical earnest- ness, of a thoughtfulness that penetrates the common conditions and ex- periences of life, and brings the truths and examples of Scripture to bear on them with singular force, and of a style that owes its real elegance to the simplicity and directness which have fine culture for their roots. " LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S DISCIPLINE. Three Sermons. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. THE WHOLESOME WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST. Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in November 1866. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. Dr. Vaughan uses the word " 'Wholesome" here in its literal and original sense, the sense in which St. Paul uses it, as meaning healthy, sound, conducing to right living ; and in these Sermons he points out and illustrates several of the "wholesome" characteristics of the Gospel, the Words of Christ. The John Bull says this volume is " replete with all the author's well-known vigour of thought and richness of expression." FOES OF FAITH. Sermons preached before the Uni- versity of Cambridge in November 1868. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. The "Foes of Faith" preached against in these Four Sermons are: /. "-Unreality." II. "Indolence" III. "Irreverence." IV. "Incon- sistency." LECTURES ON THE EPISTLE to the PHILIPPIANS. Third and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. $s. Each Lecture is prefaced by a literal translation from the Greek of the paragraph which forms its subject, contains first a minute explanation 34 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. VAUGHAN (Dr. C. J.) continued. of the passage on which it is based, and then a practical application of the verse or clause selected as its text. LECTURES ON THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN. Fourth Edition. Two Vols. Extra fcap. 8vo. gs. In this Edition of these Lectures, the literal translations of the passages expounded will be found interwoven in the body of the Lectures themselves. " Dr. Vaughan's Sermons," the Spectator says, "are the most prac- tical discourses on the Apocalypse with zvhich we are acquainted. " Pre- fixed is a Synopsis of the Book of Revelation, and appended is an Index of passages illustrating the language of the Book. EPIPHANY, LENT, AND EASTER. A Selection of Expository Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. For English Readers. PART I., containing the FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS. Second Edition. 8vo. is. 6d. It is the object of this work to enable English readers, unacquainted with Greek, to enter with intelligence into the meaning, connection, and phraseology of the ^vritings of the great Apostle. ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. The Greek Text, with English Notes. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. The Guardian says of the work, '"''For educated young men his com- mentary seems to fill a gap hitherto unfilled. . . . As a whole, Dr. Vaughan appears to us to have given to the world a valuable book of original and careful and earnest thought bestowed on the accomplishment of a work which will be of much service and which is much needed." THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS. Series I. The Church of Jerusalem. Third Edition. " II. The Church of the Gentiles. Third Edition. " III. The Church of the World. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. each. The British Quarterly says, " These Sermons are worthy of all praise, and are models of pulpit teaching." COUNSELS for YOUNG STUDENTS. Three Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge at the Opening of the Academical Year 1870-71. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6ct. The titles of the Three Sermons contained in this volume are: /. 11 The Great Decision." II. "The House and the Builder." HI. "The Prayer and the Counter- Prayer" They all bear pointedly, earnestly, and sympathisingly upon the conduct and pursuits of young students and young men generally. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 35 VAUGHAN (Dr. C. J.) continued. NOTES FOR LECTURES ON CONFIRMATION, with suitable Prayers. Tenth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. is. 6d. THE TWO GREAT TEMPTATIONS. The Tempta- tion of Man, and the Temptation of Christ. Lectures delivered in the Temple Church, Lent 1872. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3J. 6d. WORDS FROM THE CROSS : Lent Lectures, 1875 ; and Thoughts for these Times : University Sermons, 1874. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4J. 6d. ADDRESSES TO YOUNG CLERGYMEN, delivered at Salisbury in September and October, 1875. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^. 6d. HEROES OF FAITH : Lectures on Hebrews xi. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. THE YOUNG LIFE EQUIPPING ITSELF FOR GOD'S SERVICE : Sermons before the University of Cambridge. Sixth Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. THE SOLIDITY OF TRUE RELIGION ; and other Sermons. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. y. 6d. SERMONS IN HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL (1847). 8vo. los. 6d. NINE SERMONS IN HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL (1849). Fcap. 8vo. 5-y. "MY SON, GIVE ME THINE HEART," SERMONS Preached before the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1876 78. Fcap. 8vo. 5-y. Vaughan (E. T.) SOME REASONS OF OUR CHRIS- TIAN HOPE. Hulsean Lectures for 1875. By E. T. VAUGHAN, M. A., Rector of Harpenden. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. " His words are those of a well-tried scholar and a sound theologian, and they -will be read widely and valued deeply by an audience far beyond the range of that which listened to their masterly pleading at Cambridge.' 1 '' Standard. Vaughan (D.J.) Works by CANON VAUGHAN, of Leicester: SERMONS PREACHED IN ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, LEICESTER, during the Years 1855 and 1856. Cr. 8vo. 5*. 6d. 36 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. VAUGHAN (D. }.} -continued. CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES AND THE BIBLE. New Edition, revised and enlarged. Fcap. 8vo. cloth. $s. 6d. THE PRESENT TRIAL OF FAITH. Sermons preached in St. Martin's Church, Leicester. Crown 8vo. ()s. Venn. ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BELIEF, Scientific and Religious. Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1869. By the Rev. J. VENN, M. A. 8vo. 6s. 6d. These discourses are intended to illustrate, explain, and work out into some of their consequences, certain characteristics by which the attainment of religious belief is prominently distinguished from the attainment of belief upon most other subjects. Warington. THE WEEK OF CREATION ; or, The Cosmogony of Genesis considered in its Relation to Modern Sci- ence. By GEORGE WARINGTON, Author of "The Historic Character of the Pentateuch vindicated." Crown 8vo. 4*. 6d. "A very able vindication of the Mosaic Cosmogony by a writer who unites the advantages of a critical knowledge of the Hebrew text and of distinguished scientific attainments." Spectator. Westcott. Works by BROOKE Foss WESTCOTT, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge ; Canon of Peterborough : The London Quarterly, speaking of Mr. Westcott, says, " To a learn- ing and accuracy which command respect and confidence, he unites what are not always to be found in union with these qualities, the no less valuable faculties of lucid arrangement and graceful and facile expression." AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. The author's chief object in this work has been to shew that there is a true mean between the idea of a formal harmonization of the Gospels and the abandonment of their absolute truth. After an Introduction on the General Effects of the course of Modern Philosophy on the popular views of Christianity, he proceeds to determine in what way the principles therein indicated may be applied to the study of the Gospels. A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT during the First Four Centuries. Fourth Edition, revised, with a Preface on "Super- natural Religion." Crown 8vo. los. 6d. The object of this treatise is to deal with the Neio Testament as a whole, and that on purely historical grounds. The separate books of which it is THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 37 WESTCOTT (Dr.) continued. composed are considered not individually, but as claiming to be parts of the apostolic heritage of Christians. The Author has thus endeavoured to con- nect the history of the New Testament Canon with the grmvth and con- solidation of the Catholic Church, and to point out the relation existing between the amount of evidence for the authenticity of its component parts and the whole mass of Christian literature. "The treatise" says the British Quarterly, "is a scholarly performance, learned, dispassionate, discriminating, worthy of his subject and of the present state of Christian literature in relation to it. " THE BIBLE IN THE CHURCH. A Popular Account of the Collection and Reception of the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Churches. Sixth Edition. i8mo. qs. 6d. A GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. The Pall Mall Gazette calls the work "A brief, scholarly, and, to a great extent, an original contribution to theological literature. " THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, MANIFOLD AND ONE. Six Sermons preached in Peterborough Cathedral. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. The Six Sermons contained in this volume are the first preached by the author as a Canon of Peterborough Cathedral. The subjects are: /. "Life consecrated by the Ascension." II. "Many Gifts, One Spirit." III. ' ' The Gospel of the Resurrection. " IV. ' 'Sufficiency of God. " V. "Action the Test of Faith." VI. "Progress from the Confession of God" THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. Thoughts on its Relation to Reason and History. Third Edition, enlarged. Crown 8vo. 6s. The present Essay is an endeavour to consider some of the elementary triiths of Christianity, as a miraculous Revelation, from the side of History and Reason. The author endeavours to shezv that a devout belief in the Life of Christ is quite compatible with a broad view of the course of human progress and a frank trust in the laws of our own minds. In the third edition the author has carefully reconsidered the whole argument, and by the help of several kind critics has been enabled to correct some faults and to remove some ambiguities, which had been overlooked before. ON THE RELIGIOUS OFFICE OF THE UNIVER- SITIES. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d. " There is certainly no man of our time no man at least who has ob- tained the command of the public ear whose utterances con compare with those of Professor Westcott for largeness of views and comprehensiveness of 38 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. grasp. There is wisdom, and truth, and thought enough, and a harmony and mutual connection running through them all, which makes the collection of more real value than many an ambitious treatise.^ - Literary Churchman. Wilkins. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. An Essay, by A, S. WILKINS, M.A., Professor of Latin in Owens College, Manchester. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d. ' ' It would be difficult to praise too highly the spirit, the burden, the conclusions, or the scholarly finish of this beautiful Essay. " British Quar- terly Review. Wilson. THE BIBLE STUDENT'S GUIDE TO THE MORE CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of the ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Reference to the Original Hebrew. By WILLIAM WILSON, D.D., Canon of Winchester. Second Edition, carefully revised. 4to. 25^. " The author believes that the present work is the nearest approach to a complete Concordance of every word in the original that has yet been made: and as a Concordance, it may be found of great use to the Bible student, while at the same time it serves the important object of furnishing the means of comparing synonymous words, and of eliciting their precise and distinctive meaning. The knowledge of the Hebrew language is not absolutely necessary to the profitable use of the work. The plan of the work is simple : every word occurring in the English Version is arranged alphabetically, and under it is given the Hebrew word or words, with a full explanation of their meaning, of which it is meant to be a translation, and a complete list of the passages where it occurs. Following the general work is a complete Hebrew and English Index, which is, in effect, a Hebrew- English Dictionary. Worship (The) of God and Fellowship among Men. Sermons on Public Worship. By Professor MAURICE, and others. Fcap. 8vo. ~$s. 6d. Yonge (Charlotte M.) Works by CHARLOTTE M.YONGE, Author of " The Heir of Redclyffe :" SCRIPTURE READINGS FOR SCHOOLS AND FA- MILIES. 5 vols. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. With Comments, 3-r. 6d. each. FIRST SERIES. Genesis to Deuteronomy. SECOND SERIES. From Joshua to Solomon. THIRD SERIES. The Kings and Prophets. FOURTH SERIES. The Gospel Times. FIFTH SERIES. Apostolic Times. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 39 YONGE (Charlotte M, .) continued. Actual need has led the author to endeavour to prepare a reading book convenient for study with children, containing the very words of the Bible, with only a few expedient omissions, and arranged in Lessons of such length as by experience she has found to suit with children's ordinary power of accurate attentive interest. The verse form has been retained be- cause of its convenience for children reading in class, and as more re- sembling their Bibles ; but the poetical portions have been given in their lines. Professor Huxley at a meeting of the London School-board, par- ticularly mentioned the Selection made by Miss Yonge, as an example of hcnv selections might be made for School reading. " Her Comments are models of their kind.' 1 '' Literary Churchman. THE PUPILS OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. " Young- and old will be equally refreshed and taught by these pages, in which nothing is dull, and nothing is far-fetched. " Churchman. PIONEERS AND FOUNDERS; or, Recent Workers in the Mission Field. With Frontispiece and Vignette Portrait of Bishop HEBER. Crown 8vo. 6s. The missionaries whose biographies are here given, are John Eliot, the Apostle of the Red Indians ; David Brainerd, the Enthusiast; Chris- tian F. Schwartz, the Councillor of Tanjore; Henry Martyn, the Scholar- Missionary ; William Carey and Joshua Marshman, the Serampore Mis- sionaries ; the Judson Family; the Bishops of Calcutta Thomas Middleton, Reginald Heber, Daniel Wilson; Samuel Mar sden, the Aus- tralian Chaplain and Friend of the Maori ; John Williams, the Martyr of Erromango; Allen Gardener, the Sailor Martyr; Charles Frederick Mackenzie, the Martyr of Zambesi. THE "BOOK OF PRAISE" HYMNAL, COMPILED AND ARRANGED BY LORD SELBORNE. In the following four forms : A. Beautifully printed in Royal 32mo., limp cloth, price 6d. B. ,, Small 18mo., larger type, cloth limp, Is. C. Same edition on fine paper, cloth, Is. 6d. Also an edition with Music, selected, harmonized, and composed by JOHN HULL AH, in square 18mo., cloth, 3s. 6d. The large acceptance which has been given to " The Book of Praise" by all classes of Christian people encourages the Publishers in entertaining the hope that this Hymnal, which is mainly selected from it, may be ex- tensively used in Congregations, and in some degree at least meet the desires of those who seek uniformity in common worship as a means towards that unity which pious souls yearn after, and which our Lord prayed for in behalf of his Church. "The office of a hymn is not to teach controversial Theology, but to give the voice of song to practical religion. No doubt, to do this, it mtist embody sound doctrine ; but it ought to do so, not after the manner of the schools, but with the breadth, freedom, and simplicity of the Fountain-head. " On this principle has Sir R. Palmer proceeded in the preparation of this book. The arrangement adopted is the following : PART I. consists of Hymns arranged according to the subjects of the Creed "God the Creator," "Christ Incarnate," "Christ Crucified," "Christ Risen" "Christ Ascended," "Christ's Kingdom and Judg- ment," etc. PART II. comprises Hymns arranged according to the subjects of the Lord's Prayer. PART III. Hymns for natural and sacred seasons. There are 320 Hymns in all. CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY J. PALMER. GENERAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. JUN3-1955LO JN 61962 3 1956 3ARY USE MAY 3 01962 MAY 3 1962 IN7 '62 H 21-lOOm-l,'54 (1887816)476 40844 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY