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THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
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THE 
 
 RECONCILIATION 
 
 OF 
 
 RELIGION AND SCIENCE 
 
 BEING ESSAYS ON IMMORTALITY, 
 
 INSPIRATION, MIRACLES, AND 
 
 THE BEING OF CHRIST 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. T. W. FOWLE, M.A. 
 
 VICAR OF ST LUKE'S, NUTFORD PLACE, LONDON 
 
 LONDON: HENRY S. KING & Co, 
 
 65 CORNH1LL AND 12 PATERNOSTER ROW 
 1873 
 
[All rights reserved.} 
 
TO THE 
 
 VERY REV. A. P. STANLEY, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF WESTMINSTER 
 
 WHOSE FEARLESS AND CONSISTENT LIBERALISM 
 
 MAKES HIM THE FRIEND OF ALL 
 
 LIBERAL CLERGYMEN, 
 
 IS D ED 1C A TED, 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 OEEING that more than half the differences of opinion 
 S^ in philosophy and theology are due to the use of 
 words in different senses, it may be well to define in what 
 sense the words " religion " and " science " are used in this 
 volume. It is, I may say, the popular, ordinary, and quite 
 intelligible sense which they commonly bear indeed, in my 
 opinion, the general public has often a better reason for, 
 and more method in, its use of language than the wise men 
 who are for ever setting it to rights. Science is simply the 
 process by which mankind derives knowledge from reason- 
 ing about facts. (Occasionally I may have used the word 
 in its more restricted sense of " natural " science i.e., that 
 department of knowledge which deals with physical facts.) 
 Religion is the word that describes the relations of man 
 with the power or being whom we call God. 
 
 Now the quarrel between these two has hitherto consisted 
 in this. Science affirms that nothing is to be regarded as 
 true except that which can be proved by rational argu- 
 ments addressed to reasonable beings, founded upon facts 
 capable of analysis and verification. I say that science 
 affirms this, because no one who knows anything of the 
 real tendency of positive thought, as seen in its ablest 
 representatives, can permit himself to doubt what the mean- 
 ing of science is now, and what it will teach the world 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 hereafter. Two things alone it postulates the existence of 
 mind and the existence of matter as ultimate incompre- 
 hensible facts ; why these are, and in what sense they are, 
 incomprehensible, Mr Herbert Spencer will explain to all 
 who care to inquire. Religion, on the contrary, has been 
 made to assert that there are some things which must be 
 taken for granted upon some authority or other, some 
 explanations which must be received although the words 
 which convey them do not represent any actual facts that 
 have been submitted to consciousness. Hence an ill-omened 
 alliance has been struck between theology and the intui- 
 tional philosophy ; and furthermore, the conclusions of 
 science even in the field of physical fact have been sub- 
 jected to a rash and irritating opposition in the interests of 
 what was believed to be religious truth. Scientific men, on 
 the contrary, have accepted this view of religion with too 
 great readiness, and taking their opponents at their word, 
 have been content that this antagonism should be regarded 
 as real and permanent. Thus in their minds the two words 
 represented two alien tendencies of thought the one old, 
 intuitional, theological, and destined to pass away; the 
 other new, positive, founded upon experience, and destined 
 to prevail. And being strong in the growing discovery of 
 law and truth, they have disdained the ill-judged, tempor- 
 ising, and insincere offers of reconciliation which their 
 opponents, goaded from time to time by their fear of 
 the force of facts, have been making to them. 
 
 The mode of reconciliation suggested in this book consists 
 in the absolute unconditional surrender of the province of 
 religion to the methods of scientific investigation. And 
 whatever else it may show, this at least is clear, that it is 
 
Preface. vii 
 
 possible for the same man to hold the Christian Creed and 
 yet to belong to the empirical school of thought, and to 
 accept every scientific conclusion which those who are 
 entitled to be heard declare to be established. If the origin 
 of life or the genesis of man seem at all uncertain, it is not 
 because I have the faintest religious partiality one way or 
 another ; but because, by common confession, there remains 
 yet much to be explained and accounted for. My only 
 feeling in the matter is to hope that this may be accom- 
 plished as soon as possible, in order that religion may have 
 another fact upon which to exercise herself, and so to draw 
 nearer to the mind and will of God. 
 
 The way in which this reconciliation is worked out 
 appears in the Essays themselves, but admits, like all simple 
 truths, of being succinctly stated. Knowledge is derived 
 from facts by reason this is the basis of science. The 
 knowledge of God is derived primarily from historical facts 
 this is the basis of religion. These facts, it must 
 however be remarked parenthetically, are not the only 
 means, but the first or only direct means of knowing 
 God. They give us the clue whereby we may then 
 trace the mind and operations of God in all nature, all 
 history, and all religions. We do not confine (God forbid ! ) 
 the sphere of the divine working to a few almost isolated (so 
 called) supernatural events, but we take these events, or 
 rather the history that contains them, as helping us to under- 
 stand how God works in the history of mankind, in the soul 
 of men, in the universe itself. And we affirm that without 
 some such clue, without, that is, facts to go upon, all belief as 
 to the nature, being, and will of God must be and has been 
 the merest guesswork, beautiful indeed and useful, as 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 bearing witness to man's unconquerable instinct to search 
 after God, but never practical to the vast mass of men, and 
 now doomed to extinction before the onward progress of 
 scientific thought. 
 
 The kind of demonstration by which facts are proved, 
 varies, of course, in the different branches of knowledge in 
 religion, being historical, it consists of human evidence. Now, 
 no human evidence taken by itself can prove the interven- 
 tion of God in history as any natural or ordinary fact of 
 history is proved. The evidence will be received or rejected, 
 according as the knowledge of God which it purports to con- 
 vey does or does not meet the moral cravings and religious 
 wants of those to whom it is addressed. The time may come, 
 must indeed come, when the minds of men will be made 
 up on the whole in one of two directions ; at present every 
 man must do his best to justify to himself the grounds upon 
 which his belief or his unbelief is founded. Meanwhile 
 both parties ought to acknowledge that in the present state 
 of knowledge there is much to be said on both sides ; both 
 ought to abstain from irritating and contemptuous language ; 
 both ought to rest content with the assurance that truth will 
 ultimately prevail ; and finally, both ought to join in cordial 
 alliance against any school of thought or of religion which, 
 by means of intuitions incapable of analysis, or of 
 authority transcending reason, or of facts independent of 
 verification, seeks to hinder rigid scientific method in its 
 inquiry after truth. 
 
 It will be observed, I hope, that I have taken pains 
 throughout this volume not to mention (with a mere chance 
 exception here and there) the names of living theologians, 
 and to allude as little as possible to the individual opinions 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 of any of them. I have desired to call attention to a new 
 method of regarding the opposition between religion and 
 science, and not to engage in the passing controversies of 
 the day. Moreover, it is quite possible to entertain the 
 highest esteem for theological writers while utterly repudi- 
 ating the system of which they are the supporters, and to 
 which they cannot, owing to mere stress of circumstances, 
 avoid belonging. So, while restraining myself from attacking 
 individual opinions, I have put no restraint whatever upon 
 the expression of my dislike for the metaphysical theology 
 which constitutes modern orthodoxy. 
 
 The subjects treated are what may fairly be termed the 
 primary elements of religion. These are God, or that which 
 comes before our experience ; immortality, or that which 
 comes after it ; and the means, whether actions or thoughts, 
 by which God communicates with man that is, miracles and 
 inspiration. Subjects like the Atonement, Prayer, the Sacra- 
 ments, the Church, occupy a secondary or derivative position, 
 and are not therefore touched upon except by occasional 
 allusion. Yet these, too, are susceptible of strictly scientific 
 treatment, which has indeed in one case been successfully 
 employed. Mr Macleod Campbell's book on the Atone- 
 ment derives its now acknowledged value from the simple 
 fact that its doctrine is based upon the experience of human 
 nature, and upon certain historical events assumed and 
 believed to have actually occurred. Surely it is time, 
 judging from recent controversies, that the great subject of 
 Prayer was similarly treated. 
 
 I feel compelled to apologise for the brevity, and conse- 
 quent obscurity, of the first Essay on Inspiration, the more 
 so as by it more than by any other the success of the "recon- 
 
x Preface. 
 
 ciliation " will be tested. It may fairly be said that the 
 very title suggests a book rather than an essay, and requires 
 a large historical induction. I might of course reply that 
 this is a mere sketch to be filled up, or a first attempt to 
 be followed out, as occasion might serve. But apart from 
 personal considerations that are not favourable to any 
 extensive literary undertaking, there is, I think, a very 
 sufficient reason why the time for such an undertaking has 
 not yet come. There are, in point of fact, no scientific data 
 sufficient to carry us much further than I have gone. We are 
 still almost entirely in the dark as to the origin, growth, and 
 nature of the human faculties. What that was in Handel 
 
 which made him a musician is still as unknown as the in- 
 
 
 
 spiration which made St Paul discern the meaning of Christ's 
 religion or St Theresa live its life. But the definite assertion, 
 that religious inspiration is just as much, or just as little, 
 capable of explanation as any other human faculty, is 
 surely a not unimportant step in the right direction. In 
 the same way I have maintained that the actions of God 
 called miracles can be just as much and just as little ex- 
 plained that is, in their real essential nature as such 
 ultimate truths as the following : The origin of the universe, 
 the being of God, the nature of law, the correlation of mind 
 and matter. There is nothing whatever specially incom- 
 prehensible in any miracle, though there may be much that 
 is incredible. We must therefore remit the case to the 
 tribunal of posterity, that High Court of Appeal in all 
 matters that cannot be verified by absolute demonstration. 
 But it must never be forgotten that we ourselves are not 
 the first court that has tried this cause. However we 
 explain the fact, the fact remains, that Christianity under 
 
Preface. xi 
 
 many disadvantages withstood the first great wave of cri- 
 tical and scientific thought in the eighteenth century. And 
 it withstood it merely because the common-sense of man- 
 kind arrived, rightly or wrongly, at the conclusion that the 
 events that give to Christianity its claim upon human 
 allegiance really occurred. 
 
 I have added an Essay upon the Church and the Work- 
 ing Classes written some years ago, to remind my readers 
 that the questions started in this book are no mere matters 
 of theological speculation, but concern intimately the future 
 history of this country, and the present welfare and future des- 
 tiny of the Working classes, to whom that history belongs. 
 
 The publication of this book coincides with the period 
 at which the fortunes of Liberal Christianity in the Church 
 of England seem to have declined to their lowest ebb. 
 It is not that there are no Liberal writers and workers, but 
 that, to all outward appearance, they have failed to reach 
 the mass of religious thought, sentiment, and action that 
 lies embedded in the heart of the " common people." Not 
 to mention the names of living men (in speaking of whom 
 I could not claim the grace of impartiality), the Church of 
 England has within one generation produced three men who, 
 if nobility of spirit and originality of mind go for anything, 
 might have been expected to have begun the new reformation 
 by bringing home to the hearts of men the new truths that 
 are in the air around us. Seldom, indeed, has reform been 
 presented to mankind in a guise so attractive, by men so 
 indescribably winning, as by these three, Arnold, Robert- 
 son, and Maurice. Differing in much, they were alike in 
 this, that they were Englishmen to the backbone. Side by 
 
xii Preface. 
 
 side with them was started the Catholic movement. It 
 was alien to all dominant English traditions and sentiment ; 
 it has produced no great names since the first generation, 
 the leading minds of which showed their appreciation of 
 their position by deserting the Church of their fathers for 
 the communion held in the utmost dislike by the English 
 nation. Yet at this moment it has absorbed to itself all 
 that is most vital and practical in the religion of English 
 Churchmen, and dominates within the Church of whose tra- 
 ditions and history it does not now seem capable of forming 
 a conception. The reaction triumphs all along the line. 
 
 The causes of the success of the Tractarian movement 
 are easily discovered, as must always be the case with 
 movements essentially superficial, retrogressive, and non- 
 permanent. I am not concerned with them further than 
 to observe that they are to be traced more or less directly 
 to the decay of Evangelical religion, while as yet there was 
 nothing to satisfy the hunger of men's souls for a definite 
 system of religious belief and practice. But the question, 
 Why has Liberal theology hitherto failed to all outward 
 appearance, and in all outward operations? requires a single 
 word of explanation. 
 
 To begin with, no Liberal can possibly admit that the 
 failure is anything but in appearance and not in reality. 
 Sooner or later, whether by slow approximation or by 
 sudden convulsion, the Christianity of England will be 
 drawn towards those views of God's will, His relations with 
 man, man's duty to God and to his fellows, which these 
 three writers were among the first to teach. This at times 
 seems evident even to the most determined of the Re- 
 actionists ; it accounts for that strange uneasiness, that 
 
Preface. xiii 
 
 defiant obstructiveness, that vehement passionateness, which 
 they are wont to display even in the hour of seeming 
 victory. Nor is it difficult to perceive the causes which 
 have hindered hitherto the outward success of the Liberal 
 movement. The time is not yet fully come. The really 
 important and interesting thing is, however, to realise clearly 
 in what sense these three men have not failed but 
 succeeded, and how they have accomplished the work to 
 which they were sent. 
 
 The process through which those vital religious changes 
 called reformations seem in part to pass is something of 
 this sort. Prescient minds discern something false, con- 
 tradictory, non-human, immoral, in the opinions or practices 
 of contemporary religion ; they see that the best life of the 
 world is becoming alienated from religious belief. Tokens 
 of a coming storm are everywhere in the air, and yet none 
 can tell from what quarter it will burst or what direction it 
 will take. Then these minds set themselves, by a necessity 
 arising from their personal reaction from popular religion, to 
 re-state and re-establish for themselves and for the world the 
 primary truths of all religion. This was accomplished by 
 the first generation of Liberal English Churchmen, the 
 popular mind meanwhile, as was only natural, going back, 
 in the general break-up of traditionary opinions, to the 
 oldest and most positive authorities it could find. It was 
 not the business of men like the three I have mentioned 
 to lay down the exact relations of religion towards that 
 spirit of the age called science, which was beginning to 
 assail almost like an intellectual storm the oldest convic- 
 tions, traditions, and institutions of the world. To them, 
 as to Samuel, Savonarola, and above all Wickliffe, belonged 
 
xiv Preface. 
 
 the far nobler task of laying the roots of religion so deep 
 in the heart of man, of recommending it so forcibly to his 
 intellectual and moral needs, that when the storm burst 
 and beat upon the house it should stand and not fall, 
 because it was founded upon a rock. 
 
 If, then, at this moment everywhere men are yearning 
 for a religion, are admitting that it is essential to humanity, 
 are seeking for it by every available and unavailable route, 
 if, moreover, religion is able to hold her own as a power 
 that must be acknowledged and that cannot be destroyed, 
 it is due to the writings of these three Englishmen, and 
 others like them. They are doing the work of WicklirTe 
 over again ; for England, let her detractors say what they 
 will, is ever the " mother of originality." I declare, after 
 attentive study, that there is more of the vital essence of 
 religion, more to convince us of its spiritual necessity, more 
 life, hope, spiritual brightness, and energy in Mr Maurice's 
 commentary on St John, than in all the German com- 
 mentaries on the same book with which at any rate I am 
 acquainted put together. To the High Church party 
 belongs the immense credit of having kept religion as a 
 power and a reality before the mass of the people, alike by 
 what they have done and have stimulated others into doing. 
 To the Liberals, who are not a party but a school of thought, 
 belongs the more abiding credit of having implanted even 
 in the scientific intelligence of mankind the idea of the in- 
 destructibility of the worship of the Lord God Almighty. 
 
 For a guess at the future course of events let us go to 
 a parable taken from history. Never was failure more 
 absolute, never did extinction itself seem more close at hand, 
 than when the last man of the last English army died 
 
Preface. xv 
 
 round the last of the English kings upon the fatal field of 
 Hastings. And in a sense this was true ; the old England 
 lay dead with those dead warriors, the new England was yet 
 to rise from their graves. Pass a few years, and the old 
 saying is found once more to be true, " Anglia victa cepit 
 victores." Not by victories, nor revolutions, nor heroic 
 actions, but merely by the process of gradual absorption, 
 by the strength and flexibility of the English nature, nay, 
 by the very act of submitting to the inevitable and acknow- 
 ledging the supremacy that could not be gainsaid in short, 
 by treating facts and laws as though they were facts and 
 laws, the English character leavened, transformed, and 
 finally assimilated the vital elements in the character of 
 the conquering race. Through what years of patient 
 suffering, through how prolonged an agony of silent evolu- 
 tion, this took place, there are few records to explain to us. 
 But the genius of historical insight has flashed a ray of 
 light upon the lives of Englishmen during this period, and 
 in the character of Cedric the Saxon (to me, for reasons that 
 I now comprehend, always specially attractive) we catch a 
 glimpse of the process by which England in the hour of 
 defeat was slowly becoming England once more. And 
 that the ancient spirit lived on, producing new hopes with- 
 out itself daring to hope, is due to the men whose memories 
 kept alive the pride and name of the English race, and 
 whose glory and whose works became the property of 
 vanquished and vanquisher alike. The men who fell at 
 Hastings were in sober truth the spiritual ancestors of the 
 ENGLISH barons who confronted the tyrant on Runnymede, 
 of the archers who let fly their shafts at Agincourt, of the 
 sailors who " did their duty " at Trafalgar, of the grey 
 
xvi Preface. 
 
 horsemen who " rode so terribly " at Waterloo. Ah ! but 
 the story of the Cross, in all its essential meaning, has been 
 repeated in the lives of may a warrior, whether of the sword 
 or of the pen, who has fallen on the field of battle as de- 
 feated but not destroyed, as dying and behold he lives. 
 
 The application of our parable is easy. The hour is 
 coming when upon the field of intellectual controversy the 
 army of science will storm the last stronghold of religion 
 regarded from the intellectual side. Reason will conquer 
 for herself the kingdom which, even in the act of admitting 
 the inevitable result, it seems so hard to believe can really 
 belong to her. But " magna sunt facta et praevalebunt." 
 The methods, the assumptions, the opinions, the dogmas, 
 the creeds of Christendom, will pass under the yoke of 
 scientific inquiry, and will continue to exist only so far as 
 science permits and approves. And with the death of the 
 old theology will begin the new religion, just as when the 
 Norman soldiers sat down on English soil to eat their meal 
 on the night of victory, there began then and there that 
 process which was to make them more English than the 
 English themselves. In this sense, and this is what men 
 really mean by the assertion, there can be no permanent 
 contest between religion and science : at the moment of 
 victory the spell of the spiritual power of religion begins to 
 weave its influence round minds that have been forced by 
 circumstances into an intellectual antagonism. Once again, 
 by mere process of assimilation, by the spirit of patient 
 endurance, by the memory of great names and deeds, by 
 the instinctive clinging to the essential ideas of religious 
 humanity, by breathing the old spirit into words that sound 
 so harshly in the ear of the vanquished, by sheer strength 
 
Preface. xvii 
 
 of character and positive determination to exist, by the 
 power of numbers, by the grace of prayer, by the imperious 
 craving for unity, religion will live again amidst the forms, 
 the methods, and the dogmas of science. How this Recon- 
 ciliation of Religion and Science will come about we know 
 not, any more than we know how a corn of wheat if it fall 
 into the earth and die brings forth much fruit. It may be 
 in this way or in that way, by this man or by that man, or 
 by no way at all that we can see, and by no man of whose 
 name we could make special mention ; all we can say for 
 certain is, that it will be accomplished by the application of 
 rigorous scientific method to the subject of religion in the 
 first instance, and the infusion of religious spirit into the 
 mind and method of science in the second. 
 
 To have made an attempt in this direction is the claim 
 of this otherwise unpretending book. It is an endeavour 
 to carry on the traditions received from the founders of 
 Liberal Theology in England, and to harmonise the religious 
 truths they derived from nature, history, the Bible, and the 
 soul of man, with scientific thought. And if there be 
 nothing in its arguments to bring about, there is, I will 
 venture to say, nothing in its spirit to retard, that reconci- 
 liation which every man desires who believes that because 
 Unity is the Being of God, it is therefore the prize of reason 
 and the crown of humanity. May I add that some such 
 thought as this crossed my mind as, a year ago, I turned 
 aside from the grave of Maurice ? Therein had just been 
 laid all that was mortal of my dear friend and teacher ; 
 but the immortal spirit was stirring in the hearts of those 
 who stood around, so that one of them was fain to exclaim, 
 
 "What life there is here!" 
 
 b 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PARE 
 
 THE DIVINE CHARACTER OF CHRIST, ... i 
 
 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY, . ... 22 
 
 MORALITY AND IMMORTALITY, ..... 48 
 CHRISTIANITY AND IMMORTALITY, , . . .86 
 
 RELIGION AND FACT, . , . , . . 118 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF GOD, . . . . 151 
 
 THE MIRACLES OF MAN, - . . . 183 
 
 A SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT OF INSPIRATION, . . . 220 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF THE JEWS, ..... 256 
 
 THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE,. .... 288 
 
 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST AND MODERN THOUGHT, . . 325 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE WORKING CLASSES, . . . 360 
 
THE RECONCILIATION OF RELIGION 
 AND SCIENCE. 
 
 THE DIVINE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 NO one, I think, can doubt that the question of the 
 historical truthfulness of the New Testament that 
 is, of the personality of Jesus Christ is being tried before 
 us, and will be decided by our children ; nor is it possible 
 for any candid person to say what the result of the conflict 
 may be, no matter how firm his own persuasion and faith. 
 We cannot foresee the exact influence of the result of 
 scientific discovery upon the religious faith of the future ; 
 it may quench the possibility of belief in the divine inter- 
 position under the overwhelming pressure of a changeless 
 law of evolution, front the time when this globe was a 
 chaos of nebulous matter, or it may compel men to fall 
 back upon the belief in the divine mission of Christ as the 
 one means of escape from a law more horrible than 
 anarchy itself. But it is clear that once more men will 
 be brought face to face with the deepest questions of 
 religious belief; and it is melancholy, indeed, to notice the 
 absolute ignorance of popular religionism, and its popular 
 leaders, as to the true nature of the approaching crisis. 
 That Mr Darwin's last book should surprise the religious 
 
 A 
 
2 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 world in the midst of a hot fight about articles and rubrics, 
 disestablishment and vestments, is sadly ominous of the 
 result of the battle. 
 
 Now, one advantage at any rate, one consequence 
 of a real crisis, is that it clears the ground, divides men 
 into two distinct armies, sets before them a worthy object 
 of contention, appeals to manly virtues, and calls forth a 
 robust and clear-sighted faith. Such a time is especially 
 fatal to a class of thinkers whom I shall not attempt to 
 describe, because I am conscious that I have not sufficient 
 sympathy with them to enable me to do them justice. 
 These are sentimentalists, idealists, moralists, to whom the 
 goodness or the beauty of Christianity are dear, but who 
 emancipate themselves from the necessity of believing it 
 as a record of actual events displaying a divine purpose. 
 They act the part of neutrals in keeping well with both 
 parties and, like neutrals when war breaks out, they run 
 no small risk of being effaced. Their voice is silenced 
 when once the great debate is opened, and men de- 
 mand with vehement determination a simple answer to 
 a plain question " Are these things true, or are they not ? 
 Did they happen, or did they not ? Answer, yes or no." 
 
 Now the purpose of this essay is to examine one of 
 the pleas by which, as it seems to me, honest men desire 
 unconsciously to evade answering this question either to 
 their own minds or to those of other people. We are 
 constantly told that the character and teaching of Christ, 
 even if everything else perished, would be a sufficient 
 basis for a distinctive Christian creed, and, I suppose, for a 
 defined Christian Church. Everything is staked upon 
 His moral perfection. I propose, therefore, to examine, 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 3 
 
 by an appeal to the facts of the case, how far this is true. 
 Without attempting to establish distinct propositions, the 
 general course and tenor of my argument will be as 
 follows : That the biography was never intended, and is 
 manifestly inadequate, for the purpose of setting forth a 
 character merely for criticism, admiration, and imitation : 
 that there is in this character itself a distinctly divine or 
 non-human element, as much so as are the miracles 
 among His actions, the personal claims amidst His teaching, 
 and the Resurrection in His life : that this element, both as 
 a matter of fact and of right, calls for worship on our 
 part, as well as, or rather than mere imitation : that it is 
 far more difficult to believe in the possibility of a perfect 
 character existing in an ordinary man, than to believe 
 in the historical personality of Jesus Christ : that the 
 character is not separable from, and can only be explained 
 by, or be possible to, His personality, and vice versd ; ancl 
 that thus the two are not distinct inlets to the Christian 
 faith, the one prior in time or in experience to the other, 
 but, as it were, folding-doors, giving us a wide, easy, and 
 simultaneous access thereunto. 
 
 At the outset, however, I am confronted by an enor- 
 mous danger. Although it is clear to myself that my 
 argument, though close to, is nevertheless entirely outside 
 the limits of the well-worn controversy as to the identity 
 of divine and human morality, yet I am equally sure that 
 there will be an almost irresistible tendency in the mind of 
 my readers to raise that question. In the hope, then, of some- 
 what stemming this tendency, I hasten to affirm my belief 
 that the life of Christ is the revelation of divine goodness 
 in man ; that the idea, though not the capacity of good- 
 
4 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ness, is everywhere the same : that man has therefore an 
 inherent power of judging goodness, call it divine or 
 human, wherever it appears, by the unchanging laws of 
 right and wrong. But then it seems to me self-evident 
 that a divine being conscious of himself will, by virtue of 
 the very same laws, act differently and have some different 
 qualities from ordinary men. Given the same laws and 
 forces of morality, and a different person in his origin and 
 self-consciousness, and the result must be a variation in 
 character and conduct. Hence, too, it follows that this 
 variation may be the object, as I have said, of worship 
 rather than of imitation. Only I must here seize the 
 opportunity of pointing out how desirable it is to remem- 
 ber that words such as divine, superhuman, worship, 
 perfection, goodness, and the like, from seeming to ex- 
 plain and to signify more than they really do, have a 
 most confusing tendency, against which it is necessary to 
 guard by keeping steadily before our minds facts, and 
 things, and events. Two instances showing the need of 
 this have already occurred in this present essay. I use 
 the word Personality in respect of Christ, as wishing to 
 avoid all controversy upon His essential divinity or re- 
 lations to the Father, and simply as expressing that 
 historical account of Him in which He is represented as 
 being free from human sin in His birth, and from human 
 corruption in His death. Personality would thus mean 
 what a man is by virtue of powers, such as the paternal, 
 apart from himself; and character what he is by virtue 
 of his own self-determination inherent in himself. And, 
 again, when I speak of a character as calling for worship 
 rather than imitation, I define worship to be the desire of 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 5 
 
 the creature to be like the Creator, accompanied by the 
 consciousness of its own imperfection and powerlessness. 
 We turn now, then, to see what the character of Christ 
 really is in the light of simple facts. 
 
 The essence of the revelation of God to us has come in 
 the form of a biography beyond all doubt the most 
 suitable for teaching morality. The history of a life 
 affects most powerfully our moral nature by the example 
 proposed, the sympathy evoked, the light shed upon the 
 inner workings of humanity, above all, by the necessity 
 imposed of using our moral discernment to decide upon 
 the character and conduct of its hero. Now it is surely a 
 mere matter of fact that the life of Christ is presented to us 
 in a form very different from those of other men, and very 
 imperfectly fulfilling these conditions, though certainly 
 fulfilling them in part. We may throughout this argument 
 usefully compare the history of St Paul, though I shall 
 leave it for the most part to be done mentally. That 
 history resembles the history of Christ in being to a large 
 extent in its materials autobiographical, and in having 
 been compiled by the same man. And it must be a source 
 of unceasing wonder that St Luke should have been able 
 to draw two portraits of two on any view of the 
 greatest persons that ever existed, without for one moment 
 confusing the outlines, or portraying the smallest essential 
 resemblance, or leaving upon his readers the least identity 
 of treatment and effect, or placing them for one moment 
 upon a level of power and goodness. 
 
 The character of Christ is a mere outline. Though, by 
 the hypothesis which I am controverting, His character as 
 a human being is the sole ultimate evidence for His divinity, 
 
6 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 or for whatever view men take of His person ; yet the ac- 
 count of it is so short and undefined as to be proof against 
 ordinary criticism. There are no letters, nothing about His 
 personal appearance, next to nothing of His inner feelings 
 and thoughts, no record of His opinions upon science, art, 
 philosophy, history, literature, and metaphysics. St Paul, 
 on the contrary, lives before us, his bodily presence weak 
 and contemptible, his letters weighty and powerful, the 
 agitations of his inner life, loves, hopes, fears, plans, specula- 
 tions, all engraven in living characters. Painting St Paul, 
 you paint a real man ; painting Christ, you reproduce the 
 ideal of the artist, or the age, or the nation. And His life 
 appears to have had just the same effect upon those who 
 saw it as upon those who read it. With an exception to 
 be mentioned, they make no direct allusions to His char- 
 acter as an object of imitation. What possessed their souls 
 and filled their imagination was not sympathy with His 
 character, but admiration and worship of His person. 
 They built their faith, not upon His perfection, but upon 
 His birth, which was to them the love of God ; His death, 
 which was to them the goodness of the Son of God ; His 
 Resurrection, in which they saw the power of God over evil ; 
 the Ascension, in which they felt the power of the Son of 
 God for good over the world. They never attempted to 
 prove that lie was perfectly good by explaining His 
 actions or defending His conduct, nor have they left any 
 materials by which we can do so. They took all this for 
 granted, and thus gave to His life that divine suggestive- 
 ness by which we can, and must, attach all our ideas of 
 moral perfection to Him, not find them complete in Him. 
 This is that perfection which He too claimed "Which of 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 7 
 
 you convinceth me of sin ? " which, the moment we begin 
 to think of it, fades away into infinity, loses itself in God. 
 It presents to us not a character to be analysed, but a life 
 to be lived, and that lives in us. It is not merely that He 
 is far removed from us and above us ; so also is St Paul, 
 who seems nearer to Christ than we to him. But then we 
 are, so to speak, in the same plane as St Paul, and can see 
 the steps that lie between us and him ; whereas, around 
 Christ there is a vacant space, across which no man may 
 in this life tread, and in which the desire for mere imitation 
 ceases and dies ; and an instinct of His greatness and our 
 weakness constrains us to cry, " My Lord and my God ! " 
 
 And this is on the whole a description of the effect of 
 His life upon those who knew Him best. Not, certainly, 
 that it found vent in the mere bare assertion that He was 
 God for that in so many words they never said. But they 
 spoke of Him with reverent reticence, as men who struggle 
 with thoughts too big for them, tending to conclusions that 
 defy the power of language. Contrast, for instance, the 
 awkward, incoherent utterance of St Paul " He thought it 
 not robbery to be equal with God ;" or again, the prophetic 
 ecstasy which exclaimed, " Then shall the Son also Himself 
 be subject unto Him that did put all things under Him, 
 that God may be all in all, " with the precise, logical, but 
 hollow-sounding definitions of the Athanasian Creed. And 
 they felt sure of this, too, that He was alive still, and had 
 distinct personal relations with each of them ; and further, 
 that His works and death affected them, not as others do, his- 
 torically and indirectly, but directly and spiritually, and that 
 He had not died for the Jews, or for the disciples, or for 
 truth, or even for humanity, but for each individual soul. 
 
8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Now all this may be consistently and plausibly ex- 
 plained by the theory of a myth growing up about an 
 unusual life crowned by a very remarkable death. But 
 to abandon historical certainty, and then attempt to con- 
 struct out of shifting shadows of myths, or the doubtful 
 utterances of an ingenious fanatic, a morality which shall 
 satisfy the conscience of men, or abide their criticism, or 
 create a faith, or found a church, appears to me the most 
 singular delusion ever imagined. The world has seen the 
 result of one such attempt, and has grown very impa- 
 tient of Niebuhrism. Did He believe Himself able to 
 work miracles ? If not, then the very ground of the history 
 is taken from us, and we are launched into chaos. If He 
 did, then, ex kypotkesi, the morality by which men are to 
 live and die rests upon the words of one whom impartial 
 judgment must pronounce to be on the whole below 
 Socrates, who neither claimed supernatural gifts, nor died 
 believing that he should rise in triumph. Or how can we 
 say of such an one that He was perfectly or even unusually 
 good, in the absence of all real evidences as to much of His 
 conduct, such evidences as we have being furnished by 
 devoted, not to say deluded followers ? Who can affirm 
 that He was or was not unduly angry with the Jews, that 
 He acted harshly towards Judas, that His expressions were 
 always modest and truthful ? Kenan's Life gives an 
 absolute negation to the possibility of returning any answer 
 whatever, and leaves us face to face with the true alter- 
 native either myth altogether or history altogether. 
 
 So much for the way in which the character is presented 
 to us ; let us now try, by a simple analysis of the history 
 itself, to discover whether there is not in it a distinctly 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 9 
 
 divine element as clearly separating it from that of ordinary 
 men, as the raising of Lazarus separates the (recorded) 
 actions from ours. I might lay stress upon the difficulty of 
 discovering any special point of view from which to regard 
 it, or of discerning the leading features, or of classifying 
 and labelling the phenomena it presents. But, endeavour- 
 ing to deal with it as with that of ordinary men, I will 
 assume its essence and foundation to consist in three 
 qualities: unselfishness, or His attitude towards Himself; 
 meekness, or His attitude in receiving treatment from men ; 
 humility, or His attitude in dealing with men. 
 
 ist. Beginning, then, with His unselfishness, there is, I 
 venture to think, an element in it suitable only to God, 
 possible only to God, intelligible only in God, and an object 
 of worship to imperfect beings like ourselves during this 
 our progress to perfection. We distinguish between selfish- 
 ness and self-love. By the former we mean sinful excess 
 in regard to self, and to it we know that He was tempted 
 in both of its two forms. At the beginning of His life, by 
 the desire of power, pleasure, and success in its most subtle 
 manifestations ; at the close, by the fear of pain and death 
 in its most overwhelming force. In all this He has left us 
 something which we can hope to follow ; and yet even here 
 we cannot fail to notice that nearly all that is valuable 
 for mere imitation is omitted. Of the inner shades of 
 thought and feeling, the varying moods, the little details, 
 we learn on the first occasion nothing, and on the second as 
 much as can be told in two or three verses. Our attention 
 is fixed upon the fact of Jesus victorious over sin and 
 death, although, of course, we are bidden to walk in His 
 .steps, taking up our cross and following Him. But granting, 
 
io Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 as I am quite willing to do, that unselfishness or self- 
 sacrifice, in its ordinary human sense, is a perfectly adequate 
 word to describe His life at these epochs, yet we see, besides 
 this, another element which is not merely the perfect 
 negation of selfishness, but the entire absence of self-love. 
 By this we mean, that rational, reasonable, and righteous 
 care of self, which is practically admitted into all systems 
 of moral philosophy, and certainly into His teaching, 
 "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, and do to him 
 as thou wouldest he should do to thee. " Now, is it not 
 obvious that, while Christ laid down this rule for others, He 
 lived Himself by a higher law which included, and, for Him, 
 abolished the former ? We cannot, I think, describe His 
 conduct in these words, or assign it to these motives. He 
 never cared for what men did to Him, or thought of Himself 
 at all. Moral perfection, that is God, made for itself a new 
 law, a law impossible for imperfect beings, though distinctly 
 apprehended by them as the goal to which they tend in the 
 eternal life. I speak with great diffidence, but I am inclined 
 to think that this consideration enables us to answer a 
 charge urged by Positive philosophers against Christian 
 morality, the stress of which has always appeared to me 
 undeniable. They urge that self-love is not so true or deep 
 a basis for morality as the loving humanity better than 
 ourselves. To which it may be answered, that Christ lived 
 Himself by the latter law, but was obliged to recognise a 
 necessity for self-love in beings as yet imperfect, in course 
 of training for a higher, though in noways different, mani- 
 festation of goodness that is, of moral perfection. At any 
 rate, let us now examine whether He was not free essentially 
 from those self-limitations and regards, from which, as a 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 1 1 
 
 mere matter of fact, no man has ever, actually or in con- 
 sciousness been able to free himself.* 
 
 We cannot imagine God as conscious of self, or having 
 self-interest, or needing self-justification. He is, and lives, 
 and is recognised in the works of His creative power. and 
 love. Man, on the other hand, cannot divest himself of 
 self; he must remember that he has a soul to save, a 
 character to justify. The true saving of the soul may lie, 
 as of course it does, in the triumph over all self-interest ; 
 but the consciousness of the soul and of its salvation cannot 
 be got rid of. How, then, stands the case with Christ ? 
 
 (a.) Self-consciousness. What is with us the obtrusion of 
 self into our works, not at all in a sinful, but simply in 
 a necessary form, corresponds in Him to the consciousness 
 of the Father doing all the works. His meat or drink was 
 to finish that work ; His glory, in having finished it. And 
 it is remarkable that this consciousness of self, this reflection 
 upon our motives and successes, this almost agonising 
 survey of our work and life, is particularly strong in 
 religious reformers. The men who have most moved 
 the world in religion have been those to whom the move- 
 ments of their own souls have been most painfully clear ; 
 for instance, St Paul, Luther, and Milton. Consider the 
 former painfully conscious of his bodily appearance, his 
 reputation, his conversion, his very hand-writing, his 
 labours ; consider the latter brooding over his blindness, 
 his treatment, his failure, the evil days on which he had 
 fallen. And these men powerfully affected the world in 
 
 * That is, as a being who stands in need. In another sense, as will be seen 
 further on in this book, self-consciousness is necessary to our conception of God 
 as a personal Being. 
 
1 2 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 which they lived, whereas Homer and Shakespeare, of all 
 men the most destitute of self-consciousness, fade away from 
 history, and are spirits, voices, rather than distinct human 
 beings. But in Christ we have an element of self-forgetful- 
 ness, so to speak, combined with a power to move humanity, 
 which renders Him unique in history. But then, to be 
 unique in history, what is it but to be divine ? 
 
 (&.) Notice, again, the absence of self-interest, which is, 
 indeed, entirely human, and therefore imitable, though 
 rarely imitated, in His refusal to yield to that last tempta- 
 tion of noble souls, and be made a king. But in the great 
 and crowning sacrifice upon the cross there appears another 
 element distinguishable from the former. We have, indeed, 
 the perfectly human spirit, the half-concealed but quite 
 overcome reluctance, the unavailing protest against might, 
 the yielding as to a superior power, which all combine to 
 give their true beauty to human martyrdoms, and shine in 
 the humour of Socrates, the wit of Raleigh, the impul- 
 sive courage of Cranmer, and the hapless submission of 
 Lady Jane Grey. But then, side by side with this, we have 
 words and conduct which are, upon any human ground, 
 neither intelligible nor defensible. All the beauty of mere 
 martyrdom dies out in the words of One who lays down His 
 life of Himself, and will let no man take it from Him. All 
 the rules by which we can judge of ordinary men are set at 
 defiance by One who, after carefully guarding Himself 
 because His hour was not yet come, suddenly refused the 
 most ordinary precautions, courted death, allowed nay 
 worse, commanded the foreknown treachery of Judas to do 
 its work, and died with the certainty of rising again. Such 
 an one may be as far below men as a mistaken fanatic, or 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 1 3 
 
 as far above them as a Being conscious of a divine origin 
 and mission. He may be the Christ of Renan or of St John, 
 but hardly of those who acknowledge no other claims upon 
 their allegiance than His character and conduct. 
 
 (c.) Lastly, self-justification. To take all necessary steps 
 to justify ourselves, and then to leave the issue in the hands 
 of God, is our rule of conduct, not merely for our own sakes, 
 but in the interests of truth and public morality. And it 
 was His, as when He said, " In secret have I said nothing, " 
 and " If I have done well, why smitest thou me ?" But 
 once more a different element asserts itself, indicating a 
 different source of motive and action. Thus the words, 
 " Many good works have I shown you," standing by them- 
 selves, are, though somewhat arrogant, entirely human ; 
 but the addition, "from my Father," gives an absolutely 
 different colour to His defence, and takes every idea of self 
 out of it. He was but an instrument in the hands of God. 
 And again, I remember no instance of the smallest anxiety 
 to know what men thought of Him, that anxiety of the 
 noblest and highest kind, indeed, which breathes in every 
 word of St Paul's, whose whole life and work was bound up 
 with the necessity of vindicating himself. Christ's question 
 is not, "What do men think of me?" but, "Whom do men say 
 that I, the Son of Man, am ? " A question once more, either 
 the height of human arrogance or the depth of divine humility, 
 conscious not of itself, but of its origin and work from God. 
 
 2d. Passing on next to His meekness and humility, by 
 which I have ventured to describe the laws which guided 
 His attitude towards men, we shall, I think, find the same 
 divine element. It may be well to remark here that I have 
 not chosen these arbitrarily, but because they describe the 
 
14 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 two qualities expressly claimed by Himself, " I am meek 
 and lowly in heart," and therefore, so far as I remember, 
 the only two expressly attributed to Him by St Paul, and 
 used as a moral persuasive to goodness, that is, as an ex- 
 ample. It might seem, indeed, almost treasonable to say 
 that there is in these an element which we cannot imitate, 
 for the remembrance of the cross prefigured, foretold, and 
 typified in countless passages of the Old Testament, is 
 exactly that in which the example of Christ speaks most 
 powerfully to our souls just when those souls are at their 
 weakest, and stand most in need of support from without. 
 Yet how can we fail to see that Christ Himself does not 
 use them as an example, but as the ground of an invitation 
 to all weary and heavy-laden souls to come to Him and 
 take His yoke upon them and learn of Him ? The divine 
 consciousness speaks out in the very words that claim 
 human meekness, and asserts for that meekness a more 
 than human power. What a strange mixture of humility 
 and pride would this invitation appear in any ordinary 
 human being ! With what jealousy should we not scan 
 such pretensions ! Let us, however, consider these two 
 qualities separately. 
 
 There are two aspects of meekness : one, that of receiving 
 favours; the other, injuries the one, for instance, reminding 
 us of Palm Sunday; the other, of Good Friday. Now, 
 belonging to the first of these is the feeling of dependence 
 which is not too proud to ask a favour, or to be thankful 
 for it when received ; and of any one who did not ask we 
 should be inclined to say that he was hardly a human 
 being at all, whereas the absence of gratitude is conceivable 
 in one who knew himself to be something more than man. 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 1 5 
 
 Precisely these phenomena present themselves in the life of 
 Christ. There is, indeed, nothing of that continual or re- 
 curring dependence so touching in great souls, and binding 
 them so close to our frail humanity; but there is one 
 request for help, and, so far as I remember, only one, which 
 vindicates His perfect sympathy with our nature. In that 
 hour when most that weak nature asserted its weakness, we 
 find Him entreating the disciples to watch with Him with 
 what result we know, a result that almost, more than any- 
 thing else, attests His awful solitariness. But though He 
 could thus once ask for help, yet He never expressed 
 gratitude for what He received unasked, or even thanks for 
 the obedience paid to His regal requests ; for instance, for 
 the ass's foal, or the upper room at Jerusalem. He 
 defended, indeed, as in the case of the women, those who 
 had done Him a kindness from ungenerous misrepresenta- 
 tions, and He rewarded them after a divine fashion, but 
 their works He accepted as due to Him. But how can a 
 character, in which dependence appears but once and 
 gratitude never, be presented as a perfect model, except 
 upon the supposition of a divine consciousness which ex- 
 plains and harmonises these traits at once ? 
 
 Once more, in the meekness with which He endured 
 injuries there is nothing of that righteous anger on His 
 own account which is at once essential and unavoidable in 
 man. Anger plays the same part in moral economy that 
 pain plays in physical ; it is the instinctive attitude of self- 
 preservation, of which, having no self-love, He had no need. 
 The idea that He resented the treatment He received, and 
 died praying, not for His enemies, but for the mere 
 ignorant agents of their cruelty, is false to all true coir- 
 
1 6 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ceptions of His character, to the testimony of the nar- 
 rative, and to the instincts of Christianity. Such a self- 
 sacrifice as His, the free laying down of His life with views 
 that embraced the vast future, the refusal to use any means 
 of escape, is incompatible with anger for personal outrages, 
 and would, indeed, degrade it below our human level. How 
 can the conscious master of more than twelve thousand 
 legions of angels be indignant at the wrongs to which He 
 voluntarily submitted ? But then this absence of anger on 
 one's own account answers precisely to our not the Jewish 
 conception of God. 
 
 3d. His humility must be discussed in very few words. 
 By humility is meant freedom from that pride which is the 
 fatal curse of men conscious of great and unusual powers, 
 especially, e.g., Napoleon, in dealing with their fellow- 
 creatures. Now at once occurs the temptation to say that 
 His humility was all the more wonderful because it was 
 consistent with perfect freedom from the sense of sin. But 
 surely to argue thus would be to fall into the error from 
 which I have been painfully endeavouring to keep clear 
 of drawing a distinction in kind between divine and human 
 morality, as though humility in us sprang from a different 
 source, and meant something different from His. Sin does 
 not cause humility, but humiliation, and our humility, so 
 far as we can attain unto it, is the result of Christ's spirit 
 working in us, and not of our conviction of sin. He was 
 conscious of kingship, messiahship, miraculous powers, and 
 that perfect self-command and knowledge and control of 
 others which is the secret of power among men. Yet we see 
 Him without one word of pride, never intoxicated with 
 success, shunning earthly honour, consorting with the 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 1 7 
 
 humblest, refusing to lift a finger to stir the crowd which 
 on Palm Sunday were ready for anything He desired, 
 washing the disciples' feet, careless of what kind of death 
 He died that last weakness of poor human pride. In all 
 which there is a humility to which our whole nature 
 responds. But then there is something more. Where in 
 Christ's life is there any trace of that self-respect, the 
 reasonable and righteous form of pride, which is an 
 essential part of our being ? The root of this lies, perhaps, 
 in the necessity which, as a mere fact of history and of 
 consciousness, is incumbent upon every man, of comparing 
 himself with others. This trait once more is especially 
 prominent, nay, even predominant, in St Paul, who in one 
 memorable passage descends to comparison of himself with 
 others in mere personal advantages. True, he does so with 
 an air of proud humility, and with a protest against his own 
 folly ; but that does not take away the fact that the compari- 
 son, after all, was made, and was felt to be necessary. How 
 absolutely and entirely different is the whole aspect and 
 attitude presented in the life of Christ, who never spoke of 
 others, except in one or two difficult passages, in the way 
 of denying the possibility of any comparison at all. One 
 who could say, " It is the Father that doeth the works," 
 could not compare Himself with others. To such an one 
 it is possible to have all power and no pride. And this is 
 our very idea of God, who rejoices in the works of His 
 hands, who cannot be proud of them. 
 
 At this point I bring my argument to a close, though it 
 might be pursued into endless details. It would be possible 
 to point out in Him a power of self-assertion, culminating 
 in what we should call in any other man the most absolute 
 
1 8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 sectarianism, of that very kind from which St Paul and 
 Luther on the whole succeeded, and Calvin and Wesley 
 failed in guarding themselves. We should have to inquire 
 into the true significance of a character to which the ex- 
 pression of joy and wonder was never ascribed by His 
 biographers, save once in the first instance, and twice in the 
 second ; in each case at the contemplation of the moral and 
 spiritual effects of belief or of unbelief. We should have 
 to account for, and possibly upon any ordinary view of His 
 character to explain away, His excessive indignation at the 
 Jews, resulting in a condemnation of them that regarded 
 no pleas of excuse, palliation, or even of explanation. The 
 forms, again, in which His knowledge was displayed ; His 
 assertion of personal liberty from all domestic and social 
 and patriotic ties ; His claim to know the truth, and the 
 foundation upon which that claim was based, would require 
 minute investigation. Finally, we should have to consider 
 carefully the exact meaning in Him, and the real power 
 over us, of that trait which most of all speaks to our spirits 
 now, as summing up the Revelation that He made from 
 heaven namely, the profound, unbroken consciousness of 
 the Fatherhood of God. And apart from His personality, 
 we should probably have to conclude with an assertion no 
 stronger than this That having regard to the testimony 
 of a very wonderful Jewish enthusiast, this attitude of 
 Sonship is, on the whole, the highest, the most comfortable, 
 and the most profitable that imperfect creatures like our- 
 selves can assume towards a God, who, nevertheless, it 
 would have to be admitted, has never done a fatherly act 
 towards us since the day when He created, if create He did, 
 the nebulous matter from which all life has proceeded. 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 1 9 
 
 And the further we inquired, the more apparent it would 
 become that the character suits and implies the personality, 
 that the personality explains and vindicates the character, 
 and that both together present a foundation ample enough 
 for the moral being of man to repose upon. 
 
 I must crave the indulgence of my readers for a moment 
 longer, in order to answer two objections, which, if un- 
 answered, would be fatal to my argument. 
 
 ist. In predicting a crisis in which there shall be two 
 hostile camps, divided by a sharp line from each other, I 
 am not to be supposed to be intolerant of those who cannot 
 make up their minds one way or other ; for the dividing 
 line is not drawn between separate men, but in the soul of 
 each individual man, so that he doubts to which side he 
 belongs, and in a way belongs to both. I do not, indeed, 
 profess to sympathise with, because I do not understand, 
 the doubts of those who do not feel themselves compelled 
 to face the facts of the case, or to decide upon the truth- 
 fulness of the revelation presented to them. Nor is, indeed, 
 doubt quite the right word to apply to them ; let us rather 
 reserve it with all its (remembering Gethsemane) sacred 
 associations for those who have distinctly realised the plain 
 conditions of the question, to whom God seems to be say- 
 ing, "Trust me all, or not at all;" whose minds range from 
 the highest ecstasies of faith, to the sharpest agonies of 
 despair ; whose doubts are as manly as their sufferings are 
 great. Let such be consoled by the reflection that in their 
 doubts the intellectual, and in their sufferings the moral, 
 future of the Christian religion lies concealed. 
 
 2d. A protest, hitherto silent, may have arisen in the 
 minds of many, to the effect that the longing to imitate 
 
2O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Christ perfectly, the conscious determination to be like 
 Him, is sufficient to break through all the cobwebs of such 
 an argument as the preceding. And so it would be, if 
 there were a syllable in that argument which thwarted it, 
 or opposed it, or did it violence in any way. But if we 
 adhere to the definition of worship as the desire for imita- 
 tion, coupled with the consciousness of inability to imitate 
 perfectly in the present life, we leave the amplest scope for 
 the satisfaction of this desire, and provide, what is in these 
 days much wanted, one of the strongest possible arguments 
 for immortality. A little consideration will make this clear. 
 If men become here or hereafter (it makes no matter which, 
 both alike would be heaven) Christlike, then the necessity, 
 and indeed the possibility, of such a life as His in the flesh 
 ceases ; there can be none of the distinctive virtues which 
 suffering produces, when there are none to inflict suffering. 
 Consequently, as has always been the case with simple 
 Christian instincts, the desire for imitation fastens ultimately 
 upon the essential and fundamental qualities of the divine 
 nature, which assumed certain forms when brought into 
 contact with human sin and sorrow, in the life of Christ, 
 and which will abide in those forms wherever there is sin 
 to be healed or sorrow removed ; but which, apart from 
 the sin and sorrow, we dimly foresee, and in half-intelligible 
 language try to describe, as the eternal life of self-sacrifice, 
 in which the self is somehow dropped out of it, that God 
 may be all in all. At any rate, nothing that has been said 
 places the smallest barrier whatever to the boundless desire 
 to imitate the divine character, though with St John I may 
 have ventured to postpone the satisfaction of the desire to 
 the time when He shall appear, and we shall then be like 
 
The Divine Character of Christ. 2 1 
 
 Him, for we shall then see Him as He is. Words which, 
 however expressive of defective knowledge of His character, 
 and therefore of defective imitation now, do not, neverthe- 
 less, prevent him from adding, with an apparent contradic- 
 tion, which I have tried in this essay to explain, but which 
 is, perhaps, more truly described as the self-contradiction of 
 the soul when gazing upon ultimate truths of God " And 
 every man that hath this hope in him, purifieth himself, 
 even as He is pure." 
 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY. 
 
 T T E who pretends to have anything new to say upon so 
 *- -* old a subject as the immortality of the soul, must 
 expect to arouse certainly opposition, and probably con- 
 tempt. Nevertheless, this at least is certain, that the 
 tendency of science, which has powerfully affected every 
 domain of thought in new and unexpected ways, cannot 
 but place the old doctrine of immortality under new, and, 
 it may be, unexpected lights, abolishing old arguments, 
 and suggesting new ones that have not yet obtained the 
 consideration they deserve. My object in this essay is, to 
 endeavour, by the aid of all-victorious analysis, to throw 
 some little light upon the relations of the belief in immor- 
 tality with scientific thought; and at the outset, I wish 
 distinctly and positively to affirm, that it is not my inten- 
 tion to construct any argument for the belief against 
 science, but merely to explain the conditions under which, 
 as it seems to me, the question must be debated. Those 
 conditions, though in themselves plain and simple, are, I 
 believe, very imperfectly understood, and much bewildering 
 nonsense is talked upon both sides of the question by men 
 who have not clearly realised the nature of evidence, the 
 
Science and Immortality. 23 
 
 amount of proof required, or the sources from which that 
 proof must be derived. I think it possible to lay down a 
 series of propositions with which, in principle at any rate, 
 most reasonable minds would agree, and which would have 
 the effect of defining the area of debate and the true point 
 of conflict. This may sound presumptuous ; whether it be 
 really so or not, the event alone can prove. 
 
 Now, the first demand of science is for an accurate defi- 
 nition of the object of discussion, that is, that both religious 
 and scientific thinkers should be quite sure that they are 
 discussing the same thing. Immortality is bound up in 
 the minds of religious people with a vast amount of beauti- 
 ful and endearing associations, which form no part of the 
 hard, dry fact itself. The definition of immortality, viewed 
 scientifically, is, I take it, something of this sort : the exist- 
 ence of a thinking, self-conscious personality after death, 
 that is, after the bodily functions have ceased to operate. 
 This personality may or may not exist for ever ; it may or 
 may not be responsible for the past ; it may or may not be 
 capable of rest, joy, and love ; it may or may not be joined 
 to its old body or to a new body. These, and a hundred 
 similar beliefs with which religion has clothed the mere 
 fact of existence after death, form no essential part, I must 
 again affirm, of the fact itself. And throughout the argu- 
 ment, this, and no other than this, will be the sense in 
 which I use the word immortality ; because it is the only 
 one that I have a right to expect that the scientific mind 
 will accept. 
 
 It may be well, also, before going further, to make it 
 clear to ourselves in what sense we use the word religion. 
 Men who would be very much ashamed of themselves if 
 
24 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 they were detected using scientific words inaccurately, do, 
 nevertheless, attribute meanings to the word religion which 
 it is difficult to hear with patience. Without, however, 
 entering into verbal discussions, it will be, surely, enough 
 to define religion as a practical belief in and consciousness 
 of God and immortality ; and as the latter is now ab- 
 solutely essential to the idea of religion as a motive moral 
 power, and as, moreover, it includes, or at any rate necessi- 
 tates the belief in the existence of God, we may fairly 
 conclude that, for all practical purposes, and certainly for 
 the purpose of this argument, religion is synonymous with 
 a belief in immortality. And if, for any reason, mankind 
 does at any time cease to believe in its own immortality, 
 then religion will also have ceased to exist as a part of the 
 consciousness of humanity. To clear up, therefore, the 
 relations between immortality and science becomes a matter 
 of the utmost importance. 
 
 It will be well next to analyse briefly the effect which 
 science has upon the nature of the proofs by which this, 
 like all other facts, must be demonstrated. Let us, for 
 convenience sake, regard the world as a vast jury, before 
 which the various advocates of many truths, and of still 
 more numerous errors, plead the cause of their respective 
 clients. However much a man may wrap himself up in 
 the consciousness of ascertained truth, and affirm that it 
 makes no matter to him what the many believe, yet nature 
 is in the long run too powerful for him, and the instinct of 
 humanity excites him to plead the cause of what he knows 
 to be truth, and to mourn in his heart and be sore vexed if 
 men reject it. Truth is ever generous and hopeful, though 
 at the same time patient and long-suffering ; she longs to 
 
Science and Immortality. 25 
 
 make converts, but does not deny herself or turn traitress 
 to her convictions if converts refuse to be made. There is 
 a sense, indeed, in which it may be said that truth only 
 becomes actual and vital by becoming subjective through 
 receiving the assent of men. What then must the advocate 
 for the fact of the immortality of the soul expect that 
 science will require of him, when he pleads before the 
 tribunal of the world for that truth which, because it is 
 dear to himself, he wishes to enforce on others ? 
 
 The alterations in the minds of men which the tendency 
 of modern thought has effected in respect of evidence, may 
 be summed up under two heads. First, the nature of the 
 evidence required is altogether altered, and a great many 
 arguments that would in former days have gone to the 
 jury, are now summarily suppressed. Fact can only be 
 proved by facts, that is, by events, instances, things, which 
 are submitted to experience and observation, and are con- 
 firmed by experiment and reason. And secondly, the 
 minds of the jury are subject to a priori, and, on the 
 whole, perfectly reasonable prepossessions before the trial 
 begins. The existence of changeless law, the regular, 
 natural, and orderly march of life, the numerous cases in 
 which what seemed to be the effect of chance or miracle 
 have been brought within the limits of ascertained causa- 
 tion ; all these things predispose the mind against plead- 
 ings for the supernatural or the divine. Most true of 
 course it is, that there are most powerful prepossessions on 
 the other side as well ; but the difference is, that these are 
 as old as man himself, while the former have only been of 
 later times imported into the debate, and if they have 
 not been originated, have at least received their deft- 
 
26 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 nite aim and vivid impulse from the results of scientific 
 research. 
 
 Now, the first result which flows from these alterations 
 is the somewhat startling one, that all the arguments for 
 immortality deriv ed from natural religion (so-called) are, 
 in the estimation of science, absolutely futile. To put this 
 point in the strongest form, all the hopes, wishes, and 
 convictions of all the men that ever lived, could not, and 
 cannot convince one single mind that disbelieves in its 
 own immortality. Unless the advocates of religion clearly 
 apprehend this truth, they are, it seems to me, quite dis- 
 abled from entering into the discussion upon conditions 
 which their opponents, by the very law of their opposition, 
 cannot but demand. It is true, indeed, that this temper of 
 mind is confined at present to a comparatively few persons, 
 as in the last century it belonged to the philosophers and 
 to their immediate followers. But then it is as clear as the 
 day that, as science is getting a more and more practical 
 hold upon men's minds by a thousand avenues, and master- 
 ing them by a series of brilliant successes, this temper is 
 rapidly passing from the few into the popular mind ; that 
 it is becoming part of the furniture of the human intellect, 
 and is powerfully influencing the very conditions of human 
 nature. Sooner or later we shall have to face a disposition 
 in the minds of men to accept nothing as fact, but what 
 facts can prove, or the senses bear witness to. In vain will 
 witness after witness be called to prove the inalienable pre- 
 rogative, the intuitional convictions, the universal aspira- 
 tions, the sentimental longings, the moral necessity, all 
 which have existed in the heart of man since man was. 
 Nor will the science of religion help us in the hour of need. 
 
Science and Immortality. 2 7 
 
 There can be a science of religion exactly as there can be 
 a science of alchemy. All that men have ever thought 
 or believed about the transmutation of metals may be 
 brought together, classified as facts, and form a valuable 
 addition to our knowledge of the history of the human 
 mind, but it would not thereby prove that the transmuta- 
 tion had taken place, or that the desire for it was anything 
 more than man's childlike strivings after that which could 
 only be really revealed by the methods of natural science. 
 So also the science of religion can prove what men have 
 held, and suggest what they ought to hold. It can show 
 that they have believed certain things to be true ; it is 
 utterly powerless to prove that they are true. It can 
 strengthen the principle of faith in those who do not require 
 positive demonstration for their beliefs ; it cannot even 
 cross swords with those, soon to be the majority of thinking 
 men, to whom positive demonstration has become as neces- 
 sary to their minds as food to their bodies. Nay, they 
 will resent rather than welcome the attempt to put a 
 multitude of hopes and myriads of wishes in the place of 
 one solid fact, and will soon confirm themselves in their 
 opinions, by the obvious argument that these hopes and 
 wishes are peculiar to the childhood of the race, and form 
 only one out of many proofs, that man is liable to perpetual 
 self-deception until he confronts fact and law. Not, indeed, 
 that they will indulge in the equally unscientific statement 
 that there is no such thing as immortality. The attitude 
 of mind which they will assume will be that of knowing 
 nothing, and of having no reasonable hope of ever dis- 
 covering anything about man's future destiny. And while 
 they will think it good that man, or at any rate that some 
 
28 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 men, should allow themselves to hope for life after death, 
 yet they will steadily oppose any assertion that these hopes 
 ought to guide men's conduct, influence their motives, or 
 form their character. 
 
 Now if this be true, it is difficult to overrate the impor- 
 tance of thoroughly and distinctly realising it. That the 
 evidence for the truths of natural religion is overwhelming, 
 is one of the statements that are accepted as truisms, at 
 the very moment that science is slowly leavening the human 
 intellect with the conviction that all such evidence is 
 scientifically worthless. Nevertheless, the opposite idea has 
 taken firm hold of the religious mind, and forms the basis 
 of many an eloquent refutation of the " presumptuous 
 assurance " and " illogical obstinacy " of modern thought. 
 Men must have smiled to hear themselves alternately 
 refuted and rebuked by controversialists who did not 
 understand the tone of mind against which they were 
 arguing, or who assumed as true the very things which 
 their opponents resolved to know nothing about, either in 
 the way of belief or rejection. It is very certain, however, 
 that this error will not yield to the mere statement that it 
 is an error, and therefore I will go on to examine a little 
 more minutely the various arguments by which men seek 
 to prove the doctrine of immortality. These are mainly 
 fourfold : 
 
 (i.) That it is an original intuition, and arising from 
 this 
 
 (2.) That it is an universal belief. 
 
 (3.) That it follows necessarily from the existence of 
 God. 
 
 (4.) That it is essential as a motive for human morality. 
 
Science and Immortality. 2 9 
 
 (i.) I take the statement of this argument from the 
 words of one, than whom no man has a better right to be 
 heard on such a subject. Professor Max M tiller, in his 
 preface to the first volume of his " Chips from a German 
 Workshop," writes as follows : " An intuition of God, a 
 sense of human weakness and dependence, a belief in a 
 divine government of the world, a distinction between 
 good and evil, and a hope of a better life, these are the 
 radical elements of all religions. . . . Unless they had 
 formed part of the original dowry of the human soul, 
 religion itself would have remained an impossibility/' 
 Now I am not quite sure that I understand in what sense 
 the writer means to assert that these intuitions, which, for 
 practical purposes, may be limited to three God, sin, and 
 immortality, are part of the original dowry of the human soul. 
 If it is meant that there was a special creation of the human 
 soul, furnished from the beginning with these three intuitions, 
 then science will resolutely refuse to admit the fact. There 
 can be no mistake about the position held by the bulk of 
 scientific men, and little doubt, I should think, as to its 
 reasonableness. If there is anything that is in ultimate 
 analysis incomprehensible, or any fact that cannot be 
 accounted for by natural causes, then the possibility of 
 special creation and original intuitions must be candidly 
 allowed, but not otherwise. There is just a chance, for 
 instance, that the difference between the brains of the 
 lowest man and the highest animal, may ultimately be re- 
 garded as a fact inexplicable upon any theory of evolution, 
 more, however, from a lack of evidence than from any other 
 cause. Be this as it may, the possibility of special creation 
 finds a distinct foothold in the acknowledged fact that 
 
3O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 the connection between thought and the brain of animals as 
 well as of man, is an ultimate incomprehensibility, a mystery 
 which the law of man's intelligence prevents his ever even 
 attempting or hoping to understand. The famous saying, 
 " Cogito y ergo sum!' the foundation of all modern meta- 
 physics, may come to be a formula under which religion, 
 philosophy, and science may all take shelter, and approach 
 each other without ever actually meeting. 
 
 But the three intuitions of God, sin, and immortality, 
 can all be accounted for by the growth of human 
 experience, as every one knows who has at all studied the 
 subject. At some period of the world's history, science 
 will answer, an ape-like creature first recognised that it or 
 he had offended against the good of some other creature, 
 and so became conscious of sin, or was created as a moral 
 being. Thus Mr Darwin has affirmed, but (speaking from 
 memory) I do not think he has called very special atten- 
 tion to that still greater epoch (or was it the same ?) in 
 man's history, when this ape-like creature, seeing one of its 
 own species lying dead, recognised as a fact, " I shall die." 
 This is what we may term the creation of man as an im- 
 mortal being ; for in the very conflict of the two facts one, 
 the reflecting being, the self-conscious I ; the other, death, 
 the seeming destroyer lies embedded all man's future 
 spiritual cravings for eternity. And the idea of God would 
 come in the order of nature, before either of these, to the 
 creature which first reflected upon the source of its own 
 existence, and recognised a " tendency in things which it 
 could not understand." This is, in brief, the scientific 
 account of man's creation, and of the growth of the ideas 
 of natural religion within his mind ; and we may remark in 
 
Science and Immortality. 3 1 
 
 passing that it must be a singularly uncandid and prejudiced 
 mind which does not recognise that the book of Genesis, 
 which, upon any theory, contains man's earliest thoughts 
 about himself, expresses in allegorical fashion, exactly the 
 same views. 
 
 The same views are also apparently expressed by Pro- 
 fessor Max Miiller, in a very beautiful passage in the article 
 on Semitic Monotheism, in the same volume : 
 
 "The primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of 
 dependence upon God could only have been the result of a primitive 
 revelation in the truest sense of that word. Man> who owed his 
 existence to God, and whose being centred and rested in God, saw 
 and felt God as the only source of his own and all other existence. 
 By the very act of the creation God had revealed Himself. Here He 
 was, manifested in His works in all His majesty and power before the 
 face of those to whom He had given eyes to see and ears to hear, and 
 into whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, even the Spirit 
 of God." 
 
 The first impression made by this passage may be, that, 
 In speaking of a " revelation in the truest sense," it affords 
 an instance of that hateful habit of using religious words in 
 a non-natural sense. But a little deeper consideration will 
 show that no possible definition of a revelation, accom- 
 panied and attested by miracles, can exclude the revelation 
 made by nature to the first man who thought. In fact, we 
 have here a description of creation, which science, with 
 possibly a little suspiciousness at some of the phrases, may 
 accept, while, at the same time, natural religion is carried 
 to its utmost and highest limits ; and along with this a 
 foundation is laid for a truer theory of the miraculous. 
 But while gladly admitting all this, the fact remains that 
 these intuitions, following upon a revelation in which nature 
 herself was the miracle, are still plainly only the expressions 
 
32 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 of man's inward experiences, and that, however old and 
 venerable and exalted, they are still only hopes, wishes, 
 and aspirations, which may or may not be true, but which 
 are incapable of proving the actual facts towards which they 
 soar. It is open, therefore, to any man accustomed to 
 look for positive demonstration, to dismiss them as dreams 
 of the infancy of man, or to relegate them into the prison- 
 house of the incomprehensibilities, or to content himself 
 with a purely natural theory of human life, which rejects 
 and dislikes the theological. 
 
 (2.) But when we come to inquire how far these primary 
 intuitions have been universal, and whether they can be 
 fairly called ineradicable, we are met by some very startling 
 facts. The dictum, o iraai So/eel rovro elvdt, <f>a[Jiev, is so 
 reasonable in itself, that no serious attempt would be made 
 to question a belief that even approached to being universal, 
 even if it could not be shown to be part of the original 
 furniture of the mind. But the real difficulty lies in finding 
 (apart from morals) any beliefs of which this universality 
 can be predicated, and assuredly the immortality of the soul 
 is not one of them. The mind of man at its lowest seems 
 incapable of grasping the idea ; and the mind of man at its 
 highest has striven to emancipate itself from it altogether. 
 The evidence for this statement lies within the reach of all, 
 but I will just adduce three names, whose very juxtaposition, 
 by the sense of incongruous oddity stirred up, may make 
 their joint testimony the more important. I mean Moses, 
 Buddha, and Julius Caesar, all of whom, though widely sepa- 
 rated in time, race, and character, representing absolutely 
 different types of human nature, approaching the subject 
 from widely different points of view, do, nevertheless, agree 
 
Science and Immortality. 33 
 
 in this, that the consciousness of immortality formed no 
 part of the furniture of their minds. 
 
 Moses lived one of the most exalted lives, whether re- 
 garded from the religious or political side, that has ever 
 been lived on earth, and yet, as is well-known, there is not 
 a shadow of a trace to prove that he was moved by the 
 hope of a reward after death, or that the idea of existence 
 after death was ever consciously presented to his mind. 
 He may be, on the whole, claimed by modern science (the 
 miraculous element being by it excluded) as an example of 
 those who perform the greatest practical duties, and are 
 content to stand before the mystery of the Unknowable 
 without inquiry and without alarm, so far as the doctrine 
 of man's immortality is concerned. Here is another of 
 those strange links that unite the earliest thinker and 
 legislator with so much of the spirit of modern thought and 
 law. Buddha, on the contrary (or his disciples, if it be true 
 that his original teaching is lost to us), cannot be quoted as 
 one who did not realise the possibility of life after death, 
 nor is any scheme of philosophy that is practically Pan- 
 theistic inconsistent with immortality, if we limit the word 
 to the bare idea of existing somehow after death. But I 
 rather quote him as one of those who show that the very 
 consciousness of undying personal life, the existence of a 
 self-reflecting ego, which gives all its shape and force to 
 the desire for life after death, may come to be regarded as 
 a positive evil, and painless extinction be maintained as the 
 ultimate hope and destiny of man. And the case of Julius 
 Caesar is, in some respects, stronger still. He is one of the 
 world's crowning intellects, and he lived at a time when 
 men such as he were the heirs of all the ages, the possessors 
 
34 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 of the treasures of thought, in which, for generations past, 
 the greatest men had elaborated doctrines concerning 
 religion, duty, and life. And he represents the views of 
 those whom the truest voice of science now repudiates as 
 running into unscientific extremes. With him non-existence 
 after death was a matter of practical belief. It coloured 
 his opinions upon politics, as really as Cromwell's religion 
 affected his. He spoke against the infliction of the penalty 
 of death upon the conspirators in Catiline's case, be- 
 cause death was a refuge from sorrows, because it solved 
 all mortal miseries, and left place for neither care nor joy. 
 And Cato expressly applauded his sentiments, though with 
 a touch of reaction from popular theology, which sounds 
 strangely modern. To this then all the original intuitions 
 of the human mind, all the glowing aspirations enshrined 
 in Greek poetry, legend, and art, all the natural theology 
 contained in the words of Socrates and Plato, had come at 
 last. Will any reasonable man affirm that an age, which 
 breathes the very air of materialism, and whose children 
 suck in the notions of changeless law with their mother's 
 milk, can arrive at anything better if it has no facts upon 
 which to rely, as proofs that its hopes are not unfounded ? 
 And how can that be called a truth of human nature, or 
 be allowed to exercise a real influence upon men's minds, 
 which is capable of being either entirely suppressed, or 
 earnestly striven against, or contemptuously rejected ? 
 
 (3.) The remaining two arguments need not detain us 
 long ; indeed, I should not have mentioned them were it 
 not that very eminent divines have based the belief in 
 immortality upon the existence of God or the necessities of 
 man. Let it once be granted that we are the creatures of 
 
Science and Immortality. 35 
 
 a personal, loving, and sustaining God, concerning whom 
 it is possible to form adequate conceptions, and then 
 doubts as to our immortality would be vain indeed. But 
 the rejoinder from the scientific view is plain enough. 
 This, it would be said, is a mere obscurum per obscurius* 
 The belief in God is simply the working of the human 
 mind, striving to account for the beginning of its own 
 existence, exactly as the belief in immortality is the result 
 of the attempt to think about the end thereof. If the 
 definition of God be a stream or tendency of things that 
 we cannot otherwise account for, then it will not help us to 
 a belief in immortality. It is surprising indeed to see how 
 the plain conditions of the case are evaded by enthusiastic 
 controversialists ; and I am almost ashamed of being 
 obliged to make statements that have an inevitable air of 
 being the baldest truisms. 
 
 (4.) The idea that immortality is essential to the moral 
 development of man, and that therefore it is demonstrably 
 true, seems to receive some little countenance from Pro- 
 fessor Max Miiller in the close of his article on Buddhism, 
 in which he thinks it improbable that 
 
 " The reformer of India, the teacher of so perfect a code of morality, 
 . . . should have thrown away one of the most powerful weapons in 
 the hands of every religious teacher, the belief in a future life, and 
 should not have seen that, if life was sooner or later to end in nothing, 
 it was hardly worth the trouble which he took himself, or the sacrifices 
 which he imposed upon his disciples." 
 
 The true bearing, in all its immense importance, of human 
 morality upon the belief in immortality, will have to be 
 considered hereafter ; but when used as a demonstration, it 
 is at once seen to belong to a class of arguments, which 
 
36 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 science resolutely rejects. The moral development of man 
 depends upon a right recognition of ascertainable facts, 
 never upon beliefs which may or may not be fictitious. A 
 much more fatal answer, however, is found in a simple appeal 
 to history, from which it will be found that, in Mr Froude's 
 words, no doctrine whatever, even of immortality, has a 
 mere " mechanical effect " upon men's hearts and con- 
 sciences, and that noble lives may be lived, and exalted 
 characters formed, by those who are brave enough to dis- 
 regard it. Nay, what is worse, immortality may be a 
 powerful weapon for evil as for good, if it chime in with a 
 perverted nature. The Pharaoh before whom Moses stood 
 believed it, and we know with what results. Only that, 
 once more will science retort, which can be proved to be 
 true upon sufficient evidence, can be positively known to 
 be useful. 
 
 To sum up, then, what has been said, we have seen that, 
 however strong may be the wishes of man for immortality, 
 however ennobling to his nature and true to his instincts the 
 belief in it may appear to be, there is nothing in natural 
 religion to answer the demands of modern thought for 
 actual proof, and nothing therefore to impugn the wisdom 
 or refute the morality of that class of persons, representing, 
 as they do, a growing tendency in the human mind, who 
 take refuge in a suspense of thought and judgment upon 
 matters which they declare are too high for them. Occa- 
 sionally we may suspect that the garb of human weakness 
 does but conceal the workings of human pride, never per- 
 haps so subtle and so sweet as when human nature meekly 
 resolves to be contented with its own imperfections, and to 
 bow down before its own frailty ; but denunciations of 
 
Science and Immortality. . 3 7 
 
 moral turpitude only harden the hearts of men who ask 
 for the bread of evidence, and receive stones in the shape 
 of insults. 
 
 We turn next to consider the effects of modern thought 
 upon the evidence for immortality derived from Revelation. 
 And here the difficulty of obtaining assent to what seem to 
 me obvious truths will be transferred from the advocates of 
 religion to those of science. Nevertheless, I maintain an 
 invincible conviction that it is possible to state the terms 
 of debate in propositions which commend themselves 
 to candid minds, and which do not, as I have said, pretend 
 to solve the controversy, but merely to define its con- 
 ditions. 
 
 Now the first proposition is : That the Resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ, if assumed to be true, does present actual 
 scientific evidence for immortality. An illustration will 
 make my meaning clear. Whether or not life can be 
 evolved from non-living matter is a subject of debate ; but 
 it is admitted on all hands, that if a single living creature 
 can be produced under conditions that exclude the pre- 
 sence of living germs, then the controversy is settled, and 
 therefore Dr Bastian sets himself to work with the neces- 
 sary apparatus to prove his case. So, in the same way, if 
 any man known to be dead and buried did rise again (as 
 for the moment is assumed to be the case), and did think 
 and act and speak in his own proper personality, then 
 immortality (in the scientific sense of the word) is thereby 
 proved. Accordingly, those who wish to prove their case, 
 betake themselves to history for the required evidence, 
 which they may or may not find, but which, such as it is, 
 must be allowed to go to the jury. Science may refuse to 
 
38 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 listen to arguments for facts derived from men's hopes and 
 beliefs; it ceases to be science if it refuses to listen to 
 arguments which profess to rely upon facts also. Were 
 there to happen now an event purporting to resemble the 
 Resurrection, it would be necessary to examine the 
 evidence exactly as men are commissioned to investigate 
 any unusual occurrence, say, for instance, the supposed 
 discovery of fertile land at the North Pole. All this is 
 plain enough, and leads to no very important conclusions, 
 but it is, nevertheless, necessary that it should be stated 
 clearly, and distinctly apprehended. 
 
 Two other propositions may also be laid down as to the 
 nature of the evidence for the Resurrection, both of them 
 once more sufficiently obvious ; but still not without their 
 value in leading to a fair and reasonable estimation of the 
 exact state of the case, and tending also, as we shall see 
 presently, in one direction. It may be taken for granted, 
 in the first place, that nothing can be alleged against the 
 moral character of the witnesses, or against the morality 
 which accompanied, and was founded upon the preaching 
 of the Resurrection. Mistaken they may have been, but 
 not dishonest; enthusiasts, but not impostors. Further- 
 more, the deeper insight into character, which is one of the 
 results of the modern critical spirit, enables us to see that 
 they numbered among their ranks men of singular gifts, 
 both moral and intellectual, who combined in a wonderful 
 degree the faculty of receiving what was, or what they 
 thought to be, a miraculous revelation, and the power of 
 setting it forth in a sober and measured manner. All this 
 is candidly admitted by the best representatives of modern 
 thought. 
 
Science and Immortality. 39 
 
 Again, it may safely be asserted that, judged by the 
 critical standards of historical science, the evidence is 
 abundantly sufficient to prove any event not claiming to 
 be miraculous. Let us suppose such an event as an ex- 
 traordinary escape from prison related in the same way, 
 though I admit that it requires a considerable intellectual 
 tour de force to eliminate, even in imagination, the super- 
 natural from the narrative. It is not going too far, to say 
 that no real question as to its truth would in that case ever 
 be raised at the bar of history, even though a powerful 
 party were interested in maintaining the contrary. A 
 strictly scientific investigation, for instance, has brought 
 out in our own days the absolute accuracy, and consequent 
 evidential value, of the account of St Paul's voyage to 
 Malta. On the whole, then, we may conclude that the 
 testimony is really evidence in the case, that it proceeds 
 from honest and capable men, and that no one, apart from 
 the existence of the supernatural element, would care to deny 
 its truthfulness, except upon grounds that would turn all 
 history into a mass of fables and confusion. 
 
 There remains, then, the old argument, that it is more 
 easy to believe the witnesses to be mistaken than the fact 
 itself to be true, and that we cannot believe a miracle 
 unless it be more miraculous to disbelieve it. To this 
 argument I avow my deliberate conviction, after the best 
 thought I can give the subject, that no answer can be 
 given regarded from a merely intellectual point of view, 
 and subject to the conditions which modern thought not 
 only prescribes but is strong enough to enforce. It goes 
 by the name of Hume, because he was the first to formulate 
 it; but it is not so much an argument as a simple state 
 
4O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ment of common experience. All men who, from the days 
 of St Thomas, have disbelieved in miracles have done so 
 practically upon this ground. And to the "doubting" 
 Apostle may be safely attributed the first use of the now 
 famous formula, " It is much more likely that you, my 
 friends, should be mistaken than that He should have 
 risen." Now, to such a state of mind, what answer short 
 of another miracle could be given then, or can be given 
 now ? True, you may point out the moral defects in the 
 mind of Thomas which led him to disbelieve, but these are 
 immediately counterbalanced by a reference to the intel- 
 lectual defects of Mary Magdalene, which prompted her to 
 accept, the miracle. There is no real room for weighing 
 the evidence on both sides, and pronouncing for that which 
 has the greatest probability, when your opponent, by a 
 simple assertion, reduces all the evidence on one side to 
 zero. Once more let me ask Christian apologists to 
 realise this, and having realised it, no matter at what cost 
 to the fears and prejudices of theology, let us then proceed 
 the more calmly to examine what it precisely means, and 
 to what conclusions it leads us. 
 
 We observe, first, that this argument is derived not from 
 the first of the two ways in which, as we saw, science 
 influences belief, namely, by altering the nature of the 
 evidence required, but from the second, namely, by predis- 
 posing the minds of men against belief upon any attainable 
 evidence whatever. We have seen that the evidence is 
 that of honest men, that it is scientifically to the point, and 
 sufficient to prove ordinary historical events. More than 
 this cannot be demanded in the case of events which do 
 not come under law or personal observation. But the 
 
Science and Immortality. 4 1 
 
 minds of men are so predisposed by their experience of 
 unchanging order to reject the miraculous, that, first, they 
 demand more and more clear evidence than in other cases, 
 and, secondly, they have recourse at once to the many 
 considerations which weaken the force of evidence for 
 things supernatural, and account for men's mistakes with- 
 out impugning their veracity. Any one who reads Hume's 
 essay will be struck at once with the, so to speak, sub- 
 jectivity of the argument. Upon this very point he says, 
 " When any one tells me he saw a dead man restored to 
 life, I immediately consider within myself" &c., &c. We 
 ask then, at once, " To whom is it more likely that 
 evidence of a miracle should be false, than that the miracle 
 should be true ? " and the answer must of course be, " Those 
 who, rightly or wrongly, are predisposed in that direction 
 by their experience of a changeless law, growing ever wider 
 and more comprehensive." Nor is Paley's answer, which 
 assumes the existence of God, at all available as against 
 Hume, who, in his next section, puts into the mouth of an 
 imaginary Epicurus all the arguments against such a belief. 
 But it is a most just and reasonable remark that this pre- 
 disposition does not exist in the case of those who again 
 rightly or wrongly are wishing to know God and hoping 
 to live after death. It is at this point that natural and 
 revealed religion, weak when divided, becomes strong by 
 combination. The Resurrection would certainly never be 
 believed, if it did not fall like a spark upon a mass of 
 wishes and aspirations, which are immediately kindled into 
 life. Granted a man (and this is no supposition, but a 
 fact), whose whole nature craves, not to die, and whose 
 mind is occupied by the standing miracle of its own 
 
42 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 immortality, and then the Resurrection, so far from being 
 improbable, will be the very thing which gives life to his 
 hopes. The more he sees that natural religion cannot give 
 him facts, as proofs, the more he will welcome Revelation 
 which does, just because it will satisfy the rational desire 
 which science is creating in the human mind. And just as 
 there is no answer to Hume's argument for one predisposed 
 as Hume was, so is there none to one predisposed as this 
 supposed (but very actual) man is. The one is as incapable 
 of disbelief as the other of assent. Hume and Paley do not 
 really grapple with each other, but move in parallel lines 
 that never meet. As Hume himself said of Berkeley, "His 
 arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction," 
 so might each of the two say of the other. On the one 
 hand we have all the results of human experience, a severe 
 standard of intellectual virtue, a morality which confines it- 
 self to its duties towards humanity, and the power of being 
 able not to think about ultimate incomprehensibilities. 
 On the other hand, we have intense longings after the 
 infinite, which science, admitting, as it does, the existence 
 of the Unknowable, cannot possibly deny to be legitimate 
 in those who feel them sincerely ; also a body of evidence, 
 sufficient to prove ordinary events, for a fact, that gives 
 certainty and power to all these longings ; a morality, 
 which has reference to a Supreme Judge, and an absolute 
 incapacity for life and duty, until some sort of conclusion 
 has been arrived at concerning the mysteries of our being 
 and destiny. Both of these represent tendencies of human 
 nature with which the world could at this stage very badly 
 dispense ; both may have their use and their justification ; 
 
Science and Immortality. 43 
 
 either may be true, but both cannot, for the Resurrection 
 either did or did not happen. 
 
 From this account of things some very important con- 
 siderations follow, a few of which I will endeavour to sum 
 up in three heads. The scientific value of Revelation as a 
 necessity, if there is to be any vital and practical religion 
 at all, will, I hope, have been sufficiently indicated already, 
 
 (i.) The lines of a long, and, perhaps, never-ending con- 
 flict between the spirit of Religion and what, for want of 
 a better word, I will call the spirit of Rationalism, are here 
 defined. Neither of the two being able by mere argument 
 to convince the other, they must rely upon gradually 
 leavening the minds of men with prepossessions in the 
 direction which each respectively favours. The time may 
 come when Rationalism will have so far prevailed that a 
 belief in the miraculous will have disappeared ; the time 
 may also come when the Christian Revelation, historically 
 accepted, will everywhere be adopted as God's account to 
 man of ultimate incomprehensibilities. Surely, no man 
 who has ever fairly examined his own consciousness can 
 deny that elements, leading to either of these two con- 
 clusions exist within his own mind. He must be a very 
 hardened believer to whom the doubt, " Is the miraculous 
 really possible ? " never suggested itself. And he must, in 
 turn, be a very unscientific Rationalist who has never caught 
 himself wondering whether, after all, the Resurrection did 
 not take place. Nor, so far as we may at this epoch dis- 
 cern the probable direction of the contest, is it possible to 
 estimate very accurately the influence which science will 
 exercise upon it. On the one hand, it will certainly bring 
 within the mental grasp of common men that view of law 
 
44 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and causation, which, in Hume's time, was confined to 
 philosophers and their followers, and was attained rather 
 by intellectual conceptions, than by such common ex- 
 periences of every-day life and thought as we have at 
 present. On the other hand, it will purge religion of its 
 more monstrous dogmas, and further, by calling attention 
 to the necessity of proving fact by fact, and again, by clear- 
 ing up the laws of evidence, will tend to deepen in the 
 minds of religious people the value and meaning of Revela- 
 tion ; while, at the same time, by its frank admission of 
 hopeless ignorance, it will concede to faith a place in the 
 realm of fact. Every man will have his own views as to 
 the issue of the conflict : for the present it is sufficient for 
 him, if he can be fully satisfied in his own mind. 
 
 (2.) The predisposition in men's minds in favour, whether 
 of Religion or Rationalism, will be created and sustained 
 solely by moral means. This is the conclusion toward 
 which I have been steadily working from the beginning 
 of this Essay to the end of it. The intellect of both 
 Christian and Rationalist will have its part to play; but 
 that part will consist in presenting, teaching, and enforcing 
 each its own morality upon the minds of men. I need not 
 say that I use the word morality, as expressing in the 
 widest sense all that is proper for and worthy of humanity, 
 and not merely in the narrower sense of individual good- 
 ness. Rationalism will approach mankind rather upon the 
 side of the virtues of the intellect. It will uphold the need 
 of caution in our assent, the duty of absolute conviction, 
 the self-sufficiency of man, the beauty of law, the glory of 
 working for posterity, and the true humility of being 
 content to be ignorant where knowledge is impossible. 
 
Science and Immortality. 45 
 
 Religion will appeal to man's hopes and wishes recorded in 
 nature and in history, to his yearnings for affection, to 
 his sense of sin, to his passion for life and duty, which 
 death cuts short. And that one of the two which is truest 
 to humanity, which lays down the best code of duty, and 
 creates the strongest capacity for accomplishing it, will, in 
 the long run, prevail ; a conclusion which science, so far as 
 it believes in man, and religion, so far as it believes in God, 
 must adopt. Here, once more, it is well nigh impossible 
 to discern the immediate direction of the conflict, whatever 
 may be our views as to its ultimate decision. Science is 
 almost creating a new class of virtues ; it is laying its finger 
 with unerring accuracy upon the faults of the old morality ; 
 it is calling into existence a passion for intellectual truth. 
 But then religion has always given the strongest proofs of her 
 vitality by her power of assimilating (however slowly) new 
 truths, and of rejecting (alas ! how tardily) old falsehoods at 
 the demands of reason and discovery. A religious man can 
 always say that Christians, and not Christianity, are respon- 
 sible for what goes amiss. It is because religious practice 
 never has been, and is at this moment almost less than ever, 
 up to the standard of what religious theory exacts, that we 
 may have confidence in gradual improvement and advance, 
 until that standard, towards the formation of which science 
 will have largely contributed, be attained. 
 
 (3.) Closely connected with the above, follows the pro- 
 position that all attempts on the part of religion to confute 
 the "sceptic " by purely intellectual methods are worse than 
 useless. There is no intellectual short cut to the Christian 
 faith ; it must be built up in the minds of men by setting 
 forth a morality that satisfies their nature, consecrates 
 
46 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 humanity, and establishes society. It is not because men 
 love the truth, but because they hate their enemies, that in 
 things religious they desire to have what they call an over- 
 whelming preponderance of argument on their side of the 
 question, the possession of which enables them to treat 
 their opponents as knaves or fools or both. Religion may 
 have been the first to set this pernicious example, but, 
 judging from the tone of much modern writing, Rationalism 
 has somewhat bettered her instructions. No doubt it is a 
 tempting thing to mount a big pulpit, and then and there, 
 with much intellectual pomp, to slay the absent infidel 
 absent no less from the preacher's argument than from his 
 audience. Delightful it may be, but all the more dangerous, 
 because it plunges men at once into that error, so hateful 
 to modern thought, of affirming that intellectual mistakes 
 are moral delinquencies. No one, least of all science, 
 denies that men are responsible for the consequences of 
 their belief, provided these consequences are limited to 
 such as are capable of being recognised and foreseen, and 
 are not extended to comprehend endless perdition in a 
 future state an idea which is supposed, rightly or wrongly, 
 to lurk beneath the preacher's logical utterances, and which 
 religion has done next to nothing to disavow. And so we 
 come to this conclusion : to build up by precept and 
 example a sound and sufficient morality ; to share in all 
 the hopes and aspirations of humanity ; to be foremost in 
 practical reforms ; to find what the instincts of mankind 
 blindly search for by reference to the character of God 
 finally revealed in Christ, and to the hope of immortality 
 which His Resurrection brought to light ; to endeavour to 
 clear religion from the reproach of credulity, narrowness, 
 
Science and Immortality. 47 
 
 timidity, and bitter sectarian zeal ; these are, as our 
 Master Himself assured us, the only means of engendering 
 in the hearts of men that moral quality which we call 
 Faith : for " HE THAT IS OF THE TRUTH HEARETH MY 
 VOICE." 
 
MORALITY AND IMMORTALITY. 
 
 r | "HE general result arrived at in the previous Essay 
 -* may be summed up as follows : 
 
 1. The desires and opinions of men upon the subject of 
 their ultimate destiny do not amount to such an absolute 
 demonstration of the truth of immortality as science 
 demands, whereas the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, assumed 
 to be tnie, is an actual instance of the fact requiring to be 
 proved, i.e., that men can live after death. 
 
 2. There is enough evidence to satisfy a reasonable man 
 of the truth of the history of the Resurrection, provided 
 there was nothing miraculous in that history. 
 
 3. Minds that are already deeply concerned with the 
 miracle of their own immortality will find no difficulty in 
 accepting the narrative, even though it includes a mir- 
 aculous element, whereas minds that are not so concerned 
 will find no difficulty in rejecting it. 
 
 4. Hence it follows that the controversy will ultimately 
 turn upon the question, whether the doctrine of immortality 
 can or cannot be recommended to the minds of men as 
 necessary to, and necessitated by, human morality in its 
 widest sense. If it can, then men will continue to believe 
 the Resurrection, the evidence of which is, apart from the 
 
Morality and Immortality. 49 
 
 miraculous, sufficient, and reasonable ; if it cannot, then they 
 will cease to believe that which has no moral value for them. 
 It now becomes my duty to abandon the neutral position 
 I have hitherto endeavoured to maintain, and to assume 
 that of an advocate for Christianity. But it is necessary to 
 observe that this does not imply either that I should 
 advocate Christianity as it now is, or find fault with science 
 for holding aloof from it. On the contrary, the best hope 
 for religion lies in the fact of science continuing to utter a 
 clear and outspoken protest against the errors that are 
 bringing discredit upon her name, and sensibly, though 
 gradually, weakening her influence for good. Assuredly, if 
 Christianity is to prevail by being morally attractive to all 
 that is best in humanity, then there is nothing in the 
 modern forms it has assumed to attract minds trained in 
 the severe love of truth, and in the search for facts whereon 
 truth may repose. Christian apologists are too apt to speak 
 as though the ideal Christianity which they represent had 
 any real hold upon the minds of the mass of men, and to 
 forget that practically it means ultramontanism and sec- 
 tarianism, the infallibility of the Pope, balanced by the 
 infallibility of the Bible. Its moral value in special depart- 
 ments of life is not denied, but it is contended that these 
 gigantic sins against humanity and truth do at this 
 present moment, on the whole, outweigh its claims in other 
 respects. This is not, however, a very practical question, 
 nor one into which I greatly care to enter ; it is enough to 
 point out that unless (what I fully expect) science reforms 
 religion in the same way as did the revival of classical 
 learning, religion will cease to be the custodian of man's 
 deepest thoughts upon morality and eternity. 
 
5O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 My business is simply to call attention to facts, which 
 seem to show that a belief in immortality is essential to the 
 highest powers, as well as to the most general needs of 
 human nature. This inquiry belongs to the science of 
 religion, and is strictly scientific in its methods and results. 
 Let me once more state what the proofs thus obtained 
 really amount to. It is quite possible to examine the facts 
 of human nature and of history, and from them to discover 
 whether or not they lead, and will continue to lead, to a 
 desire for immortality ; but such a desire amounts to no 
 scientific proof of the fact itself. That the desire for 
 immortality is natural to man, and in accordance with his 
 instincts and circumstances, is what I believe, and am about 
 to endeavour to show. But then, why should I have to do 
 it at all ? Surely it might be thought that so obvious a 
 duty would be discharged more than sufficiently in all the 
 sermons and writings produced by a fertile and laborious 
 theology. Yet, so far as my own reading of modern 
 religious books goes, I have met with no systematic attempt 
 in this direction, indeed, with nothing but an occasional 
 remark occurring amidst a crowd of other and irrelevant 
 topics. Christian literature, taking its tone from Dr 
 Newman, may be said, on the whole, to attempt to answer 
 these questions by an evasion of the law of evidence. This 
 is, indeed, a just and fitting punishment. If men choose to 
 return to scholastic subtleties and verbal definitions, if the 
 minds and pens of Catholics and Evangelicals alike are 
 occupied with questions about the methods and meaning of 
 Regeneration, Justification, The Real Presence, Church 
 Government, and Ritual Observance, then they must be 
 content to leave the weightier matters of humanity to those 
 
Morality and Immortality. 5 1 
 
 who stand outside of Christianity altogether, and who watch 
 them with malicious amusement paying tithe of mint and 
 cummin, enlarging the borders of their garments, and 
 compassing sea and land (not to say the law courts) that 
 they may make one proselyte with what result let the 
 tone and temper of the religious press declare. 
 
 We are now to consider some plain facts of man's nature 
 as bearing upon his wish for immortality. And first, I 
 avail myself of the old truth that men must seek their own 
 happiness, only substituting for that much-abused word 
 one that Christianity has sanctioned and science will 
 accept, the joy of existence. Of what elements is this 
 composed ? What are the things by which men live, and 
 to which they have, as it were, a personal and inalienable 
 right ? What, when we examine the wonders of our own 
 being, can we claim of God, who has made us what we are, 
 and therefore made us to wish for that which we find our- 
 selves incapable of not wishing for ? I have worded this 
 last sentence so as to include both the Christian and 
 scientific conception of God, but in future I shall speak of 
 the facts of life and nature under the terms which religion 
 has given them. Now the answer to these questions may 
 be summed up under these three words, power, reputation, 
 and rest, to which, though in a somewhat different category, 
 may be added love. I do not put these forward as a 
 scientific classification, though it is obvious that they may 
 be taken to cover the joy of existence regarded as present, 
 past, and future. But I state them as simple facts of 
 human nature, which history and consciousness assure us 
 to be true, and I propose to take them in order, and see 
 what they teach us concerning man's desires for immortality. 
 
52 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 I might, of course, trace the sense of power to man's 
 consciousness of being a free agent, that is, a creative and 
 originating being, but as this would lead us straight to 
 thorny metaphysical discussions, I prefer to rest it upon 
 the simplest fact of observation and experience. Every 
 human soul is different from every other, and the further 
 we ascend in the scale of civilisation, grows more widely 
 different. Life, when regarded from the stand-point of 
 the doctrine of evolution, may be compared to a cluster of 
 mountains crowded together at their base, but whose peaks 
 shine far apart in solitary splendour. Every man has a 
 character of his own, a part of his own to play, duties which 
 none but he can discharge, persons dependent on him for 
 love and help. God (it would be equally true if we said 
 law or nature) cannot consistently with Himself create two 
 moral beings exactly alike, to each is given a special spark 
 of the divine life ; when we realise this, then the whole 
 astonishing conception of man's essential divinity rushes 
 into the mind. And therefore every true soul cannot but 
 demand the power to live out its life, and to fill its place 
 in the universe of God. To learn more of that knowledge 
 which is open to all, to perform better those duties which 
 are common to all and yet special to each, to become more 
 useful in our place and calling, this is power, and right, and 
 life. But this consciousness of individuality and of progress 
 pleads for a life to come ; it is the combination of the two 
 that makes the desire irresistible. Men resent the idea of 
 final death because they have learnt to feel that humanity 
 progresses by the progress of individuals, and death inter- 
 feres just when the moral being is developing towards 
 perfection. It is of course tempting to adduce the case of 
 
Morality and Immortality. 53 
 
 those who die in the prime of strength and usefulness as 
 filling mankind with an inextinguishable desire for com- 
 pletion in a future state ; but in truth the argument is far 
 stronger if we take, not the exceptional, but the typical 
 case, that of men who depart in the fulness of age. On 
 the one hand, there is a sense of departed power, a con- 
 sciousness of thwarted labour, a faintly sad smile as of 
 those to whom work has become impossible; on the. other, 
 there is a tender sagacity that has ceased to strive here, 
 and is preparing for work hereafter, a special and anxious 
 care for those around as though they could never cease to 
 be objects of love and care : in a word, the decay of 
 autumn, when the flower is fading and the seed within is 
 ripening. Such is the old age of men who have worked 
 and hoped, and such is the life which, if any one has ever 
 possessed it, or rather been possessed by it, he will not 
 lightly part with it, or cease to wish that it may be con- 
 tinued in a world to come. The onus probandi is as it 
 were changed, and he insists on desiring immortality unless 
 it can be shown that death is final. His desire may be 
 destroyed by contradictory evidence, or rather it may be 
 shown to rest upon no evidence at all, for to adduce 
 evidence that we are not immortal is a contradiction in 
 terms, and requires immortality to do it. But assuredly it 
 will welcome any fact which throws light upon its own 
 yearnings, and gives force and power to its own convictions; 
 and thus it fastens upon such an event as the Resurrection, 
 supported as it is by reasonable evidence, with a tenacity 
 that will defy the assaults of persons otherwise minded and 
 in other ways supported. Nor can it be blamed upon 
 moral grounds for so doing ; much less can it be shown to 
 
54 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 be contrary to scientific conceptions. Natural development 
 is carried on by means of minute physical variations in 
 each successive generation, but when we ascend to man, 
 the moral variations in descendants are so great and so 
 complex that they do not form, and cannot be classed 
 under a new species, but become separate individuals, 
 which, just because they are separate, lay claim to an 
 eternity, in which each may live out its life to the fullest, 
 discharge its duties, and fulfil its destiny. 
 
 Next let us observe how the desire for reputation and 
 rest, perfectly natural, legitimate, and praiseworthy, kindles 
 within the soul a hope of immortality. The connection 
 between these two and immortality is indeed so obvious 
 that it will be enough merely to observe how true to the 
 facts of human life the desire for reputation and for rest is, 
 and then the result follows at once : the same remark may 
 indeed be made as to any of the primary elements in man's 
 moral nature which we shall adduce, for all alike, the 
 moment they are mentioned, seem to breathe the air and 
 suggest the idea of immortality. The desire for fame is 
 then the craving to be fairly judged and recognised accord- 
 ing to the way in which we have used the "power" of 
 which I have been speaking. It is an universal instinct of 
 mankind, from which no civilised man has ever been 
 exempt, and exemption from which would be treated as 
 utterly immoral. No one who has tried to do his duty 
 does not wish to be kindly remembered after death : man 
 has a right to a just judgment, which in turn is not a thing 
 to be escaped from, as a false theology teaches, but to be 
 welcomed as an inestimable privilege from the Creator. 
 For no one can really be content to be subject to the 
 
Morality and Immortality. 55 
 
 unaided judgment, the rough, partial, hap-hazard decisions 
 of men, even of those dearest to us. The praise of men, 
 like their gratitude, oftener leaves us mourning. One of 
 the most certain results of modern thought is that the so- 
 called verdict of history is a mere pretence for hiding man's 
 incapacity to decide upon the actual character of historical 
 personages, and that history will more and more occupy 
 herself with the delineation of great movements and the 
 part that each man played in them. And what is true on 
 a large scale is true on a small one : no man is ever known 
 for what he really is. A poor consolation indeed for those 
 who have endured neglect, obloquy, and, what is far worse 
 than either, the being compelled by the inequalities of the 
 world to live a life far below their power and their deserv- 
 ings. Real reputation is the reflection of the glory of God 
 upon the lives of men, but when men feel that they are not 
 really known for what they are, nor condemned for their 
 real faults, nor honoured for their real merits, then with 
 desperate despair they make their appeal to another life, 
 and claim to stand before the eternal judgment-seat as 
 men who are wrestling. with the sharpest agony of death. 
 On such a matter we may perhaps be willing to listen to 
 the authority of one of the chief of those who have needed 
 eternity to repair the mistakes of time : 
 
 " Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
 Nor in the glistening foil 
 Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies ; 
 But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes 
 And perfect witness of all-judging Jove ; 
 As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
 Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed." 
 
 . Next comes rest, which men, being what they are, must 
 
56 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 also demand. The analogy of nature, the needs of the 
 body, the usages of life, the instincts of their being, leave 
 them no choice in the matter, so long at least as sleep, 
 holidays, old age, amusements, and the like, remain upon 
 earth. But it is important to observe what rest really 
 means. Physical science explains to us the allegorical 
 assertion that God rested from His work, by showing that 
 He ceased from the travails and birth-pangs of creative 
 work, from the slow crushing power of ice and water, from 
 the upheaval of surfaces, the submerging of continents, the 
 gradual curbing and restraining the youthful powers of 
 nature till she became answerable to man's control, or at 
 least afforded him a foothold in her midst. So does 
 moral science proclaim that man needs rest, not from work, 
 but from the conditions under which work is carried on 
 here, from the chaos, so to speak, of life. He is placed 
 here to perform onerous tasks under painful conditions, and 
 he desires, as the real source of rest, that change to a 
 higher form of existence which every modern discovery 
 (evolution more than any other), tends to make familiar to 
 him, and a right conception of which takes all selfishness out 
 of rewards, because in the light of science it is seen to be a 
 regular, upward, orderly progress. That religion has yet to 
 learn from science what are the true primary elements of 
 rest, reward, and judgment, may be true, but it affords no 
 ground for disbelieving in the great facts which religion 
 teaches, though much for attempting to teach her to teach 
 them better. 
 
 The next great fact in man's existence which I shall 
 adduce as proving the necessity of wishing for immortality, 
 is the necessity under which he finds himself for loving ; 
 
Morality and Immortality. 5 7 
 
 and here it may be well to say a word or two upon the 
 nature of love, for there is a kind of spurious sentimental 
 view of it which I take leave to denounce as being (among 
 other things) utterly unscientific. Love then is sometimes 
 regarded as having its roots in simple self-sacrifice for the 
 good of others, and Christianity is appealed to as giving 
 weight to this opinion by those who are willing to accept 
 a few " elegant extracts " from its moral teaching, while 
 repudiating its historical truthfulness. Now the plain fact is, 
 that whatever a plausible humanitarianism may say on the 
 subject, the teachings of the Bible and of science agree in 
 representing the essence of love to be rooted in the delight 
 or benefit which the thing loved conveys to him who loves 
 it. God, says the Bible, saw that the world was "good," 
 that is, a source of delight to its Creator. Men love their 
 fellows, says science, ultimately and originally from the 
 same instinct that teaches animals (and for that matter the 
 vegetable world also) to love those in whom they find com- 
 fort, pleasure, and support. Everywhere love is measured 
 by and pre-supposes a self-conscious " I," so that in its 
 deepest and most natural utterance men are commanded 
 to love their neighbours as themselves.* And the whole 
 effect of religion, as historically developed in the Bible, is, 
 while keeping this natural self-love in mind, to raise men 
 up to true, that is, to divine conceptions of what real 
 pleasure, comfort, and support consist in, and to show 
 how they are to be obtained. The life of Christ answers 
 both questions by declaring that goodness is the only 
 thing really worthy of love, and that this must be created 
 
 * And yet we could not apply this standard or formula to the love of God 
 (see p. 10). I prefer to leave the discrepancy, if such there be, unsolved. 
 
58 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 in others by self-sacrifice on our part, so that we may 
 enjoy their goodness. He revealed the perfect working 
 of the law of self-sacrifice, namely, to give up everything 
 for the cause of human goodness, that humanity might 
 become delightful to God and to itself. It avails very little 
 to enter into bewildering discussions as to whether this 
 idea of self-sacrifice is or is not as noble as the one which 
 contemplates entire destruction and abnegation of self as a 
 being conscious of the results of its own sacrifice, but it is 
 surely of the greatest importance to discern which idea has 
 its foundation in fact and law. And if the theory of 
 evolution be true, then what Butler called " reasonable self- 
 love " is found to be a natural instinct, shared with the 
 animals, from which man can no more emancipate himself 
 than he can give himself a new parentage, though of course 
 this instinct requires to be made " reasonable " by the 
 teachings of morality and religion throughout the progress 
 of humanity. Therefore whatever a transcendental philo- 
 sophy may say (such philosophy having no foundation in 
 the realm of fact), men will continue to love that which is 
 good to them, just because it is good to them, and religion 
 will continue to teach them what goodness is, and how 
 they are to create it in others by their own self-sacrifice. 
 
 I beg my readers to observe the force of this argument. 
 It is one of the many instances in which the verdict of 
 science is given in favour of religion, and, it must be added, 
 of common sense. If Mr Darwin's account of the origin of 
 morality in the social affections be true, then, by the law 
 of man's being, love must have a conscious reference to 
 self and cannot be mere self-abolition and annihilation. 
 Exactly this the Bible recognises as true of the love of the 
 
Morality and Immortality. 59 
 
 Creator, and recounts in history as true of the love of the 
 Redeemer, who will " take his friends to himself, that where 
 he is they may be there also." And exactly this the daily 
 experience of common life testifies to as being true of the 
 love which binds human souls together. The desire for 
 immortality lies imbedded in the primary instincts of our 
 nature. If to any human soul any other soul is dear or 
 pleasant in one word, good then that soul cannot choose 
 but crave lor a continuance of such love after death. A 
 man may of course rid himself of these desires, because he 
 has an unbounded power of perverting his nature, resisting 
 experience, and doing violence to facts. But wherever 
 the course of human life is true to the law of nature as 
 expounded by science and enforced by religion, there love 
 will be an intimation of immortality. And so in fact we 
 find it to be, though details that would require a volume 
 must here be discussed in a few sentences. 
 
 Take, for instance, as a type of the love of equals in age, 
 that of married life. Its essence is that it is progressive. 
 It deepens with the deepening forces of life, and grows 
 with the growth of years. All common labours, trials, joys, 
 and cares, form so many links invisible but real that are 
 binding souls together. The memory of the past and the 
 anticipations of the future fuse two souls into one common 
 life, one moral being, and yet they are haunted by the dim 
 sense of approaching change, that breathes in the words, 
 
 " There 's something flows to us in life, 
 But more is taken quite away ; 
 Pray, Alice, pray, my darling wife, 
 That we may die the self-same day." 
 
 And so the thought of final separation becomes impossible. 
 That love should perish they resent as the worst of bias- 
 
60 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 phemies. The inspired genius of St Paul, which shed 
 light upon every aspect of the spiritual world, exactly as 
 Shakespeare upon the world of man, or Newton upon the 
 world of nature, saw this when he called Christ the 
 "husband" of the Church, that is, of humanity. Take 
 again the love of parents for children, as seen especially 
 in the case of those who die young. They will not endure 
 to part for ever with the object of so much hope, labour, 
 and care. They know that there is no such thing as death, 
 in the sense that anything perishes entirely, and that a dead 
 body is but resolved into other forms, and so passes into 
 new life. Modern materialists wax eloquent on the 
 eternity of force or matter, and I for one can sympathise 
 with them. But then I crave leave, again with St Paul, 
 to carry this truth into the analogous domain of moral life 
 also. A child may have a power hidden within its brain 
 capable of moving the world, and it dies before it utters a 
 word. There must be use for this power also in a world 
 in which there is no waste ; so love declares and triumphs 
 over death. At death, physical power passes into new 
 modes of existence ; if so, then why should not spiritual 
 power also in both cases to carry out the dictates of what 
 we see to be an universal law ? To desire the immortality 
 of a dead child does not indeed require any such analogy ; 
 men desire it because to do so is true to the instincts of 
 nature and to the facts of their creation. It was some 
 such instinct as this that, in spite of the national uncon- 
 sciousness of immortality, touched the heart of David with 
 a vague sense of a life to come, and suggested words that 
 meant so much more than he could grasp, " I shall go 
 to him, but he will not come back to me." 
 
Morality and Immortality. 6 1 
 
 The same may be said of the love of children for parents; 
 indeed, the parent is to the child the very idea and possessor 
 of immortality, merely because it is the fountain of his life. 
 We might parallel David's yearning for his child with 
 Augustine's love for his mother. But enough has been 
 said to indicate that, left to themselves and to nature, men 
 do and will desire immortality, that they may continue to 
 love and be loved in turn. To strengthen and purify this 
 love in families, and then in wider circles of neighbourhood, 
 country, Church, Christianity, and humanity itself, is the 
 office of religion. It is here emphatically, that men are 
 asking for morality at her hands, and are being put off 
 with theology and ceremonies. If religion can succeed in 
 making men moral in respect of such things as these, they 
 will, if I may so speak, make themselves immortal. People 
 who love cannot bear to die, and people who do not love, have 
 by the nature of the case, no wish to live. As Arthur says, 
 
 " Thou hast not made my life so sweet to me, 
 That I, the king, should greatly care to live.'" 
 
 If a man came to me in anxiety as to his own immortality, 
 and desiring arguments to convince his reason, I should be 
 inclined to ask him upon what terms he was living with his 
 wife, his children, his parents, and his neighbours. And it 
 is because religion, occupied as it is in teaching men of one 
 school to " save " their souls, and of another to " make " 
 them, has got no real voice or power in that which makes 
 up so large a part of the normal life of ordinary men, that 
 they are beginning to seek for instruction and morality 
 elsewhere. 
 
 I proceed next to consider the effects of another great 
 fact in human life upon man's desires for immortality ; I 
 
62 Reconciliation o Religion and Science. 
 
 mean the sense of sin, or in less theological words, the 
 consciousness of evil. And, here once more I will endea- 
 vour to adduce nothing more than the simplest truths of 
 everyday experience. The first consciousness of evil comes 
 to men in the order of nature, when they realise that they 
 have done irreparable wrong to other people. They have 
 done mischief in the world, set a train of evil going which 
 they have no power to stop, corrupted others, done them 
 harm, and added their contribution to the great heap of 
 human error, folly, and crime. And in so doing they have 
 offended against a law of goodness and beneficence, which 
 may be expressed in these terms : that if all men were 
 good, then all men would be happy. Therefore, the first 
 desire is to be brought into harmony with the law of good- 
 ness in religious terms, to be reconciled to God. But 
 then this desire for pardon, which has assumed such dispro- 
 portionate, not to say monstrous, forms in modern theology, 
 is soon followed by another ; for mere pardon is nothing if 
 the evil still continues ; to save one's soul, a very poor 
 thing if souls that one has helped to ruin remain in ruins. 
 And so the next demand is for another state of things 
 altogether, for a world in which there shall be, if not per- 
 fection, at least progress towards perfection, so that the 
 results of evil shall die and fall away, or be seen to have 
 wrought out the purposes of God. Thus, from the simple 
 consciousness of evil, men spring upwards to the desire for 
 immortality, for if there be no life after death with a trans- 
 muting harmonising power belonging to it, then the evil they 
 have done remains perpetual, running throughout all genera- 
 tions of men, not to be washed away by any amount of 
 repentance, or counteracted by any good actions in other 
 
Morality and Immortality. 63 
 
 directions : a thought which is simply unbearable, the 
 agony of which is generally the first prelude to that 
 literature of immortality which we call prayer. Or again, 
 a man reaches the same desire for perfection in a life to 
 come, when he regards not so much the evil that he has 
 done as the evil that is in him. He sees in himself bound- 
 less capacities for good, as though he had all the makings 
 of a perfect man in him, and yet he is constrained by an 
 evil power over which he longs to gain a decisive victory. 
 Professor Huxley's whimsical desire to be wound up like a 
 clock every morning, in order that his moral being may 
 perform its functions with mechanical regularity, has at 
 least this about it, that it expresses, from the scientific point 
 of view, a theory of moral duty, which corresponds pretty 
 closely to the religious hope of heavenly perfection. And 
 the same idea of perfection, man, when he looks abroad, 
 finds everywhere present, only broken up in bits and 
 scattered abroad among different men. If something could 
 be taken from one man and added to another, if the self- 
 devotion of Howard could be joined to the faculties of 
 Julius Caesar, if things could be got out of disorder and 
 confusion, then that idea might be realised, 
 
 " That type of perfect in his mind 
 In nature can he nowhere find ; 
 He sows himself on every wind." 
 
 Another fact of human experience completes the picture, 
 and it is one that has exercised a profound influence upon 
 the greatest souls. Man, gifted with an instinctive desire 
 for justice, finds that there is no such thing in this present 
 world, except what his own feeble endeavours may achieve. 
 The contrast between the elaborate care with which society, 
 
64 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 in the effort of self-preservation, seeks to mete out justice, 
 and the indifference with which nature, or law, or chance, 
 or fate (by whatever name we call it), mocks the vain 
 attempt, is suggestive indeed, and has ever been felt as one 
 of the greatest of the mysteries of life. The effects, for 
 instance, of the destruction of Lisbon upon two such men 
 as Goethe and Voltaire are a case in point. That men do 
 not suffer because they specially deserve it, we know from 
 the lips of Christ himself; and if there be another life we 
 can acquiesce, although even so with difficulty, in that which 
 it is hard to understand. Once more, however, I must say, 
 that to my mind the doctrine of evolution, carried forward 
 by analogy into the realms of spiritual life, suggests the 
 explanation which later moralists and theologians will have 
 to elaborate. A perpetual reaching forward into higher 
 modes of life by means of catastrophe, death, sorrow, and 
 suffering, fills men's souls with submission to the workings 
 of a higher Will, while the hope of personal participation 
 in the higher life, satisfies their cravings for justice to them- 
 selves and others. Thus, then, it comes to pass that those 
 whose sense of sin compels them to long for pardon, per- 
 fection, and justice, will also continue to long for immor- 
 tality, and will welcome the evidence which purports to 
 establish it as a fact. And although the remark does not 
 belong logically to the precise proposition I am endeavour- 
 ing to make out, yet it would be doing injustice to the 
 tremendous power which the argument has upon the 
 human soul, if I did not observe in passing that the proof 
 of the bare fact of immortality, derived from the Resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus Christ, is bound up with a life, a character, 
 and a teaching, that claim to meet, and, as Christian people 
 
Morality and Immortality. 65 
 
 think, succeed in meeting every natural requirement of man 
 for power, rest, and reputation, for love and reunion, for 
 pardon, perfection, and justice. 
 
 Another class of arguments is derived from a totally 
 different source from those we have been considering, and 
 possesses even more value from the strictly scientific point 
 of view. It may no doubt, to a certain extent, be contended 
 that these facts of human nature and experience may be 
 modified and altered to an extent almost inconceivable at 
 present ; and I readily admit that if a morality more suit- 
 able to man's wants, and more true to his nature, can be 
 devised, he will cease to believe in his own immortality. 
 But then, I also affirm that no trace of such morality has 
 yet been propounded in theory, much less been wrought out 
 in practice ; and what is more to the point still, I maintain 
 that so far scientific discovery goes to show that the facts 
 which lead to a belief in immortality are rooted in the con- 
 stitution of man. The next class of arguments, however, 
 has to do with the external world, with our material sur- 
 roundings in a word, with the home in which we find our- 
 selves placed. Now, from the impressions thence arising 
 there is no escape, as there need be no mistake about 
 their meaning. Man's home is prepared and provided for 
 him, and just as differences in scenery or climate work 
 ineradicable distinctions upon the minds and bodies of 
 those who are subject to them, so is humanity at large 
 subject to impressions from nature and from external con- 
 ditions, which are simply unavoidable. The world is not 
 ours to make or unmake ; it forces itself in upon us through 
 eye, ear, and brain, and is in truth a real Revelation, a 
 word from that power which is not man, and is therefore, 
 
66 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 in the words of religion, God. Now, endeavouring once 
 more to grasp an immense subject within a few convenient 
 divisions, what are the things that man, both in fact and by 
 right, asks of the world in which he lives ? I answer, to 
 know it, to use it, and to enjoy it, because these correspond 
 to man as a scientific, an industrial, and an artistic being. 
 Nor shall I be prevented from asserting that the same 
 conceptions floated through the mind of the writer or 
 writers of the book of Genesis, in the allegory which re- 
 presents the first man as giving names to the beasts, tending 
 the garden, and living in an earthly paradise. 
 
 First, then, man desires to know the earth on which he 
 lives, and which seems to be ever inviting him to know her 
 better. Nature lies open, as it were, to the embrace of the 
 human mind, not tendering any information about herself, 
 but yielding it to the pursuer after that truth which is 
 nature's word for love. But it is when men contrast the 
 possibility of unbounded knowledge with the reality of 
 their actual information that the desire for another life is 
 generated, and this in more ways than one. Many, for 
 instance, are absolutely, not to say shamefully, ignorant of 
 common scientific* truths, because nature (even when 
 bountiful to them in other respects) has denied them the 
 time, or the faculties, or the education, or the inclination 
 for the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Speaking for my- 
 self, I may confess that the desire to be put to school, and, 
 if necessary, to a sharp school too, to learn something more 
 about the creation of God, stirs within me a longing for 
 
 * The word is here used, as it is occasionally in this volume, where necessary, 
 in its narrower sense of "natural" science. Generally, of course, it is used 
 simply to describe the process by which knowledge is gained from facts by 
 reasoning. 
 
Morality and Immortality. 67 
 
 immortality hardly inferior to the desire for pardon or rest. 
 Those, again, whose lives are devoted to scientific studies 
 can hardly refrain, if they give utterance to their true con- 
 victions, from hoping that they may share in the " eternal " 
 knowledge ; nor will they welcome as a higher morality 
 the teaching that they ought to be content to believe that 
 men will learn after they are dead, and that it is selfish and 
 unnatural to seek for a participation in the harvest of that 
 knowledge, of which in patience and faith they sowed the 
 seeds. But there is yet another and a stronger argument 
 still to be stated, and it is this : Nature proclaims distinctly 
 that there are secrets quite beyond the range of human 
 faculties to discover. The origin of life, the mystery of 
 thought, the essential meaning of " law," are instances that 
 will at once occur to every one. " In ultimate analysis," 
 says Professor Huxley, "everything is incomprehensible, 
 and the whole object of science is simply to reduce the 
 fundamental incomprehensibilities to the smallest possible 
 number." But however we may reduce them, the desire to 
 know the residue will still remain as an intimation of 
 immortality, just as the confession of the existence of the 
 incomprehensible affords a basis for religious faith. The 
 incomprehensible that is God : to know it that is life 
 eternal. Elsewhere he says that " he does not know, and 
 never hopes to know," the connection between the mental 
 process of thought and the physical process of the brain. 
 These words seem to me at once entirely scientific and 
 entirely unscientific, They are the former, because they 
 are evidently meant to take a candid and accurate estimate 
 of the facts of the case ; they are the latter, because any 
 confession of hopeless ignorance upon problems that are 
 
68 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 presented to human intelligence, and come within expe- 
 rience, is an absolute contradiction to the spirit of science. 
 If we read them with the addition of a simple religious 
 phrase, as follows, " I never hope to know IN THIS LIFE," 
 then they still remain true to the facts of the case, while 
 leaving scope to that spirit of inquiry from which all life 
 departs the moment limits are set to its aspirations. No 
 man has any business to confess hopeless ignorance of any- 
 thing whatever. In this saying, therefore, I think I detect 
 science melting into religion, and bearing unconscious 
 witness to man's desire for an immortality in which he 
 shall no longer "know in part, but know even as he is 
 known." Furthermore, the confession of ignorance lies at 
 the root of the poetry of nature, and accounts for its 
 Pantheistic or Polytheistic tendencies. Poetry takes up 
 the tale exactly where science lays it down. When once 
 we have discerned the existence of the Incomprehensible, 
 then a voice is heard in the breathing of winds, the mur- 
 muring of waters, in all the teeming prodigality of life, in 
 all the tremendous powers of destruction, the words of 
 which, when interpreted by a religious mind, seem to recall 
 a promise once given by the Master of nature and humanity 
 Himself, " What I do, thou knowest not now, but thou 
 shalt know hereafter." 
 
 Man's right to use the world is but another expression 
 for that instinct of civilisation which found its first utter- 
 ance in the words of the ancient writer, who represents God 
 as bidding men go forth and replenish the earth, and 
 subdue it. The key-note thus struck of the true harmony 
 between God, man, and the world, was never wholly lost in 
 the Jewish mind, and presents another bond of union be- 
 
Morality and Immortality. 69 
 
 tween it and modern thought. The same spirit is breathed 
 in many of the Psalms, notably in the noble and exalted 
 language of the eighth "Thou hast put all things in sub- 
 jection under his feet" language which, when contrasted with 
 the actual facts of the case, suggested to the writer of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews the hope of a future immortality 
 to be realised in Christ, " crowned with glory and honour." 
 Every word of this seems to me to be a prophecy, in the 
 true sense of the word (that is, a presentiment of an inspired 
 mind), of the modern spirit of industrialism and civilisation. 
 But when men possessed by this idea begin to reflect that 
 under any circumstances many generations must pass 
 before there is an approach to the fulfilment of their hopes, 
 and that there is much reason for thinking that ultimately 
 the world will be exhausted in man's service, its treasures 
 used up, and itself relapsed into chaos; then it seems 
 impossible for them not to desire a further life, in which 
 this contradiction, having fulfilled its work in the great 
 process of evolution, shall have disappeared. 
 
 Lastly, in respect of the enjoyment of nature, I must 
 refer my readers to its legitimate exponents, poets and 
 painters. The argument of Wordsworth's famous ode is 
 capable of being expressed in logical forms, but assuredly 
 would gain no weight from being thus treated. A solid 
 fact, which would be none the more impressive from being 
 dragged forth, lurks under Shelley's lines of one who does 
 
 " Not heed nor see, what things they be 
 But from these create he can, 
 Forms more real than living man, 
 Nurslings of immortality." 
 
 But if I might make the attempt in humble prose, I would 
 
70 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 say that men who view nature with the poet's mind, or 
 through the medium of his descriptions, do in sober fact get 
 themselves involved, as it were, in the consciousness of God 
 and of Immortality. The down- flutter of an autumn leaf, 
 the patient field resting its winter's rest, the curve of a 
 stream, the far-off echo of a solitary wave, a lonely tree 
 these, and a thousand other such things, cause the human 
 soul to bow down before the altar of God, and swell with 
 the thoughts of ages past and to come. The mystery of 
 love, of labour, of purity, of judgment, and of power shines 
 around, and the thought of God drifts into the mind 
 through a thousand channels. And yet men cannot enjoy 
 nature enough or understand her aright ; she is seen to be 
 doing something for them which must be finished before it 
 can be either enjoyed or understood in all its perfection. 
 A poem of Mr Browning's, " Two in the Campagna," illus- 
 trates this idea, and its closing words bring out the inevitable 
 contrast between what man has and what he wants : 
 
 " Only I discern 
 Infinite passion and the pain 
 Of finite hearts that yearn." 
 
 So far, then, science, civilisation, and poetry add their 
 contribution to man's desire for immortality. But it must 
 be remembered that man does not merely live in a world 
 which by its nature and laws suggests the possibility of 
 another life to come, but rather amidst a universe of worlds 
 which suggests the very place and mode of future exist- 
 ence, and makes it impossible for him to confine his 
 aspirations to this " dull spot which men call earth." A 
 modern writer denounces Napoleon's appeal to the stars 
 " Very true, gentlemen, but who made all these ? " as the 
 
Morality and Immortality. 7 1 
 
 most inconclusive reply ever made since the days when 
 Berkeley was refuted with a grin. If by this is meant that 
 the existence of other worlds can afford no demonstra- 
 tion for the existence of a Creator which is not already 
 afforded by the world in which we live, and further, that 
 such demonstration does not amount to evidence that 
 science can deal with, then I agree with him, though the 
 somewhat needless strength of the protest does but engender 
 confusion in a discussion in which everything depends upon 
 the parties in it clearly understanding what each other 
 means to assert. And what is meant by arguments of this 
 nature (however rhetorically they seem to assert more) is, 
 that so long as the stars exist, no merely negative argu- 
 ment will avail to hinder men from wishing to believe in a 
 personal Creator and an eternal life. It is striking, more- 
 over, to observe how all progress in knowledge fortifies and 
 gives assurance to this desire. Science puts forth a falter- 
 ing hand towards the mystery of what may be man's future 
 home, just as faith sends an anxious hope heavenward. 
 We now know something, and hope to discover more 
 about the stars ; not merely that they obey the same laws 
 of motion, but that their composition, so far as it is yet 
 investigated, resembles that of the earth ; and thus a more 
 keen and vivid interest in them is excited which will 
 assuredly modify the scientific mind by creating a link 
 between this world and others, or, in religious words, 
 between the finite and the unknown infinite, between earth 
 and heaven. The same idea is also forced upon us by the 
 limited use and enjoyment which we have of the starry 
 universe, which, though far away from us, and, as it were, 
 unconscious of us, does nevertheless come within the scope 
 
72 Reconciliation of Religion and Science, 
 
 of our mental and moral being, and suggests to us an 
 irrepressible hope for a share in the larger life which it 
 seems at once to predict and to contain. In plain words, 
 no man can see a thing of beauty, majesty, and grandeur, 
 without desiring a further and fuller acquaintance with and 
 enjoyment of it. We shall gain nothing by robbing men 
 of the natural hope that somewhere and somehow in the 
 midst of so vast a universe room may be found, in the 
 order of development by the law of evolution, for him and 
 his. Much, on the other hand, may be gained if the proper 
 office of religion is forced upon those who teach it that is, 
 if science, adopting the natural hopes of men as facts of 
 humanity, insists that religion shall strip immortality of all 
 sentimental, foolish, unworthy, and sensuous accessories, 
 and shall describe it in the brief Puritanic fashion of the 
 Bible as a "new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness." 
 
 There remain two points of considerable importance to 
 be discussed. First, if the desire for immortality be so 
 rooted in the constitution of man as I have been endeavour- 
 ing to show, how comes it that many minds, even of the 
 highest order, and, at present, in increasing numbers, should 
 be without it ? and secondly, can it be shown to have any 
 practical effect upon human morality that could not be 
 obtained in any other way ? The answer to these questions 
 will lead us to consider the abuse and use of the doctrine. 
 
 One difficulty, indeed, which I have been astonished to 
 find seriously felt, may be dismissed at once. It is urged 
 that nations of antiquity did not possess the consciousness 
 of immortality, and that many savages do not possess it 
 now ; but surely it is a reason for believing it to be true, 
 
Morality and Immortality. 73 
 
 that the truth about it has grown up gradually. We might 
 just as reasonably be surprised that the arts of cultivation 
 have not always been practised, or the use of steam under- 
 stood. The knowledge of immortality was not put into 
 each man's soul at the beginning (a most unscientific con- 
 ception), but grew by virtue of the same laws as led men 
 to discover musical harmony, family life, or natural causa- 
 tion : nor does the fact of a special objective revelation in 
 the " fulness of time " in the least interfere with the true 
 bearings of the analogy between the progress of religion 
 and civilisation. And, like all other good things, this 
 knowledge grows, whether in the consciousness of mankind 
 or of individuals, in proportion to their energy, their 
 industry, and their zeal for truth. 
 
 A different reason must, however, be found for the fact 
 that good and great men have renounced the hope of 
 immortality after it has been distinctly put before them. 
 And yet here, too, the answer is not difficult to find. 
 Recurring to the three typical instances mentioned in the 
 last essay Moses, Buddha, and Julius Caesar we discern 
 at once the law underlying the unconsciousness or denial 
 of a life to come. In each case it arose from the abuse of 
 the tremendous spiritual force placed in the hands of 
 religion by man's belief in a future state, for all history 
 goes to show that if religious belief becomes corrupt or 
 false, the truest and noblest souls are thrown into some 
 form of opposition, which again reacts favourably upon 
 religion herself. Thus the thought of judgment to come 
 did not prevent the Egyptians from being sensual, cruel, 
 and superstitious; rather it was employed to give a fictitious 
 sanction to some of the worst tendencies of human nature. 
 
74 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Therefore the Jewish people were called under Moses to 
 be the spiritual worshippers of one righteous God, and to 
 build up a commonwealth owning no King but Jehovah ; 
 nor is it at all wonderful that, having a very practical and 
 pressing work to do in this world, nothing was said to them 
 about the next. The hope of the Messiah was to be to 
 them a substitute for that of immortality, and the temporal 
 fortunes of the kingdom took the place of judgment to 
 come. In a word, the knowledge of immortality had been 
 so debased by the Egyptians that it was withheld from 
 the people through whom God was laying the foundation 
 of a religion that was to make men good. 
 
 The examples of Buddha and of Caesar illustrate from 
 immensely different points of view the same law. Like 
 Moses, Buddha was a reformer, and the preacher of a new 
 religion ; like him, he revolted from the depraved morality 
 of his times, by which the demon of priestcraft was turning 
 to its own purposes man's natural hope of a life to come. 
 His work and teaching, need it be said, fill an important 
 and necessary place in the history of religion, especially 
 when we remember the surrounding tendencies, which 
 centuries afterwards culminated in the gross and immoral 
 conceptions of a Mahometan paradise. It is only by 
 running into extremes that the balance of forces in religion 
 and morals (there is something akin to this in nature also) 
 can be sustained, until some truth emerges which har- 
 monises apparent contradictions. Julius Caesar once more 
 represents the same law at a different stage of its history ; 
 that is, at a time when the greatest minds, cast in a 
 secular, and not in a religious mould, can only show that 
 the religion of the day is worthless to them by revolting 
 
Morality and Immortality. 75 
 
 from it altogether. It was surely for nothing but good 
 at any rate it was necessary by the law of continuous 
 moral development that Paganism should be seen to have 
 lost its hold upon men like him. Here, again, we have the 
 same state of things: a religion founded on emotions, 
 fancies, legendary tales, and perverted for immoral 
 purposes by the priestly spirit which then, as ever, 
 assumed to keep the keys of the kingdom of heaven. 
 And I make bold to say that Christianity, while claiming 
 to reveal immortality as a simple fact, did nevertheless 
 follow the example of the older religious movements in 
 this, that it reduced the doctrine to the fewest and 
 plainest moral conceptions, and called men's attention to 
 the practical duties and work of life. The kingdom of 
 heaven which Christ founded, and the keys of which the 
 Apostles did in sober fact hold, was not that to which 
 later (and, in their time, perhaps needful) notions have 
 reduced it a blissful state to be enjoyed hereafter by the 
 chosen few but was in its essence the establishment of 
 God's rule, order, and righteousness upon earth, to be 
 continued hereafter in other spheres of thought and action. 
 It would be amusing, were it not inexpressibly saddening, 
 to see how the whole stand-point of the Messiah has been 
 unconsciously changed by those who have claimed to 
 represent His teaching throughout Christian times ; but it 
 is a question which does not immediately concern us now. 
 To sum up the whole argument, it is plain that the law 
 of evolution applies to religious as well as to physical 
 development, and accounts for the rise of different types, 
 each of which has arisen out of surrounding circumstances, 
 to meet pressing wants, to do a special work, to preserve 
 
76 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 one side or portion of the truth of humanity. And a 
 Christian clergyman may be pardoned for adding the 
 expression of his own personal belief that in religion, as 
 in nature, there is a " survival of the fittest." 
 
 The application of the law to this present day is, I 
 should hope, clear enough. There are men, in every way 
 entitled to be heard, who disavow all necessity for a belief 
 in immortality as a motive for duty or a part of humanity. 
 And (a far worse sign) it is plain that, whereas many men 
 hold this belief as a doctrine, it has the slightest possible 
 hold upon them, and does not enter into their lives as an 
 animating and consoling faith. Religion invents a hundred 
 reasons to account for this, and to conceal her own fault. 
 These, shallow and unreal as they are, are often no 
 more than a mere statement of the fact in other words, or 
 empty lamentations over the depravity of human nature, 
 which are just as reasonable as the complaint of a doctor 
 that his patients persist in dying. We hear, for instance, 
 that the tendency of science is to make men materialists, 
 and to crush spiritual life ; that it is a revolutionary age in 
 which people like to shock their friends by extravagant 
 assertions ; that disappointment and failure cause men to 
 give in and despair of justice and righteousness to come ; 
 that the intellect is more thought of than the heart, and 
 knowledge held of more account than duty. All which 
 does not touch the root of the matter ; indeed, it is a mere 
 evasion to lay the blame upon human nature, or the cir- 
 cumstances of the times, or the spirit of the age, instead of 
 holding those responsible to whom the care of Christianity 
 is committed that is, Christians themselves. By their own 
 confession, or rather claim, the duty of bringing men to 
 
Morality and Immortality. 7 7 
 
 believe in immortality as revealed in Christ, devolves upon 
 them ; and if, for any want of moral right or intellectual 
 truth, the duty is not fulfilled, the blame must rest upon 
 them, and not upon the world or the age which they have 
 failed to convert. 
 
 I have no desire, however, of entering upon the unwel- 
 come task of drawing up the indictment against the religion 
 of the day ; enough to say that Christian teaching, practices, 
 politics, morality, and society, in respect of such virtues as 
 self-sacrifice, sympathy, union, love of truth, and the like, 
 must bear the responsibility for what goes amiss in respect 
 of the belief in immortality. This truth has precisely the 
 same effects upon those who believe it, as the hope of 
 inheriting a large estate has upon the heir when young. 
 If he be selfish, weak, and indolent, it will do him harm ; 
 if otherwise, the knowledge of future responsibilities will 
 make him doubly watchful and industrious. Therefore, 
 the world at large looks to see what are the moral and 
 intellectual effects of the doctrine of immortality in accord- 
 ance with a certain wise saying, " By their fruits ye shall 
 know them." The point is not that outside observers 
 detect flagrant inconsistencies between men's lives and 
 their beliefs, which, though a common, is, in the case at 
 any rate of " thinkers," a most absurd excuse for infidelity ; 
 but it is that the very belief itself is perceived to have a 
 bad and perverting effect upon the mind and morals of 
 those who hold it ; in plain words, men are beginning to 
 suspect that the hope of immortality is ceasing to make 
 people good. And that this is the case to a large and 
 growing extent, who that knows anything of current 
 opinions upon the secret of happiness, the principles of 
 
78 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 God's judgment, the nature of eternity, can venture to 
 doubt? But then, the same law which teaches that 
 reaction follows upon a corruption of religion, and in turn 
 creates a reformation, explains also within what limits 
 the reformation will work. Evolution means progress as 
 well as destruction, and when certain truths have once 
 clearly emerged, and been satisfactorily established, they, 
 however perverted they may have become, will survive 
 as the basis of the new teaching. Thus, it is extremely 
 significant to observe that when Luther confronted the old 
 evils in the most aggravated form, he was not obliged to 
 cut men off altogether from the consciousness of immor- 
 tality, but only to reform, and in a measure rationalise it. 
 It has been once for all, so we believe, brought to light by 
 the Resurrection, and has become an abiding possession of 
 the human race ; therefore, although man's weakness and 
 folly, or the inevitable corruptions of time, may still drive 
 souls into revolt, yet religion will always be able to reform 
 herself upon this basis, and will never cease, so long as she 
 exists, to believe in immortality as defined, explained, and 
 demonstrated by Jesus Christ. 
 
 We are now to consider the moral use of the belief in im- 
 mortality in answer to the challenge whether it exercises any 
 special effects upon human conduct which can be obtained 
 in no other way. It is at once tempting and easy to answer 
 that the great mass of weak and ignorant men require some 
 such motive as this to enable them to struggle upwards 
 into a higher moral life ; but it must be confessed that this 
 answer would carry no weight with those to whom these 
 arguments are addressed. A belief in immortality, it would 
 be urged, may have its relative and temporary uses until 
 
Morality and Immortality. 79 
 
 the world at large becomes philosophical ; but that does 
 not prove it to be true in the most real sense, and to the 
 highest minds. Still, it must be remembered that this 
 consideration has of all others the most legitimate and 
 powerful influence with minds that are already disposed to 
 embrace religious truth, and all that is required is that 
 Christian advocates should perceive to what uses it may be 
 logically and fairly put. For ourselves, and for our present 
 purpose, we must look elsewhere. And examining the 
 moral tendencies of an age in which the hope of immor- 
 tality is waxing faint, we find that there is a growth of evil 
 exactly in those directions which a more vivid consciousness 
 of a life to come would tend to check ; these are (amongst 
 others) materialism, revolution, and despair, having a rough 
 correspondence to the old division of flesh, world, and 
 spirit. 
 
 It is needless to say that nothing can be attempted more 
 than the briefest mention of the facts that mark the growth 
 of these tendencies. Concerning the first it is enough to 
 indicate what every newspaper confesses and deplores. 
 Over-eating and drinking (the former attributed to the 
 highest intellectual circles) : barbaric splendour in dress 
 and equipment ; the gradual invasion of the professional 
 classes by the spirit of money-making (I know nothing 
 more sad than to see how men . coin their brains into 
 money, and call it success) ; the resistance to diminished 
 hours of work by the employing classes ; sensuousness in 
 art, poetry, and religion, the latter becoming more and 
 more a thing of materialistic mysteries and ceremonial 
 show, all these are some of the admitted signs of the times 
 which wise people view with regret and alarm. Something 
 
8o Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 of this sort surely lies at the root of Professor Huxley's 
 protest that he is not a materialist. Now surely it is 
 as capable of demonstration as anything of this nature can 
 be, that the consciousness of a spirit that is, of continuous 
 personal existence after bodily dissolution is a specific 
 remedy for this disorder. Given a man anxious to raise 
 himself above the dead level of his sensuous surroundings, 
 feeling himself tempted and provoked to mere bodily 
 . enjoyment, despising himself for being what he is, and yet 
 not capable of any great moral and mental effort, and it is 
 clear that no remedy could be devised so powerfully and 
 precisely adapted to give him the requisite help and 
 support as a distinct persuasion that he himself was an 
 immortal being, distinct from and higher than his present 
 body, from which his personality must be one day separ- 
 ated, when the work of evolving a higher type of life was 
 accomplished. People, it is to be feared, will continue to 
 " eat and drink,'' if they are persuaded that " to-morrow 
 they will die." 
 
 The spirit of revolution is not very easy to define in 
 words, but the expression is, perhaps, the best that could 
 be chosen to describe that over-impatient zeal which, by a 
 refinement of selfishness, causes men to do more harm than 
 good in their attempts to make things better. Men find 
 themselves in a world of injustice, inequality, suffering, and 
 disorder, too often thinly cloaked under the name of law, 
 and deriving a decent sanction from religion. And yet, 
 though animated by an almost fanatical love of humanity, 
 and ready to make any sacrifices in its behalf, they become 
 in practice guilty of gross immorality and selfishness ; they 
 give way to violent passions of hatred and revenge ; they 
 
Morality and Immortality. 8 1 
 
 adopt desperate schemes, sometimes foolish and sometimes 
 wicked, of change and revolution ; practically they come to 
 regard the happiness of men as coincident with the reign of 
 their own unchecked supremacy ; and they die readily for 
 an ideal humanity which they love, if only they may curse 
 the actual human beings whom they hate. It is this mix- 
 ture of good and evil in the better spirits of the Commune 
 that divided the heart of feeling men with these mingled 
 emotions of censure and sympathy best expressed in the 
 single word pity ; but thinking men may well set themselves 
 to work to discover the cause why persons so possessed by 
 the desire to do good to mankind should be capable of 
 doing so much harm. And yet, after all, the reason lies 
 upon the surface. Revolution is not the cause of the decay 
 of the belief in immortality, but exactly the reverse is the 
 case. Let us put ourselves in the position of one who 
 thinks that this life is his only one, who is, at any rate, sure 
 that it is the only one he cares for. He sees its blessings 
 and advantages unequally distributed, withheld from him- 
 self, his friends, or his class. Shall he then be cheated 
 out of the one existence he can call his own ? Better that 
 everything should be pulled down now, at once, without 
 delay, in the hope that the good may come to him ; surely 
 some change, radical and immediate, in the laws of govern- 
 ment and property, or in the rulers of the State, will give 
 him the enjoyment he desires. Now, to such a cry of 
 agony, with which it must be a callous soul that can find 
 no point of sympathy, the one only sufficient answer is that 
 this life is not the only one, but a progress towards another 
 and a better one. If science, as expounded by Mr Darwin, 
 
 gives a true account of the origin of man's social instincts, 
 
 F 
 

 82 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 then the desire to share in the welfare of our race is im- 
 bedded in our constitution, and is not to be satisfied by 
 the shadowy hope of a fleeting reputation after death, or 
 by a mere self-approval, or by the thought that men may 
 be better and happier when we are gone. False religion, 
 with its perpetual depreciation of the world and humanity, 
 inculcates a tame acquiescence in hardship and wrong, 
 and so drives men into that negation of religion which 
 cannot acquiesce in anything. True religion, on the 
 contrary, by setting forth a future world to be evolved 
 out of men's moral and spiritual exertions and experiences 
 here, creates that spirit of divine patience, self-sacrifice, 
 and above all, self-control, which can die at least as 
 bravely as the other, and leave with its parting breath, 
 and in its abiding moral influences, a blessing, and not a 
 curse behind it. 
 
 And as the belief in immortality confronts the revolution- 
 ary spirit with the power of patience, so does it breathe 
 hope into the spirit of despair. What turns some natures to 
 madness causes others to retire heart-broken from all con- 
 flicts and labours that have humanity for their object, and 
 produces the feeling that in Pagan times found its last and 
 most mournful expression in self-destruction. Suicide, then 
 too often the last and applauded action of noble minds, has 
 become in Christian days the meanest and most despised 
 resource of the weak and feeble, and this contrast measures 
 the extent of the practical good that religion has done for 
 morality in setting forth a life to come. Napoleon's final 
 reason for not committing suicide after his abdication is a 
 curious illustration of this " Moreover," he said, " I am not 
 altogether destitute of religious sentiment." If humanity, 
 
Morality and Immortality. 83 
 
 and each man that comprises it, is to be developed through 
 many stages, then the work of each stage becomes inexpres- 
 sibly important, and to abandon it is to abandon the future 
 as well. But if all ends here, and failure here means fail- 
 ure absolute and perpetual, then I know not what should 
 prevent a man who has clearly realised what failure is from 
 saying with Brutus at Philippi, " Certainly we must fly, but 
 with our hands, and not with our feet." 
 
 It is necessary to make one more remark, or rather to 
 repeat one already made, before I close. The case for im- 
 mortality may have seemed so strong as to suggest the pos- 
 sibility of dispensing with positive evidence, as though the 
 Resurrection could not make it much more certain than 
 it is. Now this is a state of mind with which it is incum- 
 bent upon science to wage incessant warfare. Wherever 
 the positive evidence is nil, that is, where no instance of 
 the conclusion desired can be adduced, then the more vehe- 
 ment, universal, and what is called " natural," the desire is, 
 the more certain is it that men are the victims of their own 
 delusions, the more likely they are to allow themselves to j 
 form erroneous conceptions of life and work, the more im- ' 
 peratively it becomes the duty of positive thought to warn 
 them against the evil results of believing what they wish to 
 believe. If a thing be true, there must have been some in- 
 stance sufficient to establish it as a fact throughout the 
 course of ages; failing this, immortality sinks to the 
 level of the elixir of life or the philosopher's stone, a thing 
 much desired, but having no existence in the solid ground 
 of fact, and a fruitful source of misleading errors and mis- 
 directed labours. Or at best, it might be admitted to be 
 possibly true, if it were debarred from exercising any vital 
 
84 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 influence upon human conduct. I am, of course, well aware 
 that the same remark in an altered form may be applied to 
 the evidence afforded by Christianity, and the assertion that 
 men believe the Resurrection only because they wish to be- 
 lieve it, is one that may be fairly made and must be honestly 
 met. But then there is no reason why it should not be met ; 
 we are here upon the solid ground of events and evidence ; 
 we can discover for ourselves who are the witnesses, what 
 they say, and whether they are dressing up a tale to satisfy 
 their own desires for a future life. To believe a fact for which 
 there is not a scintilla of positive evidence, because we de- 
 sire it, is one thing ; to believe the evidence for a fact, be- 
 cause we desire it, is another and very different thing. The 
 former must be scientifically wrong ; the latter may or may 
 not be right : and time is the only ultimate arbiter in the 
 contest. 
 
 I have now brought to a close this rapid, and I fear I 
 must add, perfunctory survey of the conditions and circum- 
 stances of human life as they bear upon man's desire for im- 
 mortality. I have taken the best pains I could to draw my 
 conclusions from indubitable facts of human experience and 
 consciousness by a process of reasoning which would satisfy 
 the demands of the logic of science. What I think I have 
 proved is this : that it is in accordance with man's natural in- 
 stincts and with the necessities of morality, that he should 
 desire a life to come ; and that this being so, he will welcome, 
 in spite of its indispensable supernatural element, the evi- 
 dence of historical fact, which purports to prove it, and so 
 attempts to rescue humanity from a maimed, unnatural, and 
 lifeless condition. Much that has been said may appear trite 
 enough, but it has been placed, I hope, under a new light, 
 
Morality and Immortality. 85 
 
 and been read under the influences of those mental concep- 
 tions and that theory of the universe which the doctrine of 
 evolution has made familiar to the minds of men. In such 
 cases details are everything, and to work out the details 
 may afford labour and satisfaction to the science of religion 
 for years to come. But this will be impossible so long as 
 religion and science remain apart in a defiant and disdainful 
 attitude, more anxious to spy out defects than to combine 
 the truths special to each in one harmonious perfection. 
 Any attempt, therefore, to apply the methods of science to 
 the phenomena of religion, and thus to bridge the gulf 
 between the two will be, I feel certain, candidly judged, if 
 seen to have been candidly made. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND IMMORTALITY. 
 
 T T may be desirable to explain at. the outset what is the 
 J- precise object of this essay, inasmuch as the title may 
 be thought to cover much wider ground than I am at all 
 disposed to enter upon. The relations of the Christian 
 belief in the Resurrection of Christ to the doctrine of 
 immortality, have been already pointed out, and do not 
 need to be further discussed. That the Resurrection, if 
 true, amounts to a scientific proof of immortality, that the 
 witnesses for it are honest, and the testimony sufficient to 
 prove any non-miraculous event, are statements which, 
 even if they be challenged, I do not think it necessary to 
 substantiate by additional arguments. Life after all is but 
 short, and may be wasted in endless discussions upon 
 matters perfectly obvious to all who are not blinded by 
 invincible prejudice. The man who says, " I do not believe 
 the history because it is avowedly supernatural," is, need 
 it be remarked, an intellectually honest man, and deserves 
 the most respectful attention. But the man who says, " I 
 have no prepossessions against the supernatural, but I 
 disbelieve the history upon exactly the same grounds as I 
 should any ordinary statement ; " who tries, in short, to 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 87 
 
 reach Hume's conclusion without the resolute common 
 sense that marked his method, must be dismissed as 
 impracticable. There is, it must really be remembered, 
 an enormous a priori probability attached to every straight- 
 forward statement made by, apparently, honest men, which 
 holds good in all cases where it is not balanced by some 
 antecedent improbability, such as the existence of a super- 
 natural element in the narrative. There is, indeed, a 
 conceivable case in which a man might claim to be heard. 
 If there be any one who believes that miracles have occurred 
 more or less frequently, but that the Resurrection of Jesus 
 Christ is not proved to be one of them, then the very 
 absurdity of his position entitles him to be considered an 
 honest thinker. But I deny that the term applies to any 
 (if such there be) who do not, as a matter of fact, believe 
 that miracles have occurred, and yet pretend to reject the 
 Resurrection upon the ground that it is not proved by 
 evidence sufficient to substantiate ordinary historical events. 
 Some little impatience with the men who are constantly 
 throwing up barriers against the progress of reason to right 
 conclusions, or who try to direct her march into bye-ways 
 formed by their own intellectual idiosyncrasies, is surely 
 not altogether unjustifiable. 
 
 But the task I have in hand is a much more serious and, 
 to say the truth, a much more unwelcome one. I have let 
 it be understood with tolerable plainness that, in my judg- 
 ment, modern religious teaching is answerable for the 
 errors, whether of disbelief or of superstition, which have 
 gathered about the doctrine of man's immortality. Modern 
 Christianity does not make the doctrine acceptable or use- 
 ful to men, because it does not possess the mind of Christ, 
 
88 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and does not teach 'the nineteenth century the things which 
 He taught the first. A kind of moral weakness and little- 
 ness is creeping more and more over the minds of religious 
 people ; and religious doctrines, once full of life and power, 
 have become mere dogmatic negations of some error as 
 unreal as themselves. Somehow or other the salt has lost 
 its savour in the judgment of those to whom intellectual 
 truth and practical morality are things of the first import- 
 ance. I say this with the same kind of feelings that might 
 inspire a French soldier to speak of the moral and profes- 
 sional corruptions that plunged the French army into the 
 depths of disaster. My life is bound up with the religion, 
 to the faults of which it is impossible to shut our eyes. I 
 am not insensible to the good works, the doing of which 
 has come down to us as a tradition from the great Evan- 
 gelical or Catholic revivals. I am keenly alive no less to 
 the exalted history of the past than to the equally noble 
 responsibilities and duties of the future ; but in spite of all 
 this, or rather because of it, the truth requires to be pro- 
 claimed aloud, that modern Christianity, as generally 
 received, does not represent the teaching of Christ, and is 
 not fit to be charged with the task of teaching the world a 
 suitable and satisfactory morality. That this is true with 
 respect to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul I now 
 proceed to show. 
 
 The popular conception of the religion taught by Jesus 
 Christ a conception that underlies the doctrines and 
 practices of all Christian churches is to the following 
 effect : He came to reveal the facts of a future life, which, 
 when revealed, are found to consist of an endless life of 
 happiness or misery, our destinies therein being decided 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 89 
 
 by the relation which we hold towards Him. In this 
 conception we must distinguish two erroneous notions : 
 the first, that His teaching mainly concerned the next 
 life ; the second, that it consisted in the proclamation of 
 heaven and hell as the ultimate destiny of mankind. Of 
 these, the first, though not so striking, contains a more 
 subtle power of evil than the second, and will require care- 
 ful examination. 
 
 I must, however, first say a word in answer to the objec- 
 tion that these conceptions have ceased vitally to affect the 
 religion of the world, or can be said fairly to represent it. 
 I am convinced that no greater mistake can be made. It 
 may, indeed, be admitted that the belief in endless torments 
 is ceasing to exercise a real influence upon men's minds, 
 but even this admission must not be made too much of. 
 In the Roman Church, and in many Protestant sects, it 
 is still a predominant feature of religious teaching, while in 
 none has it been formally withdrawn as an article of faith. 
 It is, perhaps, thought that it may die out in silence ; but, 
 apart from the moral cowardice this involves, all history 
 seems to show that, when once a doctrine has laid firm hold 
 of the popular mind, nothing short of active denunciation 
 and determined opposition can destroy it. And then, too, 
 it must be remembered that the system of theology of 
 which it forms a cardinal point, still remains and flourishes. 
 All the power of the priesthood, and all the logical value 
 of the Calvinistic scheme of salvation, are really involved 
 in ultimate ruin with the rejection of this doctrine. And 
 again, though hell as a place of endless torment may be 
 vanishing from men's minds, yet the idea of heaven as a 
 place of endless happiness is almost as potent as ever 
 
go Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 This seems to me the worst feature of all. Whatever may 
 be said of the evils wrought by the fear of endless punish- 
 ment, those wrought by the hope of endless happiness are 
 certainly greater. The former is, at least, due to man's 
 sense of the greatness of sin ; the latter is the result of his 
 selfish desires for enjoyment. The fear of hell has kept 
 many a rough, wayward spirit in something like conformity 
 to decent behaviour, and it has unquestionably been the 
 turning-point in thousands of lives, and the beginning of 
 better things to men beyond the reach of any argument 
 I save fear. But the common idea of heaven can claim no 
 such moral achievements/while it has enfeebled the char- 
 acter of myriads of human beings, and has ministered in 
 \ the name of religion to human selfishness and love of ease. 
 And if this assertion seems a strong one (as in truth I 
 mean it to be), let any one who doubts whether it can be 
 justified bethink himself of the hymns which have become 
 more and more popular in these latter days. Sentimental 
 longings for paradise, excessive, though easily understood 
 amid the moral wretchedness of the middle ages, are now 
 among the most marked features of modern praise. 
 Sensuous descriptions of mere outward details, passionate 
 longings for happiness and idleness, are put into the 
 mouths of grave British citizens, whose one great virtue is 
 to do their duty like men, and who hate idleness as the 
 source of all evil. How far we may believe that the minds 
 of men are really drawn off from the realities of life, or 
 how far they are merely softened and diverted for the 
 moment, depends upon the amount of practical weight we 
 are willing to admit that religion now possesses. All I am 
 concerned to observe is, that there are tendencies which 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 91 
 
 seem to be powerful, and are certainly popular, that are 
 demoralising in the extreme. 
 
 And lastly, as an additional proof that, however details 
 may have been modified or abandoned, the general con- 
 ception of the future life under the forms of heaven and 
 hell is still a living part of the consciousness of man, I 
 would point out how in times of earnest feeling it exercises 
 a subtle influence upon the strongest minds. Two of the 
 most eminent of living Englishmen, desirous of expressing 
 themselves strongly in antagonism to popular notions, have 
 done so by declaring their intention under certain circum- 
 stances of " going to hell." It is odd, on the other hand, 
 to read of a man like Descartes affirming that he was as 
 desirous to go to heaven as any one. The very idea of the 
 two, hell especially, has been engrafted in the minds of 
 men by grotesque poetry and legends. All this is indeed 
 compatible with the truth, which I do not for a moment 
 deny, that there is a gradual loosening of the hold these 
 beliefs once had upon the minds of men. What was once 
 a tremendously-earnest conflict between the preacher and 
 his hearer, in which neither of the two ever doubted that 
 the stakes were the endless destiny of an immortal soul, 
 has now shrunk into a kind of amicable contest, in which 
 the latter easily stops every attempt made by the former 
 to reach his heart by means of the fear of hell. Respect- 
 able men no longer leave church with the same profound 
 conviction that without conversion their damnation is 
 assured, and so that the only practical question is, how 
 long it can safely be postponed. But then this is just the 
 state of things in which doctrines, the errors of which 
 might well be pardoned in consideration of their effectual 
 
92 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 moral power, have become nothing but pernicious. To 
 confine all men's ideas of a future life to the one notion of 
 decisive judgment, was certainly a mistake in the face of 
 Christ's teaching, and of simple elementary moral truths. 
 But to keep the idea of judgment before men's minds and 
 force it upon their thoughts, had at least a useful deterrent 
 effect. But now that this is practically vanishing, there 
 remains but one duty for all who love the truth as Christ 
 taught it, and to whom human morality is unspeakably 
 precious. Once more we are face to face with a popular 
 religion that abuses the tremendous fact of man's immor- 
 tality to unworthy purposes. The second Reformation 
 must treat heaven and hell as the first treated purgatory 
 and indulgences : it must preserve the moral idea while 
 abolishing the literal fact, and must supersede the old 
 forms of thought by new conceptions, gathered from the 
 experience and the discoveries of the ages, but founded 
 upon a closer adherence to the actual teaching of Christ. 
 
 In examining what the main characteristics of that 
 teaching were it is of great importance to observe in what 
 relations it stood to the common religious teaching of His 
 time. To begin then, it is not in the least true to say that 
 Christ was the first to stamp the idea of immortality upon 
 the minds of men under the forms of heaven and hell. He 
 found, indeed, those ideas already existing, and He used 
 them for His own purposes ; but He took from them their 
 future and remote, in order to give them a present and 
 immediate, force and aspect. The Pharisees believed that 
 the souls of good men would be for ever blessed (there is 
 some doubt as to their ideas about the resurrection of the 
 body), and that hell, or gehenna, would be the inevitable 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 93 
 
 portion of the wicked. These beliefs had grown up exactly 
 on the soil that might have been expected to produce 
 them. They were the fruit of that, taken as a whole, dark 
 and melancholy period of Jewish history which intervenes 
 between the return from captivity and the coming of the 
 Messiah. As in the middle ages, so in these, which are the 
 veritable middle ages of Jewish history, men had taken 
 refuge from the intolerable miseries of life in the hope of 
 paradise, and, powerless themselves to avenge the wrongs 
 they endured, had fastened on the idea of endless and 
 horrible torture in the world to come. In proportion as 
 the ancient hopes of Israel became in the bad sense of the 
 word merely secular, so, by a strange but easily explicable 
 contrast, did the minds of men conceive the idea of immor- 
 tality ; for, after all, a Messiah who should at some time 
 restore their temporal greatness, could never satisfy the, 
 yearnings of individual souls for eternity. Something, too 
 must be ascribed to the influences of Paganism, to which 
 they were ever after the Captivity increasingly subject; and 
 thus it came to pass that the fierce wrath of the Jew 
 against the enemies of his people or the apostates from 
 his religion took, as it were, visible form in the purely 
 Pagan idea which turned the valley of Hinnom into the 
 symbol of the place of endless torment, and even placed 
 the gates of hell within its limits. Add to this, that the 
 virtues which were to win heaven were compliance with 
 ceremonial observances invented or maintained by an 
 arrogant priesthood, who grew rich and powerful by 
 trading on the superstitions of mankind, and we have a 
 picture of a religious teaching concerning immortality, on 
 the one hand clear and definite, on the other corrupting 
 
94 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and demoralising, resembling, in short, all the worst epochs 
 of spiritual degradation with which history makes us 
 acquainted. 
 
 How, then, did our Lord treat the religious ideas about 
 immortality with which He was confronted ? Mainly, in 
 two ways. First, He seized upon the current notions, and 
 used the truths which they contained, to enforce a present 
 heaven, an immediate judgment, a hell that was yawning 
 to engulf the whole Jewish people. Secondly, He substi- 
 tuted by act and word the fewest and simplest moral 
 conceptions of a future state, in place of outward, local, 
 and detailed descriptions of it. Or, speaking more gene- 
 rally, He revived the old true Jewish belief in Messiah as 
 the representative of God's government upon earth, and 
 brought heaven down to men as the first and urgent 
 preliminary to raising men one by one to heaven. He 
 planted in the minds of His followers the necessity of a 
 spiritual resurrection now, as being of far more consequence 
 than that of bodily resurrection hereafter, and He recalled 
 them from the contemplation of remote rewards and 
 punishments to the tremendous realities that were already 
 closing in around them. To make good this assertion it is, 
 however, necessary to examine, with all needful brevity, 
 the teaching of Christ concerning the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 Hell, and Judgment, and then to note how few, how 
 guarded, and how practical were His words upon the 
 subject of the life to come. 
 
 There are statements, which, though really new, are 
 nevertheless confounded with truths that people have al- 
 ways held, or at any rate believe that they have always held. 
 Such, for instance, is the statement that by the Kingdom of 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 95 
 
 Heaven Christ meant almost, if not quite, exclusively the 
 establishment of God's rule and order upon earth. Upon 
 hearing this, people immediately bethink themselves that 
 this is merely another way of saying that the Kingdom of 
 Heaven means the Christian Church. But the error lies not 
 so much in denying any true interpretation of these words, 
 as in substituting a secondary and comparatively unimport- 
 ant interpretation for the primary and true one. Practi- 
 cally, the thought of heaven as part of the future life has 
 swallowed up the thought of heaven as the rule of God upon 
 earth. Popular theology is like a bad picture, in which all 
 the foreground is blurred and confused, while the moun- 
 tains in the background stand out in hard and unnatural 
 distinctness. People think of Christ first as revealing a 
 future heaven, and then, quite in a secondary sense, as 
 establishing a community that should lead men into it. 
 But the fact is that the foundation of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven upon earth, for its own sake, and for the present 
 good of man independently of his future destiny, was the 
 one great object of all His teaching ; and the more we exa- 
 mine that teaching for ourselves, the more clearly we shall 
 appreciate the truth of this assertion, and discern how en- 
 tirely His soul was wrapped up in the work of the immediate 
 present. As painted by the Master's hand, the picture is 
 altogether clear and well defined in the foreground, while 
 behind it the landscape fades away with a dim suggestive- 
 ness, infinitely more subtle and impressive than the coarse, 
 naturalistic details with which later human teaching has 
 obscured the outlines faintly drawn by the divine hand, 
 and just relieved from darkness by a few far-glancing rays 
 darted forth from the divine inspiration. 
 
96 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 The above remarks are necessary, if we would avoid the 
 appearance of making a series of observations concerning 
 Christ's teaching so obviously true, not to say commonplace, 
 that every one will be inclined to believe he has always 
 known them. The history opens with the announcement 
 by John the Baptist, repeated by Christ, and put into the 
 mouth of His messengers, that the Kingdom of Heaven 
 was at hand that it was shortly to be set up amongst 
 them. The Sermon on the Mount, the first recorded instance 
 of His public teaching, begins by declaring that the poor 
 in spirit and in fact were the persons to whom it was spe- 
 cially preached ; and a great reward in heaven, that is, in 
 the new kingdom, was promised to those who were perse- 
 cuted for His sake. How many thousands of sermons have 
 been preached to account for the self-invented difficulty 
 that God meant endless happiness to be the portion of the 
 poor rather than of the rich! How many delusive hopes 
 have been fostered in the minds of poor people by the 
 thought that after a life of suffering here they would be re- 
 warded by a life of enjoyment hereafter ! The key-note, 
 however, thus emphatically struck in the first teaching, was 
 never forsaken or altered. " The Kingdom of Heaven is 
 among you;" "Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God;" 
 " There be some of them that stand here that shall not 
 taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God come with 
 power " words which have exhausted the ingenuity of so- 
 phistry to explain them away. And, again, we hear of 
 Capernaum exalted into heaven, but to be cast down into 
 hell at the speedy approach of that day of judgment in 
 which it should be more tolerable for the cities of heathen- 
 dom than of Israel. Or, once more, in one single passage, 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 9 7 
 
 the Jewish gehenna is distinctly named ,and the disciples are 
 told that anything in the world, however dear, which causes 
 them to stumble at the Kingdom of Heaven then preached, 
 or, still worse, which causes them to make others stumble, 
 must be resolutely cut away, lest they come to the doom 
 described in prophetical language as the place of the valley 
 of Hinnom, where the worm never ceases to fatten on the 
 dead bodies from within, or the fire to consume them 
 from without. These, then, are the notes of time expressly 
 laid down by the Teacher himself. But the doctrine of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven is expressly and specifically contained 
 in a series of parables, many of which begin with the well- 
 known words, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like." Read in 
 the light of modern theology, these all have reference to the 
 last day and to a future life; read in the light shed upon them 
 by the above-mentioned marks of time, they speak of im- 
 mediate judgment and of a present life, and can only be 
 applied to the former by indirect and very often incor- 
 rect references. 
 
 The first group of parables, in St Matt, xiii., which 
 explains the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, is plainly 
 an account of the laws which govern the foundation and 
 the progress of the Church on earth. In two of them, 
 however, the notion of judgment is added; and I call 
 attention to the parable of the Tares as containing the 
 germ of all future misunderstanding of Christ's teaching. 
 The field, He says, is the world (#007-109). Now, when, 
 in the next verse, the unsuspecting English reader finds 
 it said that the harvest is the "end of the world/' and 
 in the verse after this, reference is made to the "end of this 
 world/' he little thinks that the first word translated " world" 
 
98 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 is quite a different word from that in the two latter instan- 
 ces, though if he considered the matter for a moment even 
 he might wonder how the harvest can possibly be the end of 
 the field and not rather the end of the crop upon it. That this 
 last is our Lord's meaning, as in truth it is the only one com- 
 patible with common sense, is abundantly clear from the word 
 used, alwv, which means age or dispensation, and answers, 
 therefore, to the crop which was then growing upon the field 
 of the world. The good seed is the children of Christ's 
 Kingdom ; the bad seed is perverted Judaism ; the harvest 
 is its coming complete downfall, to which surely may be 
 added a glance at that break-up of all civil, social, and poli- 
 tical order, when the genius of Paganism passed away at 
 the destruction of the Roman Empire of the West. It is 
 not necessary, once more let me remark, to deny that in a 
 derived and mediate sense the moral truths expressed in 
 the parable may be applied to all times and places, though 
 even then a -strict interpretation would require us to limit 
 the application to the existing world. But what it is of the 
 greatest importance to understand, is that the actual vision 
 that was before the mind of Christ was the destruction of 
 Judaism, and perhaps of Paganism, together with the foun- 
 dation of the Church ; and that, were there never to be 
 another judgment upon earth, the parable would still be 
 adequately fulfilled. And that this was the fulfilment 
 of which He was thinking, we shall find abundant proof 
 if we turn to a similar passage in the thirteenth chapter 
 of St Luke, in which the establishment of the Kingdom 
 of God is predicted. In this the Gentiles are represented 
 as coming in from all quarters, while the Jews are thrust 
 out with weeping and gnashing of teeth, the whole at 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 99 
 
 once suggesting and culminating in the lamentation over 
 Jerusalem, " their house which is left unto them desolate." 
 And all this prediction of coming temporal judgment 
 seems to be, if not certainly in the words of Christ, at least 
 in the mind of the Evangelist, connected with His answer 
 to the question, " Lord, are there few that shall be saved ? " 
 Before we pass on to consider the final prophecy in which 
 the idea thus started is worked out in some of the grandest 
 utterances that ever fell even from the lips of Him who 
 spake as never man spake, I must call attention to cne 
 parable upon the interpretation of which I am willing to 
 stake the whole of my argument. It is the parable of the 
 Labourers in the vineyard (2Oth chapter of St Matthew), 
 one of the simplest and most practical of stories. If ever there 
 was a parable easy to interpret, this ought to be the one. It 
 stands between the lesson, twice declared, which the Lord 
 meant to be derived from it " The first shall be last, and 
 the last first." The circumstances which gave rise to it 
 namely, the sorrowful going away of the rich young ruler, and 
 Peter's question, " What shall we have therefore ? " are 
 clearly stated. Yet, in spite of all this, misled by false con- 
 ceptions of the Kingdom of Heaven, the commentators find 
 it almost unintelligible. Assuming that the day's wage is 
 endless happiness or heavenly reward in a life to come, they 
 are met by the insuperable difficulty as to how murmurers 
 can enjoy it or be fit for it, still less how the first can be last 
 and the last first. And thus they are driven to all kinds of 
 shifts, such as the unphilosophical notion of degrees of happi- 
 ness. Now, all that is required is to regard our Lord as giv- 
 ing a plain, moral description of what would take place at the 
 establishment of His Kingdom upon earth. The departure 
 
ioo Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 of the ruler suggests the reflection that it is hard for a rich 
 man to enter into that Kingdom. This, again, suggests 
 Peter's natural but dangerous question, to which the answer 
 is given that in the Regeneration, in the coming new birth 
 of humanity, they should share the labours and the glory 
 of their Master, as in truth they have done, and that in 
 place of those which they gave up they should have new 
 spiritual relationships and possessions upon earth, together 
 (elsewhere it is added, as though to admit no possible 
 mistake) with persecutions. How abundantly this pro- 
 mise was fulfilled we may conclude from the life of St 
 Paul, who had children and brethren in every city, and to 
 whom the whole world was, as it were, a home. But then 
 He goes on to warn them not to let the mere desire for a 
 reward debase their spiritual character, for in that case the 
 men who, like the twelve, had been called first, might become 
 last in moral goodness. And he illustrated this tendency 
 by a simple story of every-day life containing just the one 
 moral that religion dislikes to face, namely, that a life of 
 outward service and real Christian work may, if not watched, 
 end in an envious, selfish, murmuring disposition, concerning 
 which he says nothing and implies nothing as to its ultimate 
 destination ; but merely points out that it has missed the 
 real blessedness of work, and has lost for all moral purposes 
 its true reward, while strenuously seeking to obtain it. 
 We now come to the group of prophecies and parables 
 which form the close of His teaching. And here we notice 
 an important note of time occurring at a critical moment 
 of the history. On His way to Jerusalem for the last time 
 He delivered the parable of the Pounds, to counteract a 
 delusion on the part of His disciples that the Kingdom of 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 101 
 
 God should immediately appear. Up to this moment, then, 
 this had been the natural result of His teaching and of the 
 wide success with which it had been attended. Now, there- 
 fore, it becomes'necessary to make it clear to them that this 
 coming is to be a work of time and labour, and that they 
 are to be employed in it during His absence according to 
 the measure of their several capacities. The mental view 
 is gradually enlarging, the horizon is receding farther into 
 the distance, while yet the main interest is attached to the 
 immediate present. Then He enters Jerusalem, and begins 
 that last contest with the Pharisees which ended in His 
 death. After a parable or two in which He puts before 
 them the Kingdom of Heaven for their immediate reception, 
 and warns them of the consequences of refusal, He delivers 
 that tremendous forecast of coming doom which must 
 either be a shameless forgery or else stamps Him as one who 
 knew more than it is given to mere men to know. And 
 just at this point it is that commentators, old and new, 
 English and German, have launched out into their wildest 
 excesses of interpretation. By some it has been asserted 
 that the account in St Luke refers to the destruction of 
 Jerusalem, that in St Matthew to the end of the world, in 
 utter forgetfulness that this is simply to play into the hands 
 of the mythic school of interpreters.* By almost all (for 
 what I myself know, it may be by all without exception) it 
 is understood that the chief thing which occupied His mind 
 was the destruction of the world, the fall of Jerusalem being 
 a comparatively unimportant type of the great and distant 
 
 * In using the word " commentators," it did not occur to me that it might be 
 taken to include Mr Maurice. Need it be said that it is to him I owe the true 
 doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven? 
 
IO2 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 reality. Now I say that this is absolutely false. The true 
 canons of interpretation are these : first, that every word 
 must be applied first and fully (due allowance being made 
 for metaphorical language mostly gathered from the pro- 
 phets) to the fate -which the Jews were then bringing upon 
 themselves, and, I also think, to the general break-up of 
 the foundations of society by the destruction of the old 
 "world," which He apprehended as inevitable; second, 
 that any reference to future judgments can only be under- 
 stood as being based upon general moral principles herein 
 laid down, and is quite independent of outward details or 
 of special times, such as a supposed end of the world. The 
 prophecy is, in short, a description of all judgment in- 
 directly, but directly only of the judgment of Jerusalem. 
 Nothing can be more precise than the notes of time by 
 which He appears to have endeavoured to guard their 
 minds from exactly those errors into which men have since 
 fallen. He begins with the declaration that not one stone 
 of the Temple shall be left upon another. He speaks of 
 the persecutions and false rumours that should assail the 
 disciples. He bids them flee from Jerusalem, compassed 
 about with armies. He tells them that they shall see the 
 Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven, and gathering 
 in His elect from the four quarters ; and lest this meta- 
 phorical language, descriptive of the growth of the Church, 
 should be misunderstood, He adds that then they shall 
 know that it is near, even at the doors. Then He emphati- 
 cally announces that this generation shall not pass before 
 ALL these things be fulfilled : and if any man wishes to see 
 what human sophistry, stimulated by a false tradition, can 
 accomplish, let him read the attempts that have been made 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 103 
 
 to explain away these words. It is an instructive but 
 mournful spectacle. 
 
 After this, follow three prophetic parables, the Ten Vir- 
 gins, the Talents, and the Sheep and the Goats, all turning 
 upon the same point, but with one notable exception. The 
 first describes his rejection or acceptance by the Jews as in- 
 dividuals. The second explains His relations to His own ser- 
 vants, that is, to all Christians, and prescribes their duties till 
 His coming; though here, again, that. coming once more 
 seems to recede into the distance, nor need we deny a possibly 
 direct reference to a future world, the more so as a doctrine 
 of rewards is laid down quite at variance with that of mere 
 endless happiness, and suggestive of work, responsibility, 
 and development. But in the third, the Master does, as it 
 seems to me, in His closing words, practically abandon 
 His standpoint in the present, and contemplate Himself as 
 related to all mankind. I say this, not because the details 
 of the parable would not equally well fall in with the other 
 interpretation, but because the test by which He will try 
 men at the eternal judgment is declared emphatically, not 
 to be that of personal relationship to Himself, but of 
 simple human kindness on the part of those who never 
 heard His name. Humanity, itself, may take heart and 
 rejoice, the strongest opponents of Christianity may cease 
 to strive, when they remember that in His final words, 
 when He was claiming to be the judge of mankind, He 
 asserted that righteousness would be recognised as the 
 work of human nature in kindness, love, and help, and that 
 every man v/ho lived and laboured for his fellow-men would 
 be found to have lived and laboured for Christ. 
 
 It was thus, then, that Christ called men's attention 
 
1 04 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 away from dreams of the future life to the present realities 
 of their social, moral, and political condition ; but it must 
 be pointed out that, in assigning to these the first place in 
 His teaching, we are not limiting the scope of the parables, 
 but very much enlarging it. They become morally true of 
 all human life, delineations of man in all his many capaci- 
 ties and relationships, all being ultimately referred to God. 
 Heaven and hell, pardon and judgment, become very 
 present and pressing realities, and religion is seen in the 
 teaching of Christ to be throwing all her weight into the 
 task of giving divine sanctions to the duties of the present 
 world. The same applies to His teaching about the Resur- 
 rection, and, as linked with it, judgment to come. The 
 Pharisees believed in some sort of physical resurrection and 
 future judgment. Our Lord, in the very beautiful discourse 
 contained in St John,. ch.V., proclaimed that, as the Father 
 raised the dead and quickened them, so the Son quickens 
 whom He will, and that to Him all judgment has been 
 committed. This He further explained by saying that all 
 who believed in Him had already everlasting life ; and to 
 show beyond all doubt that He was thinking of the present 
 life, He added, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the 
 dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that 
 hear shall live." And as though this were not enough, He 
 used, a little further on, words which seem naturally to 
 refer to the last final Resurrection as believed in by the 
 Pharisees, to describe the present spiritual Resurrection and 
 rapidly approaching judgment "The time is coming in 
 which they that are in the graves shall hear His voice and 
 shall come forth : they that have done good unto the Resurrec- 
 tion of life, and they that have done evil unto the Resurrection 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 1 05 
 
 of condemnation." Once more, when Martha adopts the 
 current Jewish notion concerning her brother, "I know 
 that he shall rise again in the Resurrection at the last 
 day," she receives the rebuking answer intended to show 
 that the raising of Lazarus was typical of the immediate 
 raising of humanity, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." 
 So that we have here the fourth Gospel from its very 
 different point of view bearing witness to the truth I am 
 upholding, and we see from it as from the others that the 
 Lord declared His desire to raise Judaism as it were from 
 the dead, and foretold certain condemnation to all who 
 would not hear His voice. And it is words like these that 
 give to the actual Resurrection of Christ that moral power 
 which St Paul afterwards saw so clearly and proclaimed so 
 earnestly. To him it was the Resurrection of humanity, 
 and of every human being that believed in Christ, from sin 
 and darkness. The teaching of the apostles, indeed, bears 
 evident traces of the difficulty they experienced in seeing 
 clearly what was meant by Christ's coming in judgment, 
 while their opinions seemed to have varied just as might 
 be expected in the case of men who were living in the 
 midst of the perplexities and agitations which that judg- 
 ment caused, and whose very position prevented them from 
 separating the outward and temporary circumstances from 
 the abiding moral principles contained in His prophecy. 
 However this may be, the fact, that the Resurrection was 
 bound up first and chiefly with the rise of humanity from 
 its past degradation, exercises a most important influence 
 upon the value of the evidence by which the account of it 
 is supported. For if it could be shown that the belief in 
 the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was connected in the 
 
io6 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 minds of the earliest Christian teachers with old Jewish 
 opinions, or that it grew up in their minds almost uncon- 
 sciously from the natural desire to give force and certainty 
 to the longing for immortality, then the value of the 
 evidence would be very seriously impaired. But when we 
 see that it was attached to an entirely different set of moral 
 conceptions, that it was welcomed rather as calling men to a 
 life of practical goodness here, than as holding out to them 
 the certainty of a life of endless happiness hereafter, we are 
 obliged to admit that, except for the inevitable difficulty of 
 believing in any thing supernatural, the history has everything 
 to recommend it to favourable reception by candid minds. 
 It may, however, be urged that we run some danger 
 of cutting off the teaching and life of Christ from all 
 reference to immortality whatsoever; but to this it may 
 again be answered that, to adjust things into their proper 
 places, it is often necessary to wrench them vigorously in 
 the direction directly opposite to that in which they have 
 been distorted. And I do not only maintain that the real 
 application of the parables is to future life in this world, its 
 judgments, rewards, and penalties, but I am also convinced 
 that the sayings, in which the next world is expressly 
 mentioned, bear witness, when examined, to Christ's desire 
 not to fix men's attention upon the life to come to the 
 prejudice of that which now is. Three of those exceptions, 
 that prove the rule, occur to me now ; the first, His own 
 voluntary teaching ; the last two, forced upon Him by 
 circumstances. In the parable of Dives and Lazarus He 
 uses common Jewish expressions to point out the danger 
 of wealth and luxury, but He does so in such a manner as 
 to make any pressing of the details in their literal mean- 
 
Christianity and Immortality. i o 7 
 
 ing a mere absurdity. The wildest imagination could 
 hardly conceive this parable as meant to be a serious 
 description of the actual future world. His answer to the 
 Sadducees about the Resurrection was forced upon Him, 
 and He contents Himself simply with clearing the doctrine 
 from material and unworthy notions, asserting it as a fact, 
 and proving the assertion from the words of God to Moses. 
 The third instance is His promise to the dying thief, "To- 
 day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise," where once more 
 the necessity of consoling the penitent man obliges Him to 
 give a promise of the world to come in words which the 
 man himself and they that stood by could understand. 
 Sad, indeed, is it to think what a superstructure of barren 
 speculation has been raised by the prying spirit of human 
 dogmatism upon these simple words, and how the language 
 of metaphor, used simply for the purpose of being intel- 
 ligible to those whom it chiefly concerned, has been per- 
 verted into a literal statement of actual fact. But though 
 I am sure that sayings of this kind are not to be taken for 
 more than as affording a general indication of the existence 
 of a life to come, yet it still remains to be pointed out that 
 Christ did actually meet the cravings of the human soul 
 for immortality. And this He did, not by making it the 
 one main object of all His teaching, but by a single preg- 
 nant saying and by a single suggestive act. 
 
 Now let us ask at what time should we expect that 
 Christ presented the idea of immortality plainly and de- 
 cisively to the minds of His disciples. Any knowledge, 
 however slight, of human nature and its necessities would 
 teach us that the appropriate and, so to speak, moral 
 occasion for this would be when the agony of approaching 
 
io8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 separation made it necessary to find consolation both for 
 Himself and them, and when a new spirit was breathed 
 into the men upon whose love and faithfulness depended 
 the future destinies of the Kingdom of Heaven. At the 
 beginning, therefore, of His final discourse to the disciples 
 we find a plain and direct reference to what we call Heaven, 
 but which He carefully described under those simple 
 personal and domestic terms which have made this saying 
 especially dear to Christian minds:* "In My Father's house 
 are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you : 
 I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare 
 a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto 
 Myself, that where I am there ye may be also." Compare 
 this sentence, in which the whole of Christ's direct teach- 
 ing about immortality is contained, with the vast super- 
 structure of the so-called Christian doctrine of the future 
 state, and the striking contrast between the two will 
 become apparent. How few, and yet how pregnant with 
 all the thoughts that human nature requires for support 
 and consolation, are the words of the Master ! How many 
 and how fatal to human morality are the words of those 
 who speak in His name ! The meaning and moral force, 
 indeed, of what He taught in this saying it is not necessary 
 to point out here ; it is sufficient to call attention to it as 
 Christ's authentic description of the life to come. It em- 
 braces all the beautiful or morally-useful associations which 
 are attached to a house that shelters us, to the home where 
 our Father dwells, to resting-places, to variety of interests 
 
 * Even this passage has been thought to apply first to the Kingdom of God 
 upon earth. But the words chosen are certainly such as to suggest strongly 
 the idea of its future continuance in another world. 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 109 
 
 ("many"), to suitability of occupations ("prepared places"), 
 to eternal communion with Christ himself. But more 
 than this, though straitly questioned, He will not reveal: 
 once more He turns their thoughts to the heavenly life 
 upon earth, bidding them follow Him as the " Way," and 
 to know the God whose house they were to inhabit here- 
 after by knowing His Son now and here. Instead of 
 dreams of the imagination, curious questionings of the 
 intellect, selfish desires of the heart, dogmatic utterances 
 of miscalled authority, He confined His teaching concern- 
 ing the future world to that which can be safely gathered 
 from the moral analogies of the present. And if Christians 
 had taught immortality as Christ taught it, they would not 
 have been compelled to witness the revolt of man's heart 
 or mind from the assurance of the life to come. 
 
 Still it may be said that a single sentence, standing 
 almost alone, upon so vast a subject, affords but little 
 ground whereon, to build the fabric of man's belief in 
 immortality, so far as it is revealed in the teaching of 
 Christ. But a moral power, greater than can be conveyed 
 in words, is contained in the act of His to which I have 
 alluded. I mean, of course, the Ascension ; for it is this 
 that gives, as it were, external shape to what He said, and 
 certainty to what He promised. But, to bring this out 
 more clearly, we must trace the connection between re- 
 ligion and science in working out the moral development 
 of man. 
 
 When the Jewish poets looked up into the heavens they 
 found themselves alone with God, the universe, and their 
 own souls. Not only would they abstain from worshipping 
 the heavens, but they would, as it were, look them in the 
 
1 10 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 face and consider them. And it seemed to them that they 
 were the home of God, who had set His glory above them. 
 Still, however, in the thought of the Jews, as of the Gentiles, 
 in religion as in philosophy, the earth was the centre of the 
 universe, and for its sake the heavens existed : it was that 
 for which God had framed and designed everything else. 
 So that the heavens, while testifying of God to the Jew, 
 did not testify of immortality. He saw only that all men 
 perish and come to an end. But with the change of our 
 belief as to the true relations of heaven and earth, the idea 
 of immortality first becomes practically and morally pos- 
 sible. And this change we owe, first to the Ascension of 
 Christ, to the simple fact that He had been seen to go up 
 from earth heavenwards, which thus became the goal of 
 man's hopes, the real centre of God's universe. But then 
 man's ignorance of the real facts as to the physical relations 
 between the earth and the heavens, prevented him for 
 centuries from entering into the meaning of Christ's action, 
 and gave occasion for the revival, or rather the continuance, 
 of the old Pagan conceptions of heaven and hell. Coper- 
 nicus was the best commentator on the Ascension, and the 
 Ascension was a prophetic intimation of his discovery. A 
 true religious idea was given as the necessary step to a true 
 scientific one ; but the scientific idea, in turn, exploded all 
 the errors which religion had built upon the original truth, 
 that the earth is not the centre of the universe. In short, 
 the ultimate end of this discovery is to banish the hope of 
 selfish happiness, and substitute the idea of infinite variety, 
 occupation, and progress, which the heavens, read in the 
 light of modern science, now preach to us. They convey 
 the same kind of impression as the earth itself must have 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 1 1 1 
 
 conveyed to the minds of those who believed it to be 
 boundless space ; and we look up to the sky with much 
 the same sort of feelings as men gazed across the Atlantic 
 before Columbus crossed it. As the earth grows less the 
 heavens grow more and more. Our scientific discoveries 
 do not measure things as they are there ; our wisdom 
 about man suggests much, but explains nothing as to the 
 inhabitants of the worlds above. 
 
 Now it is just at the time when the " earthly " sciences 
 are making it difficult to conceive the idea of a spirit, 
 separated from its natural bodily organisation, that the 
 science of the heavens adds her emphatic testimony to the 
 teaching of Christ, and to His action, more powerful than 
 words, in ascending heavenwards. There is a place, or 
 rather there are places, where men may live after death 
 so says science. There is a Man who has gone there so 
 says religion. The law of progress will not consent to be 
 bound down within earthly limits ; when it has accom- 
 plished everything upon earth it sighs for new worlds to 
 conquer. So that the truest conception of immortality is 
 precisely that with which we are becoming more and more 
 familiar; that which on the physical side we may call 
 evolution, on the moral side, education. To take the 
 commonest instance, the soul of a thoughtful man, looking 
 into futurity, resembles the soul of a thoughtful child just 
 standing on the verge of this world's life. There are dreams 
 of work, of honours, of friendships, and of success. Both 
 are leaving school and beginning the larger life into which 
 they will carry the character already formed, the prepara- 
 tion already made. The man is as sure that there is a 
 world of work and of life beyond this as the boy who hears 
 
1 1 2 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and sees traces of the various callings and occupations of 
 the world in which grown men act and move. Here, after 
 the discipline of life is over, will be his future abiding and 
 working place. Here, in one of the unnumbered worlds of 
 God, may he carry onwards and upwards the life of an 
 immortal being. 
 
 From the two propositions which I have thus endeavoured 
 to substantiate first, that Christ's direct teaching concerned 
 almost exclusively the present world ; second, that His 
 teaching about the world to come represents it simply as 
 the development of our moral qualities and spiritual life 
 under higher conditions there follow two conclusions, to 
 which I invite the serious attention of all who desire to see 
 truths harmonised with each other instead of being set in 
 endless contradiction. The first is, that the objections 
 urged by modern thought against Christian morality do 
 not apply to the teaching of Christ himself; the second is, 
 that this teaching, so far from being opposed to the spirit 
 of modern science, is in exact accordance with it. We are 
 familiar with the objections to which I refer. Religious 
 men, it is said, are diverted from the duties of this world, 
 from realising the sacredness of humanity, from seeing the 
 necessity of immediate reforms and improvements, from 
 sympathy with national and social life, owing to the too- 
 present and absorbing contemplation of the life to come. 
 No one, I suppose, really believes that this is practically 
 the case to any considerable extent, at any rate at the pre- 
 sent time; but it is contended that this escape is due 
 simply to the fact that human nature is strong enough to 
 triumph in the long run over the perversions of religious 
 truth. But the objection, as an objection against Chris- 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 1 1 3 
 
 tianity, vanishes, if once it can be shown that the mind of 
 Christ was full of the present evils and pressing wants that 
 afflicted His countrymen ; that His moral teaching was 
 meant above all things to throw light upon human life and 
 human nature under their present conditions ; that to do 
 our duty here, to look for judgment now, to set up 
 righteousness and justice in the world we live in, to be 
 citizens, patriots, masters, and servants in that larger and 
 deeper sense which He saw and proclaimed, is the true 
 Kingdom of Heaven which He died to establish. All this 
 shines forth in the parables the moment they are removed 
 from the false, unnatural glare which the almost exclusive 
 notion of a Heaven to come has cast upon them. But I 
 confess that even this reconciliation, important as it is, does 
 not satisfy my ambition. I believe that the truth I am 
 here insisting upon is the missing link needed to bind 
 together the morality of Paganism and Christianity. 
 Whether Christian morality is or is not perfect, whether 
 there is in it, not only something wanting, but even a 
 certain one-sided, perverting influence, has been, and still 
 is, the subject of a long and unsatisfactory controversy. 
 On the one hand it is seen that there are certain moral 
 truths which Christianity does not teach, and certain 
 factors in human nature of which it seems to take no 
 account ; on the other hand, to lay this at the door of 
 Jesus Christ, or even of St Paul, appears manifestly un- 
 reasonable. The object of the life of Christ was to add 
 to humanity those last and highest ideas which complete 
 man's conceptions of duty and of character, not to go over 
 
 ground already traversed. In a single word, His object 
 
 H 
 
.114 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and mission were purely religious. He is the Head of 
 humanity, but not the whole of it ; He does not supersede 
 what is true in other teachers, but gives motive power and 
 divine perfection to what they have already taught. There 
 is nothing exclusive about Him, when we understand His 
 mission aright, any more than there is about the call of the 
 Jewish nation, when once we have realised that they were 
 not the only nation pleasing to God, or exclusively occupied 
 in accomplishing His will. The objection, however, that 
 Christ's teaching is not only negative on some points 
 (which in truth it could hardly fail to be, if it were to be 
 human at all), but that.it is absolutely one-sided, requires 
 a different answer, and cannot be said to be unreasonable 
 when we remember the absolutely pernicious effects which 
 have, according to the testimony of history, flowed from 
 that which has authoritatively claimed to represent it. 
 The problem is this : There are certain faulty results 
 arising from Christian morality, and yet it is not fair to 
 charge them upon Christ's teaching unless it contained 
 something positively untrue, or upon His character unless 
 He plainly did something wrong. If so, then, where do 
 they come from ? Now the answer is, that perversions 
 creep into the moral teaching of any man when the end 
 which he himself has in view is altered, and the facts to 
 which his teaching was adapted are wrongly stated. View, 
 for instance, the character and teaching of Christ through 
 the atmosphere created by the ever-present consciousness 
 of a future endless heaven to be obtained, and a future 
 endless hell to be avoided^ and then every evil effect which 
 can, with any truth, be traced to Christiarj influences is 
 
 '-Z^-* v*.r, ><//> f. / <l<i4*vs{s i~^yt^+ S**f 4\*+j &i&^&+. 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 115 
 
 accounted for at once. Softness, unreality, carelessness of 
 intellectual truth, obstructiveness to the march of new 
 ideas, unconscious selfishness, neglect of worldly virtues 
 (so called), sectarianism in its best sense (that is, anxiety 
 by any means for the salvation of souls in the only way 
 believed to be true), can all be traced, not to Christ, but to 
 Christianity, to the framework in which His teaching has 
 been set. His morality is distorted when it is made to fit 
 a different conception of life from what He intended. I do 
 not venture to hope that the difficulty is altogether solved 
 by this consideration, though I certainly think that the 
 right clue to the solution has been suggested. Let us get 
 rid of the notion that the future world was the chief and 
 direct object of what He taught, and then His teaching 
 will stand out as the crown and completion of all practical 
 present morality, and will be seen to comprehend all other 
 teaching by adding just the element of divine self-sacrifice 
 which was required to give power, light, and life. 
 
 And secondly, I affirm that the teaching of Christ, rightly 
 interpreted, is in harmony with the predominant idea 
 which science is engaged in attaching to morality at this 
 present time. The Kingdom of Heaven is civilisation viewed 
 religiously, owning God as its Creator and Judge, and look- 
 ing for still nobler developments in other spheres. Men's 
 moral capacities fit them for their place in the great here- 
 after, and judgment consists in assigning to every man the 
 place for which he is fit, just as the true reward of a child 
 at school is not the prizes which he gains but the place in 
 the world for which he has prepared himself. And if this 
 be so, I challenge any reasonable man to deny that this 
 
1 1 6 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 view of Christian immortality is conducive to human 
 morality in this present life. It finds man out exactly as 
 science wishes him to be found out, that is, as a being 
 growing upwards to higher modes of life which are con- 
 ditioned by his present conduct. It brings before him a 
 responsibility to his fellows, which death, so far from 
 terminating, only intensifies. It makes judgment a very 
 searching and personal matter, and allies it with the per- 
 fect justice and eternal purposes of God. It gives special 
 sacredness and power to common things, and makes the 
 ideas of the duty of citizens and neighbours to be larger 
 and more fruitful of good. It holds before men that hope 
 of self-culture and improvement which apart from God 
 and immortality is so unspeakably selfish, non-human, and 
 futile. And lastly it is in accordance with what common 
 sense teaches men to think as concerning their own immor- 
 tality. Left to themselves they do not, even when religious, 
 think much of the future world, and they are right not to 
 do so. As with Christ, so with all who are most true to the 
 best instincts of their nature present duties, hopes, and re- 
 sponsibilities fill the mind with thoughts enough to occupy 
 their attention and maintain their interest in sufficient and 
 worthy objects. But with all this the future life is felt as 
 well, and that all the more powerfully for good because its 
 impressions are vague and transient. It cheers, but only 
 at specially dark moments ; it blesses, but only at times of 
 exceeding sadness ; it explains, but only when disappoint- 
 ment is unwontedly heavy ; it is the firm ground which 
 men touch when the floods come over the soul, and whence 
 they rise to work and hope once more ; lastly, it forms the 
 
Christianity and Immortality. 1 1 7 
 
 background of the picture of human life to which men 
 rarely look, though they are never without the conscious- 
 ness of its existence. * 
 
 To conclude. Let science set herself to reform man's 
 belief in his own immortality, instead of engaging in the 
 unnatural and hopeless task of destroying it. 
 
 ** 
 
RELIGION AND FACT. 
 
 THE object of this essay is to examine the rela- 
 tions between religious beliefs and the doctrine held 
 strenuously and enforced vigorously by the whole tenor of 
 modern thought, that fact can only be proved by fact, and 
 that religion has no claims upon the allegiance of men 
 except so far as it can be shown to rest upon this basis. 
 
 Now the proposition that fact can only be proved by 
 fact forces us to ask two questions " What do we mean by 
 fact ?" and " What is the proof which fact alone can give ? " 
 By fact I understand that which has been presented to the 
 mind through the medium of the organs of sensation.* 
 This definition does, indeed, require to be somewhat elabo- 
 rated in order to meet the various details which seem at first 
 sight not to fall within its scope. For instance, there are 
 things, such as the fact of a man being angry or sorry, which 
 cannot in the strictest sense of the words be proved through 
 the senses, but the existence of which we nevertheless 
 believe in only because we are assured by some outward 
 marks or words which experience invariably associates with 
 them. Or, again, there are facts which have come within 
 
 *The facts of our own internal self-consciousness are not here included as not 
 coming within the scope of this essay. I doubt whether they are really distinct 
 from other so-called objective facts, the consciousness of self alone excepted. 
 
Religion and Fact. 119 
 
 the perception of other persons, and which we accept as 
 true upon their evidence. In this case once more the 
 basis of knowledge is the presentation of facts through the 
 senses to the mind, only that the perception by the original 
 witness is transferred by the act of belief to ourselves, and 
 becomes as it were our own. Of course, this act of belief 
 opens another door to the possibility of our being mistaken ; 
 still, so long as we do believe, the fact is as much a fact as 
 though we had witnessed it ourselves, and we act upon it 
 subject to this increased possibility of error. There are also 
 what may be called composite facts that is to say, some- 
 thing abstracted by the intellect from an immense number 
 of events or individual things, and summed up in one word. 
 The Reformation, for instance, may be called a fact because 
 it is a word used to describe the course or tendency or mean- 
 ing of a long series of events, but in this case, as in all 
 others, the ultimate basis upon which all knowledge rests 
 is that some one was made aware of individual facts by the 
 organs of sense. 
 
 Then, next, we inquire, What do facts thus explained 
 prove ? As I write these words I become conscious of a cer- 
 tain number of bits of straw lying in the roadway in front 
 of my window. What does that fact prove ? I answer, it 
 proves itself that is, that there is straw lying as I have 
 described ; and secondly, it proves its own possibility 
 that is, that straw may lie and may have lain where I see 
 it. In other words, each separate fact as presented to con- 
 sciousness can, taken by itself, only prove its own existence, 
 together with the possibility of similar facts to itself. Taken 
 in combination with other facts, of course each may prove 
 an innumerable quantity of laws or truths or generalisations. 
 
I2O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 My pieces of straw, for instance, when combined with the 
 fact that the collector has just left the parochial demand for 
 rates, may suggest unpleasant truths as to the advantages 
 of that local self-government under which it is our privilege 
 as Englishmen to exist. Or, they may illustrate the opera- 
 tion of the law of gravitation. But in all cases I repeat that 
 when it is said that fact proves fact, we mean that each 
 separate fact begins by proving itself, and then is ready to 
 be taken into combination with other facts and prove what- 
 ever the laws of reasoning, as summed up under the heads of 
 Induction and Deduction, will enable or allow it to prove. 
 And let me observe that, by submitting religion to a test of 
 this description, we are not in the least degrading it, but 
 doing it the best service that we can. For if there be any- 
 thing in the world to which the term divine may be properly 
 affixed, or which may be truly said to be the operation of 
 God, it is facts. My pieces of straw may be insignificant 
 in themselves, but they are at least a real something and 
 may be used to explain or illustrate a thousand truths 
 mathematical, scientific, artistic, moral, and religious. Or, 
 what is even more, they may ask us a hundred questions 
 which we cannot solve, and some few of which, lying as they 
 do beyond the limits of the knowable, bring us face to face 
 with God. A fact is, indeed, that which, because it comes 
 to me from without and from a power other than myself, 
 is to me as the works or voice of God. Once existing, 
 it has become part of the eternal order of things, and tran- 
 scends the limits of time, which may cause it to cease to 
 exist, but cannot take away the fact that it has existed. 
 There is, therefore, an infinite seriousness about that which 
 is, or that which has been done, or that which has happened, 
 
Religion and Fact. \ 2 1 
 
 which constrains the mind in the direction of religion, 
 obliges it to confess a Power that is the Master and Author 
 of facts, and even induces it to pay a reverent worship, 
 though it may be only of the " silent sort," at the altar of 
 the unknown God. 
 
 I do not put forward this explanation as altogether 
 adequate, still less as original. I merely desire to have some 
 statement of the meaning of the dictum, " fact alone proves 
 fact," which may enable us to examine the doctrines of 
 religion by its light, and which also satisfies the just re- 
 quirements of positive thought. But it is difficult to imagine 
 a more rigorous definition than the one just given, and 
 certainly if anybody can invent one I shall be glad to know 
 it. To pay homage to facts, and to accept nothing as 
 true but what may legitimately be derived from them by 
 the strictest processes of scientific reasoning, is imperative 
 upon all who wish to treat religious subjects in a way that 
 will secure a hearing in the first instance, and command 
 assent in the second. Let us now proceed to consider how 
 far and in what sense that which is called natural religion is 
 based upon facts. 
 
 Natural religion is that effort by which the mind of man, 
 by dint of dwelling upon himself and his circumstances, en- 
 deavours to attain to conceptions of God. And in common 
 with all ultimate human thought it arrives at this conclusion 
 that there is something unknowable in the origin and 
 constitution of things which it calls by the name of God. 
 However much men may disagree, and however far they 
 may advance beyond this, yet, practically, this definition 
 seems to represent the point from which they all start. It is 
 moreover, as it stands, merely a negative idea, the positive 
 
122 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 fact consisting simply in this, that something is presented 
 to the mind which the mind in turn refuses to entertain as 
 intelligible. Nor must we allow ourselves to depreciate the 
 importance of this idea, though merely negative. By itself 
 it amounts to nothing, yet it is essential to all positive 
 conceptions of the Deity. If there were nothing that men 
 could not understand if, indeed, there were nothing that 
 they could not hope at some distant time to understand, 
 then they would be in no need of the idea of God, they 
 would be gods unto themselves. The existence of the un- 
 knowable is, therefore, the one indisputable fact which 
 natural religion contributes to the knowledge of God. 
 
 But when we are asked to admit further that natural re- 
 ligion is able to furnish us with adequate positive concep- 
 tions of God, or even proofs of His existence, then I own 
 that I am entirely unconvinced. Most certainly, if the 
 sense given above to the dictum " fact alone proves fact " 
 be correct, then I deny absolutely that any proof can be 
 given by natural religion that deserves for one moment the 
 description of scientific. The existence of God is never pre- 
 sented to the mind by objective facts of an ordinary 
 character. He never, if I may so speak, proves Himself in 
 nature. No doubt the mind, arguing from what it sees 
 around, may form conceptions of God, and no doubt, also, 
 these conceptions may possibly be true, and may certainly 
 exercise a most beneficial effect for the time being. But 
 scientific proof there is none, and unfortunately this is just 
 the proof that the mind of man, having drunk deep of the 
 joy that comes of absolute demonstration, is becoming more 
 and more resolved to demand. This has, indeed, been dis- 
 puted in an article in the newspaper the Spectator which 
 
Religion and Fact. 123 
 
 contains perhaps, the best theological thinking of the day. 
 The argument was briefly this. Every specific organ is cor- 
 related, as the eye with light, with some external arrange- 
 ment, without which it could not have existed. Hence the 
 desire or hunger after God implies the existence of food to 
 satisfy it ; or the faculty of conscience bears witness to 
 some really external Judge, who is with us and knows us. 
 Now, to this it is obvious to reply that it rests not upon 
 direct evidence, but upon analogy at best a somewhat 
 precarious foundation. We know that hunger is correlated 
 with food, or the eye with light, because we have direct 
 immediate knowledge of both food and light ; whereas, in 
 the other instance, a supposed necessity, derived from what 
 we know to be true elsewhere, is the only basis of our 
 belief. Again, it is only in a metaphorical sense that we 
 can speak of the desire of God as a function, or of con- 
 science as a faculty. What is the source of actual hunger, 
 or what is the organ called the eye, we know quite well ; 
 they are separate conditions or parts of the human frame 
 adapted for specific purposes. But the others are mere 
 descriptions of the power of thought applied to certain 
 objects of thought, which may or may not have a real 
 existence. The fear of ghosts does not imply that ghosts 
 have any existence ; the intense desire for turning baser 
 metals into gold does not assure us that it was ever accom- 
 plished. And, lastly, as a mere matter of history, the 
 belief in God is always connected with and derived from 
 some supernatural revelation. From the dawn of thought 
 men have, whether rightly or wrongly makes no matter to 
 the argument, believed in outward manifestations of the 
 Deity, and have transmitted this belief to their posterity. 
 
124 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 From this condition of things, it seems to me at once idle 
 and, indeed, impossible to try and emancipate ourselves. 
 The idea of revealed religion, of some outward proof or 
 manifestation of God, is prior to the idea of natural religion. 
 Men begin by giving an objective reality and positive cha- 
 racter to that unknowable element in themselves and in the 
 world which is almost the first fact presented to them, 
 which is presented, indeed, in greatly exaggerated forms. 
 This attempt to go back to a state of so-called nature, and 
 to discover what man apart from his history does or would 
 believe concerning religion, is only part of a wide-spread 
 error. Mr Maine, to take one instance, has made us 
 familiar with its working in the domain of law. " Rousseau's 
 belief," he says, " was that a perfect social order could be 
 evolved from the unassisted consideration of the social 
 state, or social order, wholly irrespective of the actual con- 
 dition of the world and wholly unlike it. It is not worth 
 our while to analyse with any particularity that philosophy 
 of politics, art, education, ethics, and social relation which 
 was constructed on the basis of a state of nature. It still 
 possesses singular fascination for the looser thinkers of 
 every country, and is no doubt the parent, more or less re- 
 mote, of almost all the prepossessions which impede the 
 historical method of inquiry." To this list I venture to add 
 religion, and to affirm that all men's positive convictions 
 concerning the nature of God, as a Being who governed 
 and judged them, were derived from a revelation of Him- 
 self, real or supposed, under objective forms. Hence the 
 true method in religion, as in the other branches of know- 
 ledge enumerated by Mr Maine, is the historical, and our 
 business is to examine both the nature of the various 
 
Religion and Fact. 1 2 5 
 
 Revelations and the proofs by which they are supported. 
 And if on the one hand the consciousness of the fact of the 
 unknowable has been the fruitful source of the most 
 grovelling superstitions, so on the other hand must it be 
 remembered that it creates a legitimate expectation that 
 facts will be forthcoming to explain it in accordance with 
 all known analogy. There is, therefore, no priori im- 
 probability for a Revelation, but the reverse. 
 
 Now, this Revelation is of course founded upon facts 
 that have occurred, or have been supposed to occur, within 
 the experience of men. He who accepts the Revelation 
 believes that the unknowable has, so to speak, translated 
 itself into facts in order to meet the moral and intellectual 
 necessities of mankind. This belief will be acquired, as I 
 have elsewhere maintained, not by means of intellectual 
 arguments, but by virtue of moral predispositions. These 
 predispositions again it is the business of Christians to 
 create, as well by their lives and teachings as by a careful 
 and candid examination of the facts which Revelation pre- 
 sents to them. Candour is, indeed, the one conspicuously- 
 absent feature in the writings of Christian apologists : the 
 very assumption that they have already exhausted the 
 meaning of the facts, and are precluded by some dogmatic 
 authority from re-examining them in the light of modern 
 thought, exposes them to the contempt (very often un- 
 merited) of scientific thinkers. If we wish to recommend 
 Revelation to the minds of men, the best course we can 
 adopt in these days will be to consider and develop the 
 true meaning and real moral value of the events upon 
 which it claims to rest. This may be done in many ways. 
 Thus the unwillingness to believe anything avowedly 
 
126 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 supernatural may be balanced by calling attention to the 
 fact that, if this be so, then religion as a positive conception 
 and a moral power becomes impossible. It is always best 
 that the true alternative should be plainly presented in 
 the interests of truth itself. If men can escape from their 
 dislike of the supernatural into the region of an unnatural 
 and unhistorical Deism, they will on the one hand never 
 do justice to the strength of their religious instincts, and on 
 the other never have the courage of their opinions by pro- 
 claiming non-Theism as the only rational attitude of the 
 human mind towards the unknowable. Logical indecision 
 in matters of opinion is adverse to the progress of truth 
 alike in the judgment of science and religion. 
 
 But this indecision must not be confounded with another 
 disposition of mind towards Revelation which is sometimes 
 alleged as a fault against Christian believers, but which 
 examination of facts enables us to defend as rational and 
 becoming. If there be even the trace of a suspicion 
 lurking in the mind that the Revelation is not true, then 
 both the belief in it and the practice founded upon that 
 belief become hypothetical; and science, we are told, 
 abhors hypotheses. I doubt very much indeed whether 
 science does anything of the kind, and I am sure that in 
 certain departments of thought and action hypothetical 
 belief may be our wisest course for the present. This 
 attitude of mind may be explained as the feeling which 
 enables a man to say, " I believe in Revelation now, but 
 looking at the tendency of thought around me I cannot be 
 certain that I should believe in it a hundred years hence; 
 at any rate, in the form in which I do now." Granting 
 the existence of the unknowable, then, an hypothesis 
 
Religion and Fact. 127 
 
 which explains it in a manner sufficient for the (present) 
 moral necessities of man certainly falls within the express 
 approval of no less a name than that of Locke himself. 
 " Not that we may not," he says, " to explain any pheno- 
 mena of nature, make use of any probable hypothesis 
 whatsoever. But we should not take them up too hastily, 
 till we have very well examined particulars, and made 
 several experiments in that thing which we would explain 
 by our hypothesis, and see whether it will agree to them 
 all ; whether our principles will carry us quite through, 
 and not be as inconsistent with one phenomenon of nature 
 as they seem to accommodate and explain another, and at 
 least that we take care that the name of principles deceive 
 us not, nor impose on us by making us receive that for an 
 unquestionable truth which is really at best but a very 
 doubtful conjecture." 
 
 Locke is here thinking and speaking of "natural" 
 science, but it needs no excuse in these days to claim to 
 apply his method to all phenomena whatsoever; to the 
 mind of man as seen whether in the history of the race or 
 the character of the individual. We are not only justified 
 in acting as though revelation was true, but in examining 
 the facts upon which it rests as though they actually took 
 place. It may be that when thus tested the hypothesis 
 may fail to recommend itself either morally or intellectu- 
 ally to the mind that has provisionally adopted it. If, for 
 instance, the effect is merely to create mysteries for the 
 mind to accept, instead of throwing light upon difficulties 
 with which it has hitherto struggled in vain, then the Reve- 
 lation stands condemned as insufficient for the very pur- 
 poses for which it was hypothetically accepted. And yet 
 
128 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 it is difficult to deny that this has been the result of 
 theology taken as a whole, and so the necessity of a 
 further and closer and more rational examination of the 
 facts becomes at once apparent. Most assuredly the 
 rejection of the facts of Revelation is not as a rule accom- 
 panied by any thorough appreciation of their meaning and 
 use ; but then whose fault is this ? The Christianity that 
 has to recommend itself to modern thought, weighted with 
 the incubus of to take the worst case out of many bad 
 ones the doctrines of the Church of Rome, may well be 
 ashamed to cast the blame upon any one save those who 
 profess to be its champions and exponents. 
 
 This, again, suggests another branch of the great inquiry 
 into facts namely, the consideration of the relations 
 between Christianity and other religions professing to be 
 historical, that is, to rest upon events in which God 
 revealed Himself by supernatural methods. And here we 
 should be called upon to realise what Christianity is in 
 respect of time and extent. When the comparatively late 
 appearance of Christianity in the world is insisted upon, it 
 is really necessary to remember that it claims to be coeval 
 with the dawn, if not of thought, at least of history. A 
 notion seems to prevail that men can obtain for themselves 
 a certain amount of natural religion, which God then steps 
 in to supplement and explain by Revelation. I can only 
 say that if this be true, then I for one should be compelled 
 to abandon the belief in Revelation as at once unscientific 
 in itself, and as unnecessary for the civilisation and develop- 
 ment of man. The religion that claims at this time to be 
 the only religion adapted for civilised man claims also a 
 continuous descent from days in which men were preserved 
 
Religion and Fact. 129 
 
 by outward methods in the belief of the true God, and in 
 which one man was specially chosen to propagate this 
 belief by means of a posterity governed by the direct 
 interposition of God himself. It will be observed that the 
 stress of this argument is not in the least affected by the 
 question as to whether these providential and miraculous 
 events took place, upon which I offer no opinion whatever. 
 It is enough for my present purpose to point out that men 
 have not, as an historical fact, elaborated their religion for 
 themselves by any process of reasoning or inquiry, and 
 that every iota of the Christian religion is at this present 
 moment based upon a long series of supernatural events, 
 which trace their origin back to the time of the call of 
 Abraham, and even beyond that. Whether these events 
 are true, whether some are true and some not, in what the 
 miraculous element consists all these, and many more, 
 are questions of the gravest import ; but it admits of no 
 question at all that the men who have built up the Chris- 
 tian religion from the time when Abraham left his father's 
 home, down to the half million or so of last Sunday's 
 preachers, have laid its foundations upon the revelation 
 of Himself in history, which they believe that God has 
 given. 
 
 This, men will exclaim, is a hard saying. I admit, 
 indeed, that I have purposely made the assertion as broad 
 and sweeping as I could, in order to challenge attention to 
 a fact or state of things, the true importance of which is 
 surely very far from being appreciated as it deserves to be. 
 But I go on to guard myself against obvious attacks, not 
 by modifying this assertion, but by explaining it. And 
 first it may be said that I am drawing a broad line of dis- 
 
130 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 tinction between Christianity and other religions just at 
 the time when the whole object of scientific research is to 
 trace affinities and resemblances. To which may be added 
 the still more serious charge of throwing unmerited con- 
 tempt upon the latter with a view of obtaining equally 
 unmerited reputation for the former. That this charge is 
 painfully true of much Christian advocacy I do not deny, 
 and we must be content to share the blame which attaches 
 to the community that permits, encourages, and rewards 
 such a line of argument. But for myself I disavow it with 
 the utmost energy. To begin with, other religions resemble 
 the Christian in nothing more than in this, that they too 
 have felt the necessity of believing that the unknown God 
 has made himself known by special revelation. Their 
 doctrines and their morality, no less than ours, are traced 
 upwards to the deeds or words of divine or divinely- 
 inspired beings, who at some time or other, or at more 
 times than one, in the history of their religion, have been 
 commissioned by outward signs to speak in the name of 
 God. And it ought to be at once our duty and our 
 pleasure to acknowledge the vast amount of moral good 
 which has thus been contributed to the sum of human 
 virtue and happiness. But then it will be asked in what 
 do they differ from Christianity, or in what do its special 
 claims upon our homage consist ? 
 
 Now, this is just one of those questions that can be 
 answered by nothing short of that examination of facts for 
 which I plead. But the general principle which will be 
 established as the foundation of the distinction between 
 the two, lies upon the surface, and admits of being suc- 
 cinctly stated. The morality of other religions is relative 
 
Religion and Fact. 1 3 1 
 
 and temporary ; that of Christianity is absolute and per- 
 manent. Or, to put it in another form, the teaching and 
 the actions attributed to God are in the latter case identical 
 with our highest moral conceptions of power and goodness, 
 whereas in the former they are not ; the morality of the 
 Old Testament being of course viewed as imperfect in 
 itself, but necessary in the religious education of man. 
 Whether or no this distinction can be ultimately proved to 
 exist remains for the present doubtful ; but there is a con- 
 sideration connected with the extent of Christianity which 
 gives an enormous d priori probability that it can. I am 
 alluding to the distinction between progressive and non- 
 progressive nations, concerning which I will once more 
 quote the words of Mr Maine, because the history of law 
 comes, on the whole, nearest to that of religion, and the 
 same facts are available for the study of both alike. He 
 observes that nothing is more remarkable than the extreme 
 fewness of those progressive societies with which alone the 
 student of the history of law is concerned. " In spite of 
 overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of 
 Western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the 
 truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare 
 exception in the history of the world. The tone of thought 
 common among us, all our hopes, fears, and speculations, 
 would be materially affected if we had before us the rela- 
 tion of the progressive races j:o the totality of human life. 
 It is indisputable that much the greatest part of mankind 
 has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institu- 
 tions should be improved since the moment when external 
 completeness was first given to them by their embodiment 
 in some permanent record. The difference, however, 
 
132 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 between the stationary and progressive societies is one of 
 the great secrets which inquiry has yet to penetrate." 
 
 Let us now carefully observe what the facts have been in 
 respect of the religion of these two classes of societies up to 
 the present time. They may be summed up as follows : 
 First, Christianity is at this moment the religion of all pro- 
 gressive races. Not only has it shared this progress, but 
 at more than one memorable crisis in their history it has 
 been the mainspring of human energy and endeavour. 
 Second, the other religions of progressive societies have 
 decayed in almost exact ratio to their improvement in 
 nearly every department of thought and action. All the 
 wisdom and virtue of ancient Greece and Rome failed alike 
 to retain a belief in the old religion, or to elaborate a new 
 one which should take its place. Third, the immense pro- 
 portion of stationary societies have not been Christian. 
 In religion, as in science, art, or law, they have neither 
 made nor desired any advance beyond a certain point. 
 There is something in Christianity with which they have no 
 sympathy, and so they have rejected it a very different 
 statement, be it observed, from the one usually made, that 
 the rejection of Christianity is the cause of their want of 
 progress. Fourth, the reception of Christianity by non- 
 progressive races is due to special causes. The Slavonic 
 nations, for instance, if they or any of them are to be num- 
 bered among the stationary races, may be pronounced to 
 have the seeds and elements of a future civilisation ; where- 
 as the Christianity of people like the negroes is at most an 
 external covering, its real spiritual influence, wherever it 
 exists being due to the perpetual and overpowering contact 
 of superior races. At any rate, this much is certainly true : 
 
Religion and Fact. 133 
 
 that the Christian religion shares for good or for evil the 
 fate of all the elements of progress in whatever nations of 
 the world it exists, and so appears d priori to have a real 
 and natural affinity with them. It is consistent with the 
 tiny ray of light that shines amidst the darkness of Abys- 
 sinia, and it manages, though it must be admitted, with 
 steps at times somewhat faltering and laggard, to keep its 
 place in the march of human progress amidst the blaze of 
 civilisation and knowledge of Western Europe and North 
 America. 
 
 Now, it is difficult to account for facts such as these 
 except upon the supposition of some essential difference 
 between Christianity and other religions. Why is it that, 
 in the case of stationary races, the cause of their want of 
 progress is attributed by the best thinkers in no small 
 degree to religious influences ? Why is it, on the other 
 hand, that from the days of Abraham onward religion has 
 been the exciting cause of some of the greatest revolutions 
 through which the progressive races have advanced on the 
 pathway of civilisation ? Contrast, for instance, Christi- 
 anity in this respect with two of the most splendid and 
 beneficial systems of religion that the world has known. 
 Hellenic Paganism may be called though I greatly distrust 
 these symmetrical definitions, and only adopt this one as 
 being in common use the religion of beauty, the worship 
 of God under artistic forms. Like all religions, it professed 
 to have its origin in events and actions ; like all religions, 
 except one, there came to it a time when these were unable 
 to abide the test of criticism and of moral philosophy. 
 And yet while the old beliefs perished and no new ones 
 took their place, it must never be forgotten that the 
 
134 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 original source and ground of all religion remained exactly 
 as it had ever been ; or, rather, it became intensified, and 
 gained in reality and power. The men who shattered into 
 pieces the legends of Greek mythology did not get rid of 
 the unknowable. On the contrary, then as now, the more 
 they discovered, the further they penetrated, the more firmly 
 they grasped the limits of that which man can know, so 
 much the more clearly did the unknowable rise before 
 them, the more mysterious and awe-inspiring became the 
 secrets of God, of life, and thought and goodness. Like 
 explorers in a new country, they caught glimpses of strange 
 things, which filled them with curiosity and wonder, and 
 yet one by one, whether with the plaintive acquiescence 
 of Aristotle or the pathetic earnestness of Plato, they came 
 back to say that there were no means available to man for 
 penetrating into that unknown land of silence and of God. 
 And so the old mystery remained, while the old explana- 
 tions, having done their work, died away. It was no 
 rhetorical adroitness, but the simple instinct of truth itself, 
 that caused St Paul to sum up the religion of Pagan anti- 
 quity in the words of the inscription he noticed at Athens, 
 " There is a God, but we do not know Him." 
 
 The second instance to which I am alluding is the religion 
 of Buddha, though this might more properly be called a 
 philosophy of goodness illustrated in actual life. And it is 
 an instance in some respects specially adapted for purposes 
 of comparison, because it has exerted an influence almost 
 as wide, as lasting, as searching, and as beneficial as 
 Christianity itself. I entirely repudiate any wish to insti- 
 tute comparisons between the two merely for the purpose 
 of praising Christianity at the expense of Buddhism. But 
 
Religion and Fact. 135 
 
 the plain instincts of historical criticism compel us to ask 
 for a reason for the simple fact that, whereas Paganism 
 ceased to be the religion of progressive, Buddhism has re- 
 mained the religion of stationary, races. Why is it that 
 both alike are so plainly distinguished from Christianity ? 
 The more we insist upon the likeness which they bear to it 
 the more incumbent upon us does it become to find some 
 explanation for this fact. We are accustomed to be told 
 that all religions have a relative and transitory value, and 
 that the world stands in need of what is good in all. The 
 affinities of Christianity with, say, the Stoical philosophy, 
 or Rabbinical morality, or Buddhism itself, are clearly 
 pointed out, and much insisted upon. I accept all this, 
 and ask still more urgently why Christianity is what it is 
 now, the religion of the civilised or progressive nations of 
 the world. There are, indeed, things with which we can 
 compare it, but not religions. Greek art and philosophy, 
 Roman law, Germanic family life (together with positive 
 science) are spiritually imperishable ; they have been 
 adopted by modern civilisation, and become its component 
 and vivifying elements. To account for this we say that 
 they are all based upon some absolute truth or other ; some 
 Tightness of method ; some conformability to fact, to 
 nature, and to law. But then that form of the old Hebrew 
 religion which we call Christianity has fared exactly as 
 they have, and it seems strange to refuse to attribute the 
 same fact to the same causes. At any rate, it enables the 
 Christian believer to assert that his religion owes its suc- 
 cess to this alone : that the events upon which it is founded 
 were real occurrences in the history of the world, and form 
 a true and adequate revelation of the character, the relations, 
 
136 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and the intentions of God towards mankind. And thus 
 the burden of proving the contrary is thrown upon those 
 who deny this assertion. 
 
 A very common and popular objection to this view of 
 things fills me, I own, with simple astonishment. Believers 
 in the historical truthfulness of the Christian records are 
 derided for their love of the supernatural, and it is asserted 
 that to rely upon miraculous events is dishonouring to 
 religion, and to the humanity that is supposed to stand in 
 need of them. I readily admit, of course, that in coming 
 to a conclusion as to the value of the evidence, men may 
 be deceived by their wish that their own opinions may be 
 proved to be true. This is a temptation which we share 
 with all investigators in every branch of learning, and truth 
 is for the most part advanced by men who urge upon 
 public attention one side of the case or one aspect of the 
 facts. The severely judicial temper is rare in all depart- 
 ments of thought, and, owing at once to the nature of the 
 evidence and the magnitude of personal interests involved, 
 it is especially rare in religion. But the further assertion 
 that a belief in the miraculous is a priori foolish, or that 
 a miraculous element dishonours religion, is to me quite 
 unintelligible, when the subject is regarded in a scientific 
 point of view. Our business is not to decide what seems 
 to us the best kind of religion, or in what way we should 
 like to think that it was originated in the heart of man : it 
 has simply to ask, as a mere matter of fact, whether miracles 
 have or have not occurred. There are some to whom the 
 possibility of the miraculous appears most necessary and 
 beneficial ; there are others to whom it appears in the 
 exactly opposite light. But whatever may be our pre- 
 
Religion and Fact. 137 
 
 possessions, and however strongly they may sway our 
 minds, we are not to be told that d priori considerations of 
 this kind settle the matter. Let us know what happened, 
 and then we shall know what is the true source and real 
 meaning of religion. The history of what is supernatural 
 claims our attention like anything else that purports to be 
 true, and requires investigation at our hands. In some 
 sort it comes to us as a fact already, because it rests upon 
 a large amount of evidence; because it has influenced 
 myriads of human beings ; because lastly, if true, it carries 
 with it the most important results to our own lives and 
 conduct. Whether it be believed to be true or not, let us 
 accept the conclusion that seems most reasonable, provided 
 always that we accept with it all the tremendous results 
 that flow of necessity either from a rejection of the super- 
 natural or from a belief in it. The a priori convictions of 
 any one man may be to him a very good reason for taking 
 one side or the other upon a still disputed issue, but they are 
 merely impertinent when they assume to decide the ques- 
 tion by the summary process of abstract definitions as to 
 what is right, or best, or worthy of God, or suitable to 
 man. Surely the time has come when propositions of this 
 nature may be banished from religion as they have been 
 from science, and men may be content to discover what 
 God ought to do by the humble and patient method of 
 inquiring what He has done. Let them take sides as 
 seems to them good, but not, therefore, confound their 
 subjective beliefs with absolute truths, or make their 
 private ideas the measure of the actions and character of 
 God. 
 
 The account, then, that I would give of the origin of 
 
1 38 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 religion is briefly this : Man, from the very first, is conscious 
 of the existence of something he cannot understand, and, 
 down to the very last, this consciousness not only con- 
 tinues but increases. Its modern expression may be seen 
 in the philosophy of Mr Mill, who says "that on the 
 inmost nature of the thinking principle, as well as on the 
 inmost nature of matter, we are, and with our present 
 faculties must always remain, entirely in the dark." Next, 
 this unknowable gives rise to an immediate belief in the 
 existence of God. Then God is believed to have revealed 
 Himself in facts or events, and thus, what was formerly a 
 negative assumption becomes a positive belief. Lastly, a 
 religion of morality and practice is founded upon the 
 character and dealings of God as revealed in His real or 
 supposed actions, and having gained this clue, it becomes 
 possible to explain nature, history, and man himself from 
 the religious no less than from the physical point of view. 
 It is necessary, however, to add at this point a word of 
 explanation. Although man, it may be urged, can by his 
 unassisted strength form no adequate conception of God, 
 yet he can form, and as a matter of experience always has 
 formed, a conception of a Being in some way resembling 
 himself. This is of course true. Man cannot transcend 
 the limits of his own experience, and God, however made 
 known, will always be imagined as a tendency towards 
 some human perfection, whether of outward majesty or 
 supreme power or moral excellence. But I cannot see 
 that the foregoing argument is in any way affected by this 
 truth, all important as it is. It is equally reasonable a 
 priori to say, " men must think of God as in some way like 
 themselves, therefore the highest effort of their imagination 
 
Religion and Fact. 1 39 
 
 was to create a perfect character in Jesus Christ;" or to 
 say, " men must think of God as in some way like them- 
 selves, therefore God revealed Himself as perfect man." 
 The question to be decided is, which of the two alternatives 
 actually took place ; whether, that is, the facts of Christ's 
 life are fictitious, and His character an ideal, shaped in the 
 imagination of His too-devoted followers. Natural religion, 
 we are all agreed, may, and does, invent facts upon which 
 to repose. It may, therefore, have invented the character 
 and actions of Christ as it invented those of Jupiter or 
 Odin. But the moment it has been shown that this is 
 actually the true account of the matter, then, just as in the 
 case of Greek myths, natural religion ceases to have any 
 true knowledge of God. We may part from the Christian 
 conception of His character with even tenfold more reluc- 
 tance than Plato felt in abandoning the beauties of Greek 
 legend and art, but inexorable science would point out 
 that we have no positive ground for our conception what- 
 ever, and God would once more become the unknown God, 
 before whose altar the only acceptable worship that could 
 be offered would be homage of the "silent sort," though 
 practically, who can doubt that it would be at least for 
 generations, if not centuries, to come superstition and 
 fear ? 
 
 It is necessary that this position should be made per- 
 fectly clear. In maintaining that religion, to be effective 
 and permanent, must be based upon objective facts in 
 which God reveals Himself, I am as far as possible from 
 asserting that Revelation depends upon the merely mar- 
 vellous element which it contains, or that it is merely 
 relative to our faculties, and not an absolute display of 
 
140 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 God as He is in His essential moral attributes. I look to 
 history, and I find it there stated that God has made 
 Himself known to man by actions which, if true, convince 
 us that He is; that He is good in our sense of that word ; 
 that He is interested in our welfare as our Father, and has 
 displayed that interest by one act of surpassing love and 
 tender mercy. Therefore, my first object must necessarily 
 be to come to some sort of conclusion as to whether this 
 account is true. In what way is this to be accomplished ? 
 This question brings us one step further on the road 
 towards the conclusion at which I have been all along 
 aiming, because it forces us to ask what are the positive 
 objections to receiving the history of supernatural events 
 as true. By the word positive, I mean objections which 
 are based, not upon d priori opinions as to what we think 
 ought to be true, but upon scientific examination of the 
 facts presented to us. We find in history certain events, 
 and certain results connected with these events, which have 
 to be accounted for. This may be done either by believing 
 that God was their Author in a supernatural way, or else 
 by asserting that they fall under the general class of 
 supposed miracles which the human mind has in all ages 
 and races been prone to invent. The force of this last 
 argument is, of course, exceedingly great, especially at 
 times like this, when the discovery of general laws govern- 
 ing alike things, events, and even thoughts, is the one great 
 ambition of the human intellect to accomplish. To this, 
 however, it has been answered, with great effect, that the 
 supernatural element in the Christian history is a totally 
 different thing from the same, element in other religions, 
 and is not to be accounted for by the same causes. The 
 
Religion and Fact. 141 
 
 controversy is, it need not be said, an old one ; but it is 
 also exceedingly unsatisfactory and undecisive. Both 
 parties, as usual, succeed in making good their own posi- 
 tion. The same forces that have elsewhere produced false 
 miracles are to be seen at work in nearly every page of the 
 Bible. On the other hand, there are other forces also, at 
 least as distinctly visible, which take the Bible quite out of 
 the category of ordinary histories containing miraculous 
 accounts. These are they to which we have already 
 alluded as making Christianity the religion of civilised 
 races. Its moral tone, its sober, measured style, its exact 
 accordance with all the highest thoughts that men can 
 have of God, its duration and extent, above all, its 
 systematic growth and purpose are elements that it is 
 difficult to account for on the hypothesis that its heroes 
 and historians were half-deceived, half-deceivers, more 
 entirely right in their moral ideas, and more entirely wrong 
 in their mental beliefs, than any human beings that ever 
 existed. The result, then, of this controversy, in spite of 
 the ability with which it has been conducted is, on the 
 whole, nil; it leaves the matter pretty much where it 
 found it. 
 
 But the aspect of the controversy is entirely changed the 
 moment that men condescend to examine the history itself, 
 without any foregone conclusion as to the abstract possi- 
 bility of the miraculous occurrences. So long as men 
 approach the subject with an avowed conviction that 
 nothing in the world shall convince them that the miracu- 
 lous can happen, so long their opponents will have a 
 position at least as strong as the arguments to which it 
 is opposed. So long, again, as Christian advocates assume 
 
142 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 the literal accuracy of every event they find recorded in 
 the Bible, so long will they find themselves committed to 
 all kinds of damaging conclusions. The real scientific 
 interest begins, arid with it the real difficulty of the whole 
 question, when we ask ourselves what precisely are the 
 events which, though miraculous, we believe to be true. If 
 men lay aside the attitude of mere opposition, and assume 
 that of candid inquirers, they may put a whole series of 
 questions to which Christianity has, at any rate in England, 
 not attempted to give satisfactory or definite answers. I 
 can imagine these men, still better I can imagine the public 
 mind, which they do but represent, saying as follows : 
 " Granting, then, that the miracles are possible, we find a 
 great number recorded in the Bible, some of them descend- 
 ing to the lowest level of mere marvels, some of them 
 ascending far above the utmost dreams of the human mind. 
 Which of these are true, or are all true ? And why are 
 some to be received and others not ? What canons do you 
 lay down by which to determine the true and the false ? And 
 what is the precise meaning of those which you retain, and 
 what information do they give us about God ? Can you, 
 moreover, give us an account of the mode of operation, or 
 adjust it to modern conceptions of law and modern theories 
 of the mind and of substance ? How are miracles affected 
 by the laws of evidence ? In one word, can you give us a 
 new theory of the miraculous, a science of the supernatural, 
 a history of the actions of God ? " 
 
 I do not suppose that any reasonable man will deny that 
 this is a fair account of the attitude assumed, by what may 
 be called the popular mind, towards religion at this present 
 time. Men are by no means disposed to give up Christi- 
 
Religion and Fact. 143 
 
 anity, and their common sense refuses to dismiss the 
 supernatural from history, merely because it appears to 
 militate against a present tendency of human thought, 
 which may possibly prove to have been only relatively true, 
 temporarily useful, and charged, like all its predecessors, 
 with a full cargo of man's prejudices and littleness. But 
 on the other hand, they cannot but see that judgment is 
 going by default. What they want is knowledge based upon 
 an inquiry into facts ; what they get on both sides is theory 
 derived from personal predilection or preconception, and 
 making a more ingenious than candid use of the facts it has 
 to deal with. Perhaps, indeed, the time is not yet fully 
 come ; certainly the man competent to answer this craving 
 for knowledge has not appeared. He must be a man of 
 reverent disposition, thoroughly imbued with the spirit of 
 positive thought, acquainted with the histories of religions, 
 swift to see analogies, patient to investigate, apt to gene- 
 ralise, above all, careless of the hard names with which he 
 will certainly be at first assailed. But assuredly this does 
 not prevent men, however humble alike in capacity and aim, 
 from making those preliminary attempts which are the ne- 
 cessary precursors of final success. Every detected mistake 
 stops one avenue of error ; every confessed failure suggests 
 another and a better way ; every imperfect argument calls 
 attention to the missing link; every refutation of accepted 
 but erroneous beliefs clears the ground for some better ex- 
 planation. It is in this spirit that I propose to investigate 
 some aspects of the miraculous element contained in the 
 Bible, and to attempt some sort of answer to the question 
 everywhere addressed to us; "What are the facts upon which 
 the Christian religion rests, and why are we to believe them?" 
 
144 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 But any hesitation which I might feel at attempting such 
 a task with powers so inadequate, is more than removed 
 when I survey the actual state of Christian opinion, and 
 notice the way in which the Christianity of the past, with 
 the full approbation of the Christianity of the present, has 
 dealt with the grave and serious question, " What are the 
 facts to which revealed religion makes her appeal ? " The 
 sight fills me with astonishment and indignation, and then 
 facit indignatio verba. This is what has happened. The 
 Bible contains a great number of alleged supernatural 
 events, some of them approaching to the grotesque, as, for 
 instance, the speaking of Balaam's ass ; others so " caught 
 up " into the divine that the merely marvellous element 
 disappears in the moral grandeur of the action, as, for 
 instance, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, or the Conver- 
 sion of St Paul. All these have been accepted as equally 
 true, and the attempt to draw distinctions between one and 
 the other has been denounced as fatal to all. But then, as 
 many of these events derived no support from the rules 
 of historical evidence, or from their moral significance, it 
 was perceived that some external anthority was needed. 
 Whereupon the doctrine was laid down, or was assumed, 
 or grew up, I know not how, that the Bible could not 
 possibly contain any statement not exactly and literally 
 true ; so that I beg the attention of even the most cur- 
 sory reader to this every statement in the Bible, whether 
 of opinion, or argument, or calculation, or of mere remark 
 upon subjects of passing interest, was elevated into the 
 region of fact, and became the unquestioned basis of 
 theological science. Then a step further was taken. It 
 was seen that the human intellect could, by process of 
 
Religion and Fact. 145 
 
 ordinary logic, derive certain abstract truths from the 
 words of Scripture assumed to be absolutely true ; hence 
 metaphysical abstractions concerning God took their place 
 among undoubted facts, and dogma became essential to the 
 Christian faith. But dogma implies an authority, just as 
 an infallible book requires an interpreter ; and, therefore, a 
 Pope, or the Universal Church, or, more modestly among 
 Protestants, articles which should be binding upon the 
 members of each church, grew into being, and all that 
 huge and heterogeneous and contradictory multitude of 
 canons, decrees, creeds, institutes, articles, homilies, trust- 
 deeds, under which religion groans in vain, was added to 
 the already portentous mass of supposed facts. And lastly, 
 with that daring logic which fascinates the noblest spirits 
 and wins a passing tribute of admiration from the sternest 
 opponents, the Roman Church saw instinctively that this 
 mass was but dead and dissoluble matter unless the spirit 
 of a living guide was breathed into it, and so, as the ulti- 
 mate outcome of Christian development, we have an 
 infallible Pope. And then we wonder that religion is 
 discredited in an age of positive thought, and fall to and 
 abuse the Rationalist or the Sceptic as the author of that 
 dark cloud of suspicion and doubt which is descending 
 upon the world, so that all hearts begin to " gather black- 
 ness." 
 
 Let us review the position. On the one hand we have a 
 demand for positive facts, and a challenge addressed to 
 religion to say distinctly what are the facts upon which 
 she relies. On the other, I gladly admit that Christianity 
 has always more or less clearly perceived that this chal- 
 lenge was a fair one, and has alleged facts in support of 
 
 K 
 
146 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 her claims. It is this alone which, among all her aberra- 
 tions from the truth, spite of all her halting paces and 
 timid concessions, has enabled her to retain a place in 
 civilisation and to exercise her enormous spiritual influence 
 for good upon the heart of men. Furthermore, there are 
 a few events, in the number of those which she accepts, of 
 such overwhelming moral significance that these alone 
 would be sufficient for every religious purpose, especially 
 in days when scientific thought, just in proportion as it 
 detracts from the power of believing in miracles, adds to 
 the power of miracles when believed. But to these she 
 has added, as articles of faith, as follows : First, a number 
 of stories of no moral importance and no historical value. 
 Second, thousands upon thousands of statements of writers 
 believed to be inspired and incapable of error upon, at 
 any rate, religious subjects. Third, all the metaphysical 
 abstractions which human ingenuity could frame from these 
 data and persuade the Church to accept. Fourth, the 
 articles binding upon separate churches. Fifth, the utter- 
 ances of the Pope binding upon a large and not decreasing 
 number of Christian people. And, encumbered with all 
 this vast array of mostly non-combatant followers, she has 
 to confront the spirit of an age which delights to reduce 
 every branch of knowledge to the fewest possible prin- 
 ciples, and which will assuredly say of religion that 
 miracles, like essences, won sunt multiplicanda. 
 
 To all which I confidently reply that, as there is no 
 knowledge save that which comes from undoubted facts, 
 so there is no authority save that which proves the facts to 
 my mind and approves them in my heart. When St Paul 
 went forth to preach the gospel of man's redemption, he 
 
Religion and Fact. 147 
 
 went as one who had been brought face to face with the 
 most tremendous events in human history. He needed no 
 other commission than his knowledge of what had hap- 
 pened ; he claimed no other authority than to recommend 
 what he knew to the consciences of men ; the very idea of 
 dogma had no place in the mind of one who remembered 
 his Master's word, " We speak that we do know, and testify 
 that we have seen " who himself could say, " I delivered 
 unto you that which I also received" whose brother 
 Apostle could say, "that which was from the beginning, 
 which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, 
 which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, 
 of the Word of Life (for the life was manifested, and we 
 have seen it and bear witness, and show unto you that 
 eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested 
 unto us) ; that which we have seen and heard declare we 
 unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us." In 
 other words, the preachers of Christ acted as every human 
 being who has contributed anything to man's improvement 
 or happiness has been obliged to act by the unchanging 
 law of nature. That is, they bore witness to the truth they 
 knew, in the full assurance that truth would be its own 
 authority. Let me illustrate this by instances taken from 
 the famous men of one nation only our own. 
 
 Shakespeare looked into the height and depth of human 
 nature, and saw well-nigh all the actual workings of human 
 passion and thought. He came back to tell us what he 
 had seen, and we believe him, not because he said it, but 
 because his words interpret all our own experience, reduce 
 to law a mere chaos of objects more or less clearly per- 
 ceived, throw light upon dark places, explain ourselves to 
 
148 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ourselves, harmonise with what we know of beauty and 
 pleasure ; in a word, make facts known to us. Newton 
 caught sight of a law that fills all space, and also ex- 
 plains the movements of all phenomena : we believe him 
 because, once more, though by a different method, we can 
 assure ourselves that demonstrable fact lies at the founda- 
 tion of all he said. Edmund Burke looked into the facts 
 that bind polities together, and we have paid him the 
 greatest honour that man can receive by accepting his 
 thoughts as the informing and guiding spirit of the English 
 Constitution, not because he a party politician uttered 
 them, but because our experience has stamped them as 
 true and useful for our national life and order. We might 
 go on to speak of Watt or Adam Smith, each in different 
 spheres of thought, catching a vision of facts and translat- 
 ing them into instruments and rules, which our experience 
 verifies and adopts. But I mention one illustrious name 
 worthy to be ranked among famous Englishmen who have 
 revealed truth to mankind. Mr Mill has discerned the 
 true source and conditions of knowledge, of logic as the 
 science of knowing, and more and more we begin to see 
 that the basis of a lasting union between philosophy and 
 science has been laid by him and others like him in our own 
 days. Is there, then, no hope that a similar work may not 
 be accomplished between science and religion, viewed, that 
 is, as a revelation of facts ? Is the shadow that darkens 
 the face of Revelation a mere temporary obscuration of the 
 splendour of the mid-day sun, or is that sun hastening to 
 its grave amidst the clouds that are gathering in the western 
 sky ? I know not ; but this I do know, that they who are 
 endeavouring to face the facts of the case without fear and 
 
Religion and Fact. 149 
 
 without bias, will be able to submit to the result, whatever 
 it may be, with dignity and patience. They will have, 
 indeed, if so it must be, to accustom themselves to the 
 gray twilights of a world in which God has never revealed 
 Himself by any act that could be specially called His, or 
 attributed to His will in any strictly personal sense. They 
 may, if they like, continue to call Him Father, but not a 
 Father who has given His only and beloved Son for the 
 sake of His other children, and they may meditate on 
 immortality, but hardly pretend to believe in it. They 
 will part from the ancient faith with reluctance and regret, 
 but still they will part from it, if they needs must, and 
 begin with silent heart yet resolute to repair once more that 
 ruined altar of the unknown God, which a noble but mis- 
 taken spirit broke in pieces at Athens with a few wonder- 
 working words, based, as he thought, upon what God had 
 done. I think, indeed, that even the opponents of Revela- 
 tion as a record of supernatural events will, in that the 
 day of their victory, not grudge their captives the pleasure 
 of recalling the beautiful legends of the olden days when 
 men believed in a God who had suffered with them and 
 conquered for them in the person of Jesus Christ. Nay, 
 it may even be that they will ask us to sing one of the 
 songs of Zion in that " strange land " of silence unbroken 
 by the voice of the living God. The words of one such song 
 come across my mind as prophetic now of what men will 
 feel then, and with them I conclude : 
 
 " There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
 The earth, and every common sight 
 
 To me did seem 
 Apparell'd in celestial light, 
 The glory and the freshness of a dream. 
 
1 50 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 It is not now as it hath been of yore ; 
 Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
 
 By night or day, 
 The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 
 
 " The rainbow comes and goes, 
 And lovely is the rose ; 
 The moon doth with delight 
 Look round her when the heavens are bare ; 
 Waters on a starry night 
 Are beautiful and fair ; 
 The sunshine is a glorious birth, 
 But yet I know, where'er I go, 
 That there hath passed away a glory from the earth? 
 
THE MIRACLES OF GOD. 
 
 THE attempt to treat the subject of religion by what 
 may be called the Positive method, subjects those 
 who make it to several inevitable difficulties, and is of 
 necessity accompanied by conditions which render it dis- 
 tasteful to many religious minds. Especially we seem to 
 miss those tendencies of human thought and devotion which 
 give birth to and animate large and idealistic phrases, such 
 as " Christ dwelling in man ; " " the universal Fatherhood of 
 God ; " " the revelation of God to the conscience ; " " the 
 communion of the soul with its Maker ; " " the inspiration of 
 man by God's spirit." I am very sensible of this, the more 
 so as it is by phrases such as these that religious life is kept 
 alive : they contain elements of poetry, metaphysics, 
 romance, and sentiment which are not only essential to 
 religion, but which are in some sort its highest and most 
 genuine intellectual efforts. But on the other hand, we may 
 be permitted to remark that science also has its aspect of 
 poetry and awe ; and that, if sentiment and idealism are to 
 be of any use whatever, they must repose upon a substratum 
 of facts. I think it of so much importance that this truth 
 should be clearly apprehended that I will go on to make 
 my meaning clear by means of an illustration. 
 
 At the close of his account of the story of the golden 
 
152 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 calf, and of the intercession of Moses with God which 
 followed it, Professor Ewald writes as follows : " A glorious 
 picture, perfect in its kind, and full of eternal truth, if only 
 it be not treated as dry historical fact." Now there are 
 minds so constituted I confess mine to be one of them 
 to whicli this saying appears to be nothing short of high 
 treason against the majesty of truth. To many persons 
 the word eternal represents that which has never happened ; 
 is, indeed, incapable of happening ; is, so to speak, above 
 happening. To science it means all that has happened, 
 together with all the results, hopes, fears, and intimations 
 that have been, or may be, founded upon it. In the first 
 case it amounts to no more than the productions of human 
 imagination and ingenuity ; things that men think of as 
 being probable, beautiful, useful, and which would somehow 
 or other suffer degradation if they abandoned the region of 
 thought, and were regarded simply as facts that had 
 occurred. To which science has but one invariable reply : 
 <c Probable when proved ; beautiful if true ; useful so 
 far as actually existing." 
 
 No one, I hope, will be foolish enough to object that this 
 cuts at the root of dramatic and epic poetry. Nothing 
 whatever of the sort. These have their abiding beauty and 
 interest because they are pictures of the human soul, and 
 true to the experiences of human life. But then they 
 profess to be nothing more than this, or if the phrase be 
 liked better, to be nothing else than this, whereas the history 
 of the golden calf professes to detail the relations that have 
 subsisted between God and man in history. And everything 
 is true if it is and does that which it professes to be and to 
 do. " Macbeth " is entirely true as a picture of human 
 
The Miracles of God. 153 
 
 passion and character ; it would become absolutely false if 
 it pretended to recount the history of Scotland. And the 
 word eternal, if by that we mean independence of time, 
 seems to me to be much more accurately applied to truths 
 of the latter than of the former description, to those of 
 history rather than of poetry. For truths of poetry are 
 essentially limited by temporal considerations. Deeper 
 and truer views of human character may be presented to 
 us; or again, those of Shakespeare may vary with the 
 varying minds to which they are addressed, or they may 
 have little value for particular persons or epochs. Whereas 
 an historical fact (there is here happily no question of 
 miracles) remains true eternally; no idiosyncrasy of 
 character, no defect of critical powers, no development of 
 intelligence, no national or local peculiarity can take any- 
 thing from it or add anything to it. It lies beyond the 
 limit of suspicious phrases, such as " this is true to me/' or 
 " this finds me out," or " this expresses my sense of the 
 beautiful." Nor does it need to be pointed out that in the 
 realm of religion, which professes to be a revelation of the 
 dealings of God with man, this eternity of fact is all- 
 important. It makes an immense difference whether Moses 
 did actually, at a great crisis of his people's fate, address to 
 God this intercession, or whether some Jewish poet centuries 
 later painted it as dramatically true and poetically beautiful. 
 In religion, which is the science of life in its relations 
 Godward, we want facts first, and imagination, with all its 
 treasures of worship, idealism, sentiment, and mysticism, 
 afterwards. 
 
 Nor can I have the smallest doubt as to what will be the 
 result of the conflict between the two modes of thought, if 
 
154 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 conflict there is to be. It is not merely that science is 
 powerful enough to carry its own conception of truth into 
 every region of thought, or that the mind of man under 
 its influence is slowly awakening to the tremendous 
 seriousness and absolute necessity of facts, or that this 
 tendency, being as it is the one original contribution of this 
 century to the history of human thought, cannot cease to 
 operate till it has modified religious no less than so-called 
 secular truth. But I take my stand upon the one decisive 
 consideration, that science does not take from religion any 
 power of imagination or idealism which it possessed before, 
 does not interfere with the operation of these two faculties, 
 does not censure or depreciate their productions. The play 
 of the human mind about facts and events would still be 
 as free as ever, provided only it did not pass itself off as 
 being historically true. So far as regards poetry and art, 
 no contradiction could arise : they do not pretend to be 
 true in any sense of which historical criticism could take 
 account. But in religion let it be granted that science 
 busied itself ever so minutely with the facts, that could not 
 destroy the ideal or poetical truths which have been built 
 upon them. I mean this : If the story of the golden calf 
 were reduced to the level of legend, religion as a science of 
 facts would so far cease to exist. But if it were proved to 
 be historical, not one atom of the beauty and power of the 
 narrative would be lost. Why that which purports to be 
 history, and often is of immense historical value, should 
 lose its " eternal truth," if it could be shown to have actually 
 happened, passes my comprehension. I entirely fail to 
 understand how that which is poetical and true in the mind 
 of an unknown Jewish writer becomes " dry " if actually 
 
The Miracles of God. 155 
 
 spoken by Moses in the agony of his intercession. And to 
 pass to wider spheres, it is surely equally true that every 
 beautiful or fruitful Christian phrase or idea, such as those 
 I quoted at the outset, can receive no injury from the most 
 careful and prosaic examination of facts. For if they are 
 independent of historical events, as some people like to 
 think, and were derived from the thoughts and emotions of 
 great men, then clearly the reduction of the Old and New 
 Testament alike to the region of fables would not injure 
 them. If, once more, they are really derived from events 
 falsely supposed to have taken place, then they are neither 
 beautiful nor fruitful themselves, and must perish, as they 
 deserve to do, at the touch of science. But if, as I believe, 
 they are founded upon real historical events, then the result 
 of scientific investigation will only be to add that touch of 
 positive truth to these large and noble phrases which will 
 enable them to survive even the sceptical tendencies of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 The question then to be decided is, whether we have in 
 the Bible an account of what God has done by special 
 intervention in the case of one chosen people, or whether 
 we have an account of what that people imagined He had 
 done. And I contend that this question can only be ap- 
 proached I do not say decided by the application to it 
 of scientific method in a manner totally different from what 
 has hitherto obtained. This last may be designated, for 
 convenience of classification, the d priori method, and I 
 shall proceed, at the risk of seeming to recapitulate what I 
 have said before, to give two or three illustrations of its 
 application and results. I do so in order to distinguish it 
 clearly from the object I have before me in this present 
 
156 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 essay, and also to show how unsatisfactory the results have 
 been in the way of deciding the question now before us. 
 The course of discussion has been this. Objections have 
 been raised to the possibility or credibility of miracles as 
 such ; these have been answered with more or less success 
 as they have appeared ; finally, the contest has ended in a 
 drawn battle, neither party being able to convince the other, 
 although, of course, many valuable results have been 
 indirectly arrived at. No less than four such discussions 
 may be mentioned as having taken place. 
 
 First, it has been said that there is no trustworthy his- 
 torical evidence. So far, indeed, as regards the New 
 Testament I have assumed, and shall continue to do so, 
 that, apart from the miraculous element, the evidence is 
 perfectly satisfactory is, indeed, overwhelming. But the 
 case of the Old Testament is obviously very different. On 
 the one hand we have a continuous history showing one 
 main purpose running throughout its whole course ; display- 
 ing a noble and progressive morality ; joined with exquisite 
 gifts of poetry, eloquence, and prophecy; wonderfully 
 accurate in local details and colouring ; strikingly faithful 
 to human nature and character ; based upon a conception 
 of the being and attributes of God, which, however its 
 origin be explained, falls little short of the miraculous ; 
 finally, written by men impressed with a profound belief in 
 the supernatural interposition of God, and attributing to 
 Him actions entirely worthy of His grandeur and goodness. 
 On the other hand, there is little or no external authority ; 
 there are internal difficulties of the most serious character 
 which it is not necessary to particularise in detail ; there 
 are stories of, to say the least, the most legendary ap- 
 
The Miracles of God. 157 
 
 pearance ; there are, above all, suspicious similarities to 
 the temper of mind which has produced the supernatural 
 in other nations. Professor Evvald has made one attempt 
 by omitting, not only miracles, but also details to bridge 
 the gulf, and we have as the result what is no doubt an 
 invaluable account of the general course and spiritual 
 meaning of the history. It is too soon to predict with any 
 certainty the fate of this attempt, but no critic will deny 
 that it is at times arbitrary in the extreme, that it fails to 
 explain many of the phenomena, and that it bears a peril- 
 ous resemblance to Niebuhr's attempt to re-write the history 
 of ancient Rome.* Nor is it easy to overcome the feeling 
 that his almost unbroken silence on the subject of miracles 
 is like the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted. 
 Yet upon one occasion, strangely enough in dealing with 
 the miracles of Elisha, that silence is broken in a passage 
 too significant not to be quoted at length : 
 
 " The province of religion is always the province of miracles also, 
 because it is that of pure and strong faith in the presence of heavenly 
 forces, actively as well as passively ; where, therefore, true religion 
 makes the most powerful efforts, there will be a corresponding display 
 of miracles which will either actually take place through the activity of 
 the believing spirit, or will be, at any rate, experienced by the believing 
 heart : while to be vividly penetrated, though only from a distance, 
 with the might of such forces, is in itself a gain. Thus far the age of 
 Elijah and Elisha, when the true religion was obliged to maintain itself 
 with the utmost force against its internal enemies, was as rich in 
 miracles as the days of Moses and Joshua, or the conclusion of the 
 
 * It may be well to give an instance in passing of what I mean. Professor 
 Ewald describes the character and conduct of Saul with almost as much 
 minuteness as, for instance, Mr Grote delineates Alcibiades. Yet in a note on 
 page 51, volume iii. (English Translation), he says, " The account of the first 
 narrator is probably derived from a drama." What would be said if we should 
 write a history of Henry VIII. founded upon Shakespeare's drama ? One feels 
 inclined to exclaim, Oh for an hour of the late Sir G. C. Lewis ! 
 
158 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Judges had been ; only these miracles do not now, as in the time of 
 Moses and Joshua, affect the whole nation, nor, as in the era of the last 
 Judges, are they directed against a foreign people, but they proceed 
 from a few individual prophets who are compelled, as instruments of 
 the ancient religion, to exert all the greater power, as in the nation 
 itself the true faith threatens to disappear. No such stories can be 
 anything more than scattered traces of a spirit itself miraculous, and 
 of the impressions immediately produced by it ; but that there is some 
 spirit of power in religion, to the agency of which they all point, is only 
 the more certain." (English Translation, vol. iv., page 83.) 
 
 No one can say that this is a satisfactory account of the 
 miraculous element It concedes too much to meet the 
 approval of science and it falls short of the demands of 
 religion. And thus we come round to the old position that 
 those who stumble at the miraculous will reject the evidence, 
 and those who do not, will accept it. One result does, 
 however, emerge from this discussion, which might almost 
 be termed a canon of criticism. It is that the strength of 
 the evidence for miracles is, on the whole, that of the 
 strongest part of the chain, and not, as might be supposed, 
 of the weakest Once admit that any one miracle, such as 
 a Resurrection, has actually taken place, and the a priori 
 objection to any other miracle is removed. But again, the 
 spirit which accepts even a true miracle is so far liable to 
 accept and to record without due caution and inquiry the 
 stories of false ones. I am inclined to fancy that we have 
 in this " canon " a key which may be found to unlock 
 several difficulties. 
 
 Secondly, the miracles in the Bible have been objected 
 to on grounds derived from a comparison with the mira- 
 culous inventions of other nations. I have alluded to this 
 already, and need not repeat the reasons for my conviction 
 that here again the battle is a drawn one. 
 
The Miracles of God. 159 
 
 A third objection, derived from an antecedently supposed 
 impossibility of breaking the laws of nature, may be dis- 
 missed with precisely the same remark. Professor Mozley's 
 book is entirely devoted to the task of meeting this and 
 similar a priori objections : the idea of examining the 
 miracles themselves, of classifying and arranging them, in 
 a word, of submitting them to an inductive process, never 
 seems to have crossed the- mind of the Bampton Lecturer, 
 whose book, nevertheless, purports to be " On Miracles." 
 In the fourth Lecture he distinctly affirms that the proof 
 of miracles depends upon the assumption of a moral and 
 personal God, a concession which, so far at any rate as we 
 are concerned, renders the whole position untenable. If 
 there be such a God as we can, by our unassisted efforts, 
 form an adequate conception of; if that God created the 
 world by an effort of His will and an exercise of His power, 
 then every reasonable man will not deny the possi- 
 bility that He may, if He pleases, interfere, not, indeed, to 
 suspend the laws of nature, but to produce special results 
 by the agency of His will acting through and upon them. 
 (If I take up a stone, I do not alter the laws of nature, but 
 I do alter the condition of things.) But then this assump- 
 tion of a creating and sustaining God, possessed of will 
 and purpose, is just that which positive thought refuses to 
 make, and so once more the battle is a drawn one. " Your 
 belief in God," it is answered, " is derived ultimately from 
 the supernatural events with which He has been associated 
 from the dawn of reflection, and therefore the existence of 
 God cannot, as you assert, be admitted to prove the credi- 
 bility of miracles, while the miracles are by your own 
 confession incapable of proving the existence of God." 
 
160 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Arid so we go round and round the weary circle of d, priori 
 argumentation. 
 
 The fourth and last objection, however, requires- a little 
 careful consideration, because to a certain extent it deals 
 with miracles as they are, and distinguishes between the 
 various events to which the name has been indiscriminately 
 applied. Certain of these, then, it is said, cannot possibly 
 be true, because they are inconsistent with our highest 
 notions of morality, and, therefore, must on no account be 
 ascribed to God. Either they are not true or God did not 
 do them. 
 
 Perhaps the real force of this objection will be best 
 observed by taking as an example, not a mere passing 
 story of no great interest or value, but one of moral signi- 
 ficance and real importance. Such an example is presented 
 by the account of the rebellion of Korah during the 
 wanderings in the wilderness. Can it be true that God 
 caused the earth to open and swallow up whole families of 
 misguided men and innocent women and children ? Our 
 first instinct is to deny it altogether ; our second is to ask 
 with some uneasiness whether even thus we get rid of the 
 difficulty. The narrative is, like the Bible stories in 
 general, if regarded apart from the supernatural element, 
 perfectly rational, straightforward, and consistent, probable 
 alike in the actions it records, the motives to which it 
 attributes them, and the human nature which is thus 
 delineated. Then we go on to ask, as Mr Maurice has 
 done, by what tests we are to distinguish actions of this 
 sort from the destruction of Lisbon, whether it may not be 
 regarded as the explanation of similar catastrophes, a 
 revelation of the eternal law of God against selfishness, 
 
The Miracles of God. 1 6 1 
 
 sin, and rebellion, which have sacrificed and continue to 
 sacrifice their myriads of victims with Jesus of Nazareth 
 at their head ? But if this be not thought satisfactory (it is 
 not to me), why may not a sober utilitarian philosophy 
 come to our aid and suggest that morality is, after all, not 
 an undeviating law of conduct intuitionally apprehended, 
 but the power of dealing rightly with facts as they arise ? 
 We are, therefore, unable in some cases to decide whether 
 any course of conduct was right, not because our moral 
 nature is different from God's, but because we do not 
 adequately know the facts. And if this merely negative 
 position be thought unsatisfactory, we may go on to say 
 boldly that granting for one moment the possibility of the 
 interposition of God by supernatural means, then this 
 destruction was warranted by plain considerations of utility. 
 For the rebellion must have led to civil war, in which, not 
 merely the national life of the people would have run great 
 risk of perishing, but more lives would have been lost, more 
 innocent people would have suffered, and (to use the one 
 triumphant nineteenth-century test of what is right), more 
 property would have been destroyed, than by its sudden 
 and miraculous overthrow. And, therefore, it is just as truly 
 moral as the destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red 
 Sea, which, again, is hardly to be distinguished from that 
 of the French army in the Russian campaign of 1812. 
 
 So true, then, is it that these d priori considerations 
 lead us nowhere at the last. Once more, I must again 
 and again affirm, does it become apparent that neither 
 Rationalists nor believers have any effective arguments at 
 their disposal wherewith to confute each other by summary 
 intellectual processes. If so, then the true work of the 
 
1 62 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 intellect is to create a moral predisposition by presenting 1 , 
 enforcing, explaining the facts which it thus enables to 
 speak for themselves and recommend themselves to the 
 consciousness of mankind. If arguments for and against 
 the miraculous come to nothing, why not examine the 
 miracles themselves ? If science and religion are to be 
 made friends together, it will be accomplished by applying 
 the methods of the former to the study of the latter. 
 Miracles, like other events, may be classified, grouped, 
 arranged, submitted to the intellectual microscope, made 
 to give up their meaning, whatever it may be. Such an 
 examination is strictly scientific, whether the miracles are 
 assumed to be true or admitted to be productions of the 
 Jewish mind ; in the former case they belong to the region 
 of actual facts, in the latter to that of ideas. Hitherto, 
 very little indeed has been attempted in this direction. 
 It is as though men had been content to argue about the 
 nature of the unknown interior of the Australian continent, 
 instead of sending exploring parties to see for themselves. 
 To be sure there is great danger that the first adventurers 
 may perish, especially if they make the attempt with 
 inadequate powers and insufficient equipment. Yet even 
 then the desire of ascertaining their fate and doing honour 
 to their remains will lead to future expeditions and further 
 discoveries. It is with some such feelings as these that I 
 survey the wilderness of stories that make up the super- 
 natural element in Jewish history, before proceeding to 
 plunge into it. And, that I shall come to an untimely 
 intellectual end in the midst of it, I am more than afraid. 
 
 Now on glancing at this confused mass of events, can 
 the eye discern any principle of classification and arrange- 
 
The Miracles of God. 163 
 
 ment ? The first thing we ask about actions is, Who did 
 them ? and then all at once we are brought face to face 
 with the surprising confusion of thought which attributes 
 them all alike to God. In reality we find that they divide 
 into three classes : those done by God alone ; those done 
 by God and man together ; those done by man alone. I 
 take these three in order. 
 
 The miracles done by God alone are those which come 
 to man simply as a recipient, without any expectation on 
 his part or any co-operation of his own will. These are 
 by far the most important, comprising as they do the first 
 call of God to the spirit of man, as evinced in the appear- 
 ance to Moses in the burning bush, the call of Samuel, the 
 Annunciation, the Resurrection, and the conversion of St 
 Paul. And let us at once observe that they demand an 
 intellectual conception entirely different from those which 
 we apply, rightly or wrongly, to other miracles. They are 
 not signs, nor marvels, nor proofs of revelation, nor argu- 
 ments for design, but in the simplest sense actions of God. 
 Let us emancipate ourselves once for all from the necessity 
 of regarding them from the point of view suggested by the 
 doctrine of final .causes. Why should we apply to the 
 personal actions of God some theory of causation which 
 we never apply to our own ? While we are surveying the 
 large field of general design, or ultimate purpose, or 
 imaginary necessity, we are simply missing the whole 
 value of the events themselves which the Bible represents, 
 merely as actions done to meet each pressing need as it 
 arose, whose one only continuous motive is this, that they 
 proceed from a heart that never ceases to love mankind, 
 and a wisdom that never fails to watch over man's growth 
 
164 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 towards perfection. To the writers of the Bible, at any 
 rate of the Old Testament, they were, as has been often 
 remarked, not supernatural at all. God was in the midst 
 of them, and might at any moment act or speak as He 
 pleased. They drew no distinction between natural and 
 supernatural ; any trivial law that occurred to Moses was 
 attributed to God, " Who spake unto Moses," as much as 
 the most tremendous events of their history. This con- 
 sideration makes it exceedingly difficult for us to draw the 
 line now, and may, indeed, render theories of the mira- 
 culous and tests of the supernatural for ever impossible. 
 But, on the other hand, it removes the whole subject from 
 the influence of artificial modern notions of proof and 
 design, and places it in the region of actions done by a 
 just and merciful Being. So that if the theological intel- 
 lect has done its best to dry up and wither the history of 
 God's dealings with mankind, the imagination may still 
 have power to reanimate it, and make it intelligible to the 
 human heart and conscience. 
 
 And when we go on to inquire what was the effect of 
 these actions, we find that it resembles that of actions done 
 by man to man. Not primarily to startle or to convince, 
 but simply to communicate with him and gain a mastery 
 over his spirit by revealing to him facts and truths such 
 was the purpose of God, as it is the purpose of every being 
 who adresses himself to another being capable of receiving 
 spiritual impressions from him. This, indeed, is the specific 
 peculiarity of this class of miracles, in which the work of 
 men is merely receptive, and God, for the first time in the 
 life of each of His servants, reveals Himself to them, claims 
 them as His own, assigns to them their duty, and elevates 
 
The Miracles of God. 1 65 
 
 them henceforward into what Ewald calls the miraculous 
 spirit. For when once men are convinced by external 
 evidence, sufficient for themselves, that God is in special 
 communication with them, then two results immediately 
 take place. They acquire a command over nature because 
 a power greater than nature is known to be overruling all 
 things for their good, and they acquire a mental certainty 
 that the thoughts which come and go are not the mere 
 chance workings of their own minds, but the inspiration of 
 God, subject, of course, to the one invariable test that they 
 are right and just in themselves. In short, the very first 
 result of miracles of this discription is to eliminate the 
 idea of chance or fate from the operations alike of nature 
 and of the human mind, and to substitute faith in that 
 which is orderly, regular, systematic, and designed by a 
 benevolent will for our happiness and improvement. All 
 faith * is, indeed, ultimately the apprehension of the laws 
 underlying physical and moral phenomena. The human 
 
 * The use of the word "faith" is so various and puzzling that it may be 
 well to recapitulate here the meanings which it bears, and their relations to 
 each other. 
 
 1. Faith is assent to any proposition whatever a belief that it is true. 
 
 2. Faith is assent to propositions which come to us upon the evidence of 
 others, and therefore implies, (a) some trust in the witnesses, (b) some moral or 
 immoral tendency in ourselves which makes the testimony satisfactory to us. 
 
 3. Faith is assent to the propositions that are the most general conclusions 
 of human experience, and are therefore fundamental. These are such as the 
 following : That experience is to be trusted ; that law is universal ; that there is a 
 tendency in things to goodness ; that there is a right and wrong. Moreover these 
 have an appearance of being intuitional, because they are born in individuals 
 as the inheritance which they receive from the accumulated experience of 
 ancestors. But there is no essential distinction between faith in these elemen- 
 tary propositions and faith in the latest scientific discovery. And in all cases 
 faith means assent. Lastly, the strength of the assent much more its moral 
 influence does not depend solely upon the conclusiveness of the evidence, but 
 upon this as related to the moral or intellectual condition of the person assenting. 
 
1 66 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 mind, whether religious or scientific, postulates the exis- 
 tence of something regular behind appearances, which is 
 good just because it is regular, and the knowledge of which 
 is useful merely because it enables us to live our lives and 
 frame our conduct accordingly. I am not, of course, deny- 
 ing that this apprehension may and does rest upon very 
 different degrees and kinds of evidence in the respective 
 regions of religion and science ; but what I contend is, that 
 in both alike men crave to believe in the existence of some- 
 thing fixed and stable upon which they can absolutely 
 rely. When they have attained to this belief, no matter 
 whether it be in a law of nature or in the presence of God, 
 then the absolute conviction which results is the final 
 triumph of faith, and produces the same kind of effects 
 upon their character. Thus the certainty of men like 
 Moses and Elijah, their prophetic control over nature, the 
 moral decisiveness of their actions, create a real bond of 
 sympathy between them and the scientific mind, while a 
 religious mind will not fail to remember that these great 
 qualities were consistent with the deepest inward struggles 
 and torments. To sum up, then, I place in the first rank 
 of importance and reality this class of miracles, because 
 they are simply communications from God to men that 
 explain their future lives and actions, by giving them that 
 moral power which is best described as faith apprehending 
 the unchanging will of God. 
 
 But then what was the nature of the outward fact by 
 which the call of God was made ? Was it in the first place 
 an objective reality ? Now the time may come when the 
 whole conception of the relations between subject and 
 object will be modified by positive thought ; but waiving 
 
The Miracles of God. 167 
 
 all considerations of this sort, I answer the question by 
 asking how we can possibly tell. What method of inves- 
 tigation can we follow that would tend in the least degree 
 to throw light upon a difficulty of this description ? Per- 
 sonally, my sympathy is on the side of those who receive 
 the history of these calls in their literal simplicity; because 
 every attempt to explain them does but evince that 
 curiously purblind spirit- in which men, dazzled by the 
 lights of the nineteenth century after Christ, approach the 
 history of nearly as many centuries before Him. But no 
 explanation whatever ought to be demanded as an article 
 of faith or rejected as a product of heresy. Men really 
 argue the question as though Moses went next day in the 
 spirit of Faraday to see whether he had been the victim of 
 an optical delusion, or as though he recognised to himself 
 that it was henceforth his bounden duty to deliver his 
 nation, while smiling within his heart at the superstitious 
 dread which had, nevertheless, suggested or confirmed his 
 purpose. The rational student of miraculous history will, 
 I feel sure, decline to pronounce dogmatically upon such a 
 question. These events may have been produced by the 
 efforts of an excited imagination ; but then, also, they may 
 not ; and some of them are plainly not susceptible of such 
 treatment, and must, therefore, if objective reality be denied, 
 be relegated into the number of simple legends and fables. 
 What he will feel is that there is something ultimately in- 
 explicable in the simplest operation of nature, or the most 
 ordinary action of man, and the exact nature of these 
 miraculous appearances will take its place in the region of 
 ultimate incomprehensibilities: the more so as by virtue of 
 being believed to be supernatural, they are at once taken 
 
1 68 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 out of the ordinary distinction between subject and object. 
 But what he will maintain resolutely, positively, and dog- 
 matically about them, will be as follows. First, that the 
 men to whom these appearances came received them as 
 simple actual facts declaring to them the will and mind of 
 God. If it were admitted that even a trace of a suspicion 
 ever crossed their minds, that their belief was only the 
 result of their own imaginations, then St Paul, for instance, 
 would be reduced to the level of the grossest deceivers by 
 whom mankind has been afflicted. Secondly, that, there- 
 fore, to the men themselves they were really objective, that 
 is, they had all the moral effects and natural consequences 
 of actions done to and towards us by some power, will, or 
 person lying outside ourselves. This may be proved by 
 the simple test of what they did. Moses did not draw 
 near to the bush, but hid his face and took off his shoes. 
 Joshua did the same. Samuel ran twice to Eli and insisted 
 that the voice he heard had come from him. Elijah went 
 out and wrapped his face in his mantle. Zacharias came 
 out of the temple dumb, and insisted upon calling his child 
 John. Mary went with haste to see Elizabeth, and " her 
 soul magnified the Lord." The Baptist knew the Messiah 
 by the descent of the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, 
 and told the people so in plain words. The Apostles 
 declared that Christ was raised from the dead, and went 
 into Galilee to meet Him there. St Paul went into 
 Damascus blind, there to wait till it should be told him 
 what he was to do. Nothing, therefore, is gained morally 
 if, in our eagerness to attribute every event to man's un- 
 assisted imagination, we refuse to believe in any actual 
 sensible interposition of God. The men themselves gave 
 
The Miracles of God. 169 
 
 the plainest proofs that they did believe in such interposi- 
 tion, and could it be shown to-morrow that the burning 
 bush was a natural meteoric appearance, our view of the 
 character, the beliefs, and the actions of Moses would not 
 be in the least modified unless, which is absurd, it could 
 be also shown that he himself suspected as much. Thirdly, 
 that those who believe in a living God are justified in 
 speaking of these events as, in a special sense, actions of 
 His, done out of His wisdom and benevolence towards His 
 creatures. The only alternative, except rejecting them 
 altogether, is to attribute them to mere chance events, a 
 meteor, a dream, or a storm which fell upon minds 
 rendered susceptible by previous inward struggles and 
 reflection. No man of science, possessed of the reverential 
 spirit which springs from the homage paid to facts, would, 
 I feel persuaded, speak of events like these, or, indeed, of 
 anything in the world as chance or accident, though he 
 may be quite unable to connect the outward event and the 
 inward mental effect by any law of causation. He might 
 decline, though I do not see why he should,, to follow the 
 religious man in his assertion that, explain their nature as 
 you will, events which wrought such prodigious conse- 
 quences upon men like St Paul, and through him upon the 
 world, are best attributed to the overruling will of a per- 
 sonal God ; but science goes all lengths with religion in 
 abhorring the idea of chance or accident science, because 
 it seeks to reduce everything to the operation of law; 
 religion, because it believes in a moral government of the 
 world. Some day or other these two, law and will, will 
 meet together, to the infinite confusion of all who have 
 tried to separate them, as though the One God were a 
 
1 70 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 different Being in His dealings in man and in nature 
 Meanwhile, until some one discovers a better explanation 
 than the philosophy of Atheism, which falls back as the 
 last resort upon the doctrine of a fortuitous concurrence of 
 incidents, we may continue to adopt the old Hebrew faith 
 which found its simple expression in the words, " God did 
 it" 
 
 The conclusion, then, to which we are led in respect of 
 the objective character of these miraculous appearances is, 
 that that which in other cases impostors invent or fanatics 
 imagine was entirely accepted by some of the greatest and 
 best of men ; that it formed the groundwork of a profound 
 belief in a personal God, who was with them ; that it was 
 soberly related to other people without the least sus- 
 picion that they were mistaken ; and that their future 
 conduct was shaped by the convictions impressed upon 
 them by what they thought they had seen and heard. In 
 this statement we have, as it seems to me, all that is re- 
 quired as a foundation for a revealed religion, while there 
 is nothing in it to which objection can be made, provided 
 that the narrative be accepted as historically, though not 
 of necessity literally, true. 
 
 Another element common to all miracles of this class is 
 that the appearance was always regarded as that of a person 
 was, in short, spiritual and not physical. It might be an 
 angel, or a vision, or a voice, or a human form, but it was 
 never a mere startling occurrence in the physical world. 
 At first sight the burning bush might seem to be an excep- 
 tion to the rule, but the true Hebrew conception is pre- 
 served for us in St Stephen's speech, in which it is stated 
 that an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses, and that 
 
The Miracles of God. 1 7 1 
 
 when he drew near, a voice came unto him. No doubt, to 
 a certain extent the converse of this is true also. I mean 
 that the idea of angels or spiritual intelligences is bound 
 up with the mystery of natural processes, so that they 
 might even be called powers of nature. But it is interest- 
 ing to observe how in the growth of the Jewish mind the 
 idea and the appearance of angels became detached from 
 any connection whatever with natural occurrences, till in 
 the time of the New Testament, angels were regarded 
 simply as intelligent messengers from God, bearing close 
 resemblance to men. We may, therefore, lay down the 
 important rule as applicable to all miracles of this class, 
 and to nearly all Scriptural miracles whatsoever, that no 
 natural prodigy, no physical disturbance, ever takes place 
 apart from the co-operation of a personal will (human or 
 divine) revealed in it, and giving it a moral significance. 
 The few exceptions to this rule, such as the speaking of 
 Baalam's ass and Jonah's whale, are precisely those which 
 the most rigid orthodoxy is beginning to feel the necessity 
 of explaining away at any cost. 
 
 We go on next to regard this class of miracles from the 
 point of view of the recipient, to inquire, that is, whether 
 there are any facts common to all of them which throw 
 any light upon the disposition of mind of those to whom 
 they occurred. Several things strike us at once. 
 
 First, we notice an unbroken silence as to what they were 
 thinking about at the time when, as they believed, God ad- 
 dressed them. It may be that a certain moral predisposi- 
 tion was required, but this is not what the persons chiefly 
 concerned attached any importance to. To them it seemed 
 more true to believe that the Spirit of God comes where and 
 
172 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 when He listeth. It may well be that the heart of Moses 
 was brooding over his people's wrongs ; that the child 
 Samuel was burning with indignation at priestly corrup- 
 tions ; that St Paul was shaken through and through by 
 the unyielding constancy of Christian sufferers under the 
 persecutions he was inflicting. But from first to last there 
 is not a word to tell us that this was so, or that they 
 thought of themselves as contributing in the smallest 
 degree to their own call or conversion. " It pleased God, " 
 was the unfailing account given by St Paul. " The Lord 
 God of our fathers has appeared to us, " was the simple 
 explanation of Moses. 
 
 If, however, in obedience to the demands of modern re- 
 ligious thought, we seek to discover in what this moral pre- 
 disposition consisted, most certainly it does not lie upon 
 the surface. Nothing can be at first sight more varied 
 than the circumstances and characters of the men who were 
 called by God, at the time of their calling. Moses after 
 failure, followed by many years' retirement in the wilder- 
 ness ; Samuel as a child growing into the knowledge of 
 good and evil ; Elijah no one knows how or when ; St Paul 
 in the full tide of hatred and oppression ; our Lord himself 
 simply at the age of legal and actual manhood what law 
 runs throughout these and other widely different cases ? 
 Only, I think, the presence in them of perfect sincerity and 
 truthfulness. But then consider what this amounts to. It 
 means a perfect readiness to accept facts, and to act with 
 absolute fidelity to the convictions which they inspire. 
 These men were perfectly incapable of explaining away 
 what they saw and heard and felt to be true. That this 
 incapacity was in some sort connected with the temper of 
 
The Miracles of God. 173 
 
 mind that did not require a scientific explanation may be 
 true, but then that does not prevent this temper of mind 
 from having its definite use and playing its destined part 
 in the history of man. To it we owe the first outburst of 
 poetry, religion, and art three things that science may 
 very powerfully modify, but could never have created. 
 This moral sincerity, this incapacity of playing false with 
 our convictions, is what we call on the intellectual side, 
 genius, which may be defined in all its manifold varieties of 
 operation as the capacity to receive and act upon com- 
 munications from the Eternal. The burning bush would 
 have had one meaning for Moses, another for Raphael, a 
 third for Newton ; but prophet, artist, and philosopher 
 would all agree in this, that whatever truth it conveyed to 
 them they would implicitly receive and faithfully declare. 
 We can thus in some measure understand that the truth of 
 the free grace of God was revealed to St Paul, or the name 
 Jehovah to Moses, by reason of the same law of God's 
 working as that by which the movement of the earth was 
 revealed to Galileo. And, on the other hand, a fatal moral 
 incapacity for seeing things as they are lies at the root of 
 the Philistinism, Pharisaism, and spirit of obstructiveness 
 which have watered the earth with the tears and the blood 
 of the heroes and saints of God. In one single sentence 
 our Lord, speaking as the representative of the servants 
 and preachers of truth (of every kind), has summed up the 
 unceasing conflict between these two spiritual powers 
 " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, 
 and testify that we have seen ; and ye receive not our wit- 
 ness (St John iii. n). 
 
 A third remark which we discern as being applicable to 
 
1 74 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 all these appearances is that they bear a close and natural 
 relation to the future lives and labours of those to whom 
 God made Himself known ; and, further, that they are pro- 
 gressive in accordance with the onward march of the 
 people in religious knowledge and spiritual life. With 
 Moses we find that the idea meant to be conveyed was 
 God's absolute power over the operations of nature, which 
 henceforward should obey the prophet in working out the 
 deliverance of His people. To Joshua the lesson was taught 
 by the appearance of an armed messenger of God that 
 Jehovah was no less able, and resolved to subdue the wrath 
 and might of man before the face of His people Israel. 
 Samuel was instructed by a voice that the special domain 
 of God was the spirit, to which God would hereafter address 
 Himself, and so he became the first founder of the prophetic 
 order. But the succession of prophets immediately follow- 
 ing him were men who by the power of human genius made 
 Israel into a great and prosperous kingdom ; in them for 
 instance, in David and Solomon the voice of God spoke by 
 what we should call, to use the most comprehensive avail- 
 able word, ability. Therefore the second founder of the 
 prophetic order, Elijah, felt the inspiration of God as a still 
 small voice under circumstances which taught him, and 
 through him the prophets of the later monarchy, that, not 
 in outward greatness nor in political success, but in inward 
 spiritual fidelity to God, lay the true secret of Israel's 
 grandeur and the real purpose of his calling. The call of 
 Isaiah is represented as a purely spiritual vision, an unlock- 
 ing of the mind of man to discern spiritual realities under 
 forms which do not purport to have any material external 
 existence ; furthermore, the accomplishment of the divine 
 
The Miracles of God. 1 75 
 
 purpose, no matter how weak or fallen Israel might be- 
 come, is still more clearly recognised. The unnamed pro- 
 phet of the Captivity speaks without any express call at 
 all ; suffering and experience had done their work, and the 
 prophetic spirit could at length discern the mind of God in 
 the march of events, such as the rise of Cyrus and the ap- 
 proaching fall of Babylon. More than 500 years later the 
 same is true, in a still more significant manner, of the 
 Baptist, of whom it is simply said that the spirit of God 
 came upon him. It is also remarkable that it is expressly 
 stated that John did no miracle, just as what may be 
 called the miraculous spirit is entirely absent from the 
 writings and thoughts of the second Isaiah. These two 
 facts are, it cannot be doubted, closely connected. Not 
 having had an outward call (that is, to define it again, a 
 call which, whether objective or not, was for all moral and 
 intellectual purposes real and objective to those who re- 
 ceived it), they were not possessed of the miraculous spirit, 
 and neither in their own minds nor in the minds of their 
 followers were connected with the power of doing super- 
 natural works. I shall, however, have to refer to this point 
 again, when we come to consider the laws which seem to 
 underlie the periodical and intermittent outpourings or out- 
 comings of the miraculous power. 
 
 It is necessary now to call attention for a moment to 
 this class of miracles as they appear in the New Testa- 
 ment. Remembering that they were defined to be the 
 original call of God to men without previous knowledge 
 or personal co-operation on their part (except by a passive 
 susceptibility arising from absolute sincerity of disposition), 
 we shall find that there were two persons, and two sets of 
 
1 76 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 persons, to whom God thus spake. First, there were those 
 who were connected more or less directly with the birth of 
 Christ. Practically, however, the Annunciation represents 
 all these. Secondly, there was our Lord himself, to whom 
 the call came at His Baptism. Thirdly, there were the 
 Apostles, who were called by a series of appearances after 
 the Resurrection, culminating in and represented by the 
 descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. Fourthly, there was 
 the conversion of St Paul. In each case we see at once 
 that the object to be gained was the kindling of the spirit 
 of man by a revelation of the being, the favour, and the 
 purposes of God ; in each case we also see that the mira- 
 culous appearance was specially adapted to the life and 
 work of the persons therein called. The only case that 
 requires a brief word of explanation is that of our Lord 
 himself. The circumstances of His call are just what 
 might be expected of One whom we believe to owe His 
 existence directly to God, without any intervention of man. 
 To be owned as the Son of God, in a way that symbolised 
 the indwelling in Him of the Godhead "bodily," kindled 
 in His heart and mind that miraculous spirit which 
 depended upon His unbroken confidence in the Father- 
 hood of God. Henceforward it was His Father's works 
 that He claimed to be doing, His Father's words that He 
 felt sure He was speaking, because the " Father hath borne 
 witness of Me," whereas "ye (the Jews) have neither heard 
 His voice at any time, nor seen His shape." It is impor- 
 tant to observe this, because if there had been no external 
 calling in the case of Christ, then He would have been 
 exempt from the general law which governs the experiences 
 of all God's specially chosen servants in the Bible history. 
 
The Miracles of God. 177 
 
 So far from being unworthy of our conception of Christ, 
 the picture presented to us at His baptism is in harmony 
 both with the general dealings of God and the character 
 of His Son. He comes seeking to fulfil all righteousness, 
 meditating upon the deliverance of humanity from sin, 
 growing into the consciousness of His divine origin and 
 Messiahship. Henceforward undoubting certainty, perfect 
 faith, absolute command over Himself, nature, and circum- 
 stances, mark the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. In 
 this, as in all other points, He was as we are, and subject 
 to the conditions of our human life, and yet He was still 
 the Son of God. 
 
 I conclude this essay with calling attention once more 
 to the special importance of the class of miracles we have 
 been reviewing. 
 
 There is a temptation, to which I had nearly yielded, of 
 attaching to them a purely evidential value. Nothing at 
 first sight seems more natural. Here is a long series of 
 miraculous calls stretching over a great extent of time, all 
 conforming to some distinct moral principle, faithful to 
 one type, developing one uniform purpose of God 
 namely, to communicate with and gain a mastery over 
 the spirit of the great men by whom the world was to be 
 taught religion. That such could have been the mere 
 inventions of the Jewish mind, from Moses to St Paul, is 
 more astounding than miracles themselves ; it is a flagrant 
 exception to everything we know to be true of the work- 
 ings and the power of the human mind. But a moment's 
 consideration suggests what the answer would be. A 
 candid opponent would say, "I admit with you the im- 
 possibility that such ideas could have been invented, or 
 
 M 
 
178 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 rather one main idea persistently carried out through the 
 changing circumstances and characters of fifteen hundred 
 years, therefore I see in this record an argument for 
 supposing that all these stories were due to a great out- 
 burst of Jewish thought at some period in their history yet 
 to be defined, but which is undoubtedly connected with 
 the spirit of the age that produced the book of Deutero- 
 nomy. This same spirit did, as a mere matter of historical 
 fact, take hold of the Jewish people many centuries after- 
 wards, inspiring them with new hopes and a higher 
 morality. Hence it also produced another array of facts 
 in the New Testament conformable to the main idea of 
 Judaism, but conditioned by the growing and progressive 
 spirit of its best and highest minds." Once more I must 
 affirm that there is no answer to be given to an argument 
 of this sort, just as there is no absolute proof that it is true, 
 except such as is drawn from an d priori determination to 
 reject the supernatural. The internal and external evid- 
 ence for say the Book of Exodus is, apart from the 
 supernatural element, consistent at present either with 
 the conclusion that it is on the whole historical, with 
 certain legendary admixtures, or that it is on the whole 
 legendary, with gleams of history here and there shining 
 through it. If, then, this book, or rather the Bible, of 
 which it forms a part, can most worthily set forth the 
 attributes of God, can create the highest morality in man, 
 and produce the best and most useful characters, the 
 events which it relates will carry their own conviction to 
 the minds of men ; if otherwise, they will reject them as 
 a useful superstition that has played its part in the past 
 history of the human race, and must now give way to what 
 
The Miracles of God. 1 79 
 
 will then appear to be more worthy conceptions of truth 
 And if I should seem to assert this principle with weari- 
 some pertinacity, I must plead in excuse that I offer it as 
 my one humble contribution to the settlement of religious 
 controversies by arousing religious people to the necessity 
 of a higher spiritual life, an increased moral excellence, a 
 more vigorous and united action, a larger and more 
 tolerant and more comprehensive charity. The jury 
 that is, the mass of educated opinion is at present 
 greatly perplexed on this point ; advocates on both sides 
 are beginning to admit that they have little expectation 
 of being able to adduce fresh evidence of any material or 
 decisive importaace. Yet time, which cannot alter facts,- 
 may very decidedly alter the tone of mind to which those 
 facts are submitted, and change the light in which they 
 are regarded, so that the jury, now locked up for a night 
 of doubt, darkness, and disputation, may at the dawn of 
 morning after all be prepared with a tolerably unanimous 
 verdict. 
 
 The true value, then, of this class of miracles is to be 
 found in the religious influence which they bring to bear 
 on human hearts and minds. If once accepted as true, we 
 are assured by them that the unknown God has communi- 
 cated with man and revealed His character and His will 
 to His chosen servants. And yet it must in candour be 
 confessed that these are just the miracles many of which 
 have been most exposed to suspicion and rejection. Take, 
 for instance, no less a person than the late Dean Milman. 
 In the history of the Jews he defends strongly the reality 
 of a supernatural interference at the Red Sea; but in the 
 history of Christianity he appears to regard the appear- 
 
180 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ance of angelic messengers to Mary and Zacharias as 
 explicable by subjective impressions. Now I believe that 
 the present tendency of religious thought is beginning to 
 run in the opposite direction. Do what we will, we cannot 
 get rid of the objective, for that miracle, which is the 
 crown of all God's actions I mean the Incarnation is, 
 even more than the Resurrection, either absolute fact or 
 gross fiction. The latter may have been, as Renan sup- 
 poses, a pious delusion of honest people founded upon 
 events falsely but not dishonestly believed to have been 
 witnessed ; but the Incarnation, if untrue, must have been 
 a pure legend, more or less deliberately invented. But if 
 we believe, as Christian people do believe, in so distinct 
 and unmistakable and tremendous a fact as the miraculous 
 Incarnation of Christ, then I should really be glad to be 
 told what possible gain there can be to the cause of 
 rational religion if we attempt to explain away the 
 messengers who announced it. How else could such 
 announcement be made ? and yet made in some way it 
 must be, if God is to deal with us as spiritual beings, 
 through whose wills He means to carry out His designs. 
 The simplicity, propriety, and intrinsic naturalness of the 
 whole narrative, are more than apparent. Here, again, I 
 confess myself quite unable to enter into the state of mind 
 of those who accept the Resurrection, doubt about the 
 Incarnation, and "rationalise" the Annunciation. These 
 all hang together, and form a consistent story to be 
 rejected or received as a whole ; in short, the attempt 
 to discriminate between these New Testament miracles, 
 in which God is the one original actor, and the nature of 
 which lies, therefore, beyond the reach of human investiga- 
 
The Miracles of God. 1 8 1 
 
 tion, seems as unsatisfactory in a religious as it is pitiable 
 in a scientific point of view. Either they all occurred as 
 related, or they did not occur at all.* 
 
 But it must be observed that I limit this remark to the 
 special class of miracles we have been considering. The 
 more, as it seems to me that we can rationalise or explain 
 by natural causes other miracles, such as, for instance, the 
 crossing of the Red Sea, or the more we succeed in doing 
 away with the supernatural element in them by further 
 discoveries in the regions of mind and matter, the better it 
 will be for the cause of religious truth. This will have to 
 be enlarged upon hereafter, but what we want is non- 
 interference with the supremacy and regularity of natural 
 law on the one hand ; on the other, some distinct revelation 
 of God to the soul through the usual organs of apprehen- 
 sion. I hope that what has been said in this essay as to 
 the purpose, the nature, and the "objectivity" (how far 
 necessary to be accepted) of these revelations will remove 
 from some minds certain difficulties they may have felt, 
 and may demonstrate the exceeding importance of the 
 revelations themselves. What men want, I must again 
 repeat, is not signs, wonders, or convulsions of nature, but 
 a voice from a living God, making itself heard by methods 
 sufficient to satisfy a rational and sober mind of its reality. 
 Such a voice may be heard only now and then, and may 
 in its special outward manifestation be confined to a few 
 chosen spirits, from whom it descends to us in the usual 
 
 * Every miracle done by God alone MIGHT belong to one of two classes : 
 
 1. Really objective, but capable of natural explanation, e.g., the conversion 
 of St Paul. 
 
 2. Subjective that is, the effect of the imagination, e.g. (as above), the 
 Resurrection. The Incarnation alone can be neither. 
 
1 82 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 channels of spiritual influence. But to them it reveals, in 
 unmistakable language, not only the abiding character, 
 but also the present designs of Almighty God, and (it 
 may be, but this secondarily) produces in them that 
 undefined control over nature which we call miraculous. 
 We seem thus to have taken one step towards placing 
 ourselves at the centre of the labyrinth of the miraculous, 
 from whence we may hope to adjust its various windings in 
 their true place of reality and usefulness. And yet every 
 step only shows the more clearly what doubtful, hesitating, 
 tentative work it needs must be, and how much easier it is 
 either to swallow everything or reject everything according 
 to our previous mental bias or education. It is not, how- 
 ever, thus that a belief in God has been maintained in 
 searching and trying times ; nor has mere blind defence 
 or equally blind attack any real or fruitful interest for 
 those to whom inquiry is one of the chief delights, and 
 truth one of the main objects of their lives. 
 
THE MIRACLES OF MAN. 
 
 T HAVE already discussed that class of miracles in which 
 -*- God for the first, or at any rate at a decisive time, 
 approaches the spirit of man.* I turn, therefore, next to 
 consider the miracles in the performance of which the will 
 of man co-operates, or even predominates, our object being 
 to gain some insight into the methods of miraculous work- 
 ing as it appears in history, and especially to obtain some 
 clue as to its extent and credibility. In a subject that covers 
 so large an extent of ground, and contains so many inci- 
 dents, it is obvious that we must be content with taking one 
 or two chief events and persons to illustrate the whole. Nor 
 will this be found in practice at all difficult to accomplish. 
 The power of working miracles may be described gener- 
 ally as the control over nature obtained by those who 
 believe that God has communicated to them some special 
 revelation of His being, His character, and His purpose. 
 To such men it becomes apparent that nature, history, and 
 the soul of man, belong to God, who is supreme alike in 
 the world of matter and of mind. But although this is the 
 
 * The distinction is difficult to carry out in all cases, and yet is all-important 
 to my argument. Thus the stories of Balaam and Jonah belong to the first 
 class, because the miracles (as reported) were actions of God, communications 
 to men apart from, and independent of, any actions or knowledge of their own. 
 On the other hand, the census-plague, and the safety of the crew at Malta, were 
 in themselves perfectly natural events, and were only miraculous, so far as they 
 were foretold and interpreted by the " miraculous spirit" of Gad and St Paul 
 respectively. The first class contains all the miracles that are necessary to 
 establish the fact that God has entered into special communication with man ; 
 and if the chief events in it are accepted, all other miracles can be explained in 
 a natural and reasonable way. 
 
184 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 general idea underlying the power of the miraculous, in the 
 actual history we discern a very remarkable and orderly 
 development. Beginning with Moses, this power is simply 
 that of a discoverer, for Moses is represented as doing 
 nothing by himself, but as foretelling what God would do 
 in and through those forces of nature which formed the 
 worship of the ancient Egyptians and dominated over 
 their minds. Ending with Christ the power has become 
 what we may call inventive, for Christ is represented as 
 overruling by His own energy and will the same forces of 
 nature for the welfare and salvation of man. Now, whether 
 we accept the history as a statement of facts or as a record 
 of ideas, it is not to be denied that it presents a remarkable 
 resemblance to the development of scientific thought. 
 First discovery, then invention. First the attempt to learn 
 the laws and qualities of material objects, and then the 
 attempt to mould them into forms suitable to the welfare 
 of mankind. The age of Newton and astronomy precedes 
 the age of Watt and the steam-engine. That all nature is 
 subject to the will of a righteous God, and may therefore be 
 directed by human agency to save men from misery and 
 death, such is the thought of religion. That all nature is 
 guided and established by undeviating law, and may there- 
 fore be adapted by human wisdom and contrivance for 
 man's comfort and happiness, such is the thought of science. 
 So that, view it in what light we please, the idea of the 
 Bible is prophetic of the growth of civilisation. Moses 
 knows what the course of nature will be ; Christ knows 
 how to use its powers to work out His own designs for 
 man's good. Everywhere we have presented to us the idea 
 of a progressive, harmonious, and moral development of 
 man's control over nature. 
 
The Miracles of Man. 1 8 5 
 
 Another point of affinity between the belief in miracles 
 and the tendency of science may at this juncture be use- 
 fully alluded to. This belief rests upon the fact that there 
 is a power external to nature (as we know it) which can 
 adapt, modify, and accelerate the processes and properties 
 of material objects. It does not matter for our present 
 purpose whether the power in question is or is not personal 
 and beneficent ; it is sufficient that it exists as something 
 external to our world and system of things. Now the 
 testimony of science, if I understand it rightly, goes to 
 show that the existence of such a power is both possible 
 and probable. That it is possible I gather from the 
 opinions of Mr Mill, who asserts that as our knowledge is 
 confined to experience we can have no certainty but that 
 the laws of nature, and mind and matter themselves, may 
 be in other spheres of existence dissimilar from what they 
 are here. I think that in view of the late discoveries star- 
 wards, it will have to be admitted that there is a very strong 
 presumption to the contrary, and one that is likely to in- 
 crease in strength the more we know concerning the nature 
 of the heavenly bodies. But however this may be, it is 
 clear that the strictest philosophy of experience admits 
 that for all we can tell there may be powers external to 
 and different from those with which we are acquainted 
 here on earth. If this be so, then if they were brought 
 into contact with our sphere, the effect produced would be 
 miraculous, and thus room is provided for the exercise of 
 powers supernatural to us, but not so in themselves. Nor 
 is it any answer to say that as a matter of experience no 
 such contact has taken place. That is to beg the whole 
 question, and to beg it in a way contrary to what science 
 
1 86 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 demands, judging at least by one of her latest utterances. 
 Sir W. Thomson having got to account for the origin of 
 life, attributes it as an hypothesis to the fall of an aerolite 
 from another planet. That is. to say, he attributes it to 
 what religion calls a miracle, and a very portentous, not to 
 say absurd, miracle it is. For we inquire at once, What 
 about the aerolite ? where did that come from ? It must 
 have come ultimately from the void of the unknown, from 
 that in which religion discerns a (to us) supernatural power, 
 and which it will perversely persist, acting under the inspira- 
 tion of great souls, in calling by the name of a Personal 
 God, and even daring to address as a " Father in Heaven." 
 And thus much having been granted, it is enabled to go on 
 and explain that it is possible for men to work miracles, if they 
 can appropriate or discern the external power by means of 
 a revelation from God addressed to their spirits. Further- 
 more, when science undertakes to explain the creation of 
 the original aerolite, or the first germ, or the first molecule, 
 or the primal force (by whatever name it elects to call the 
 origin of things), then religion will be in a position to ex- 
 plain by natural agencies that which she is now compelled 
 to call miraculous, only because science is compelled to 
 recognise it as unknown. 
 
 The existence of the miraculous is then reduced to a 
 question of evidence, and considering, as I have before 
 observed, what are the astonishing peculiarities of the 
 Jewish people, and what the Bible is which professes to 
 account for them, the presumption in favour of such ex- 
 istence becomes exceedingly strong. But then we are 
 compelled to admit that as the legendary or the fictitious 
 has crept everywhere into history, and especially into the 
 
The Miracles of Man. 187 
 
 sources of history, so we may expect that it will have 
 gathered with especial force about the lives of great men to 
 whom the power of working miracles has been attributed. 
 The legendary spirit may work in two ways : it may invest 
 facts with a peculiar atmosphere of its own, through which 
 historical events loom in curious and disproportioned 
 shapes ; or it may invent facts as expressions of ideas 
 which the marvellous excites in the minds of men. Our 
 object, then, in dealing with the miracles of the Bible, is to 
 attribute to their real origin the accounts as they stand, 
 and to discover, if we can, in what the supernatural element 
 (if there be one) consists. In doing so, we will abide by the 
 following rules, which are, as it seems to me, sufficient to 
 satisfy candid religious minds. 
 
 1st. The absolute good faith and veracity of the historians 
 are to be preserved, for this, if for no other reason, that there 
 is not the slightest ground to convict them of falsehood. 
 
 2d. No question is here raised as to the genuineness or 
 authenticity of the books. That belongs to another branch 
 of inquiry with which I am not at present concerned, 
 Adhuc subjudice Us est. 
 
 3d. No miracle is to be rejected merely because it is 
 improbable, incredible, or appears immoral to us. I again 
 express my dislike of that method of criticism which makes 
 the subjective impressions of one generation the test of the 
 reality of occurrences that happened thousands of years 
 ago. On the other hand, anything extravagant may fairly 
 set us upon a closer examination of the facts or of the 
 evidence, and cannot fail but exercise some influence upon 
 our ultimate decision. But if the things recorded are, as 
 many of them are, inconsistent in their naked simplicity 
 
1 88 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 with the possibilities of human life and human nature, then 
 we are bound to find some explanation of them. There 
 are narratives which do not merely seem impossible to us, 
 but which are impossible to humanity itself. It is, of 
 course, difficult to draw the line in the abstract, though by 
 no means difficult to decide upon separate cases. The con- 
 duct of Pharaoh, for instance, is inexplicable if the narrative 
 is to be taken in its literal simplicity. It is perhaps as well 
 to add that we are here upon well-debated ground, upon 
 which I shall therefore linger as short a time as possible. 
 
 The first question to be asked in surveying the history of 
 miracles is this, Are there any that have no claim to be 
 facts at all, simply because they are stories written for a 
 moral and religious purpose ? There are not perhaps many 
 such, but as an illustration of this kind of story let us take 
 the history of Jonah. The marks by which it may be dis- 
 tinguished from real events are these: 1st. It does not 
 occur in a regular historical book purporting to give an 
 account of the Jewish people. If it did, then to set it 
 down as fiction would seriously impair the value of the 
 whole book. 2d. All the incidents have that dramatic 
 exaggerated appearance which belongs to the realm of 
 fiction, and shows indubitable signs of being due to the 
 imagination. Every dramatist is compelled more or less 
 to force the natural order of events which flow too slowly 
 for the necessities of his plot. " Plot " is indeed the word 
 that exactly expresses the impression made on the reader 
 by the history of Jonah. 3d. The events are adapted to 
 produce certain moral lessons, and to teach certain spiritual 
 truths. This is an evident sign of artificial production, and 
 not of natural growth, 4th. The account of the swallowing 
 
The Miracles of Man. 189 
 
 of the prophet by a fish would not be an insuperable diffi- 
 culty to me if it were the only one, and if it were as well 
 authenticated as other miracles. But the account of the 
 preaching at Nineveh and its results is incredible per se. 
 The limit of time, "within forty days," is like nothing else 
 in the Bible, and pledges God to the performance of some- 
 thing so prodigious as to be impossible. How can we 
 suppose that a great city like Nineveh should repent at 
 the preaching of an entire stranger from a despised race ? 
 How can outward and ceremonial manifestations of repent- 
 ance avert the wrath of God ? What is the meaning of 
 such a repentance as this ? did the Ninevites change their 
 religion, or their social life, or their national policy? The 
 moment we examine the story it falls to pieces if it is 
 regarded as literal fact, though it is possible that Jonah, 
 who is certainly a real personage, may have had relations 
 with Nineveh, which formed the basis of the book. 5th. 
 The moral lessons taught us and very invaluable lessons 
 they are belong to that class which gains nothing by 
 being derived from actual facts, but which might just as 
 well be the results of the meditations of an inspired mind. 
 Any pious Jew might well have written such a story as this 
 with a view to the edification of his people, such parables 
 being common to Eastern literature. No doubt it expresses 
 in a general way what was probably the tone of Jewish 
 thought towards Nineveh at one period of their history; 
 but what was the main idea of the book (if there was any) 
 I must leave to ingenious critics to discover if they can ; every 
 commentator has his own opinion, and is sure that it is the 
 right one. Only let us be sure that the writer never meant 
 his beautiful allegory to be regarded as sober historical fact. 
 
Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 I do not think, however, that this principle will help us 
 in many cases. The miracles of the Captivity in Daniel, 
 and the historical portions of the Book of Job, may perhaps 
 be thus explained ; but as a general rule, the Jewish mind 
 was far too much occupied with the seriousness of facts to 
 give room for the play of invention. 
 
 A second class of miracles which are not to be accepted 
 as literal facts are those in which the narrative itself does 
 not affirm that there was any personal contemporary 
 evidence, but rather by the nature of the case excludes it. 
 Surely we might be spared endless wranglings as to the 
 historical value of the account of the Fall or the Deluge, if 
 we did but remember so very obvious a truth. If indeed 
 the writers claimed in so many words to have had an express 
 revelation of the facts, or if any competent authority ascribed 
 it to them, then it would be our duty either to accept their 
 statements or condemn them as deceivers. But from this 
 miserable alternative we are preserved by the artless wisdom 
 of the Bible itself. What we have is a story of Adam or 
 Noah told by men to whom the distinction between the 
 actual and the ideal, so obvious to us, was non-existent. 
 The existence of the world was a fact that had to be 
 accounted for in a religious sense by men who were building 
 up a true conception of God in the heart of the Jewish 
 people. And it was accounted for by men who neither 
 had nor claimed to have scientific information, but who 
 had a clear and true insight into the eternal moral relations 
 between God and man, and who threw their thoughts into 
 that which we have chosen, naturally enough no doubt, to 
 regard as matter of fact history. But then this test, 
 which most people would not now hesitate to apply to the 
 
The Miracles of Man. 191 
 
 account of the Creation, applies to several other miracles 
 as well. What ear-witness took down the dialogue between 
 Balaam and his ass ? Are we to suppose that Balaam told 
 the story against himself? Or who saw the destruction of 
 the two companies by fire at the word of Elijah ? Or who, 
 be it spoken reverently, saw the Lord Jesus placed upon 
 the pinnacle of the Temple by the Devil ? In all these 
 cases the matter of fact explanation is furthest from the 
 truth upon the face of the narrative itself. 
 
 A third class consists of those which, if they are to be 
 regarded as actual events, must have been notorious enough, 
 and are too closely interwoven with the web of the history 
 to be separated from it. An instance is the plague that 
 followed the census of David. But then this is incredible 
 in itself, for the simple reason that human life and natural 
 existence could not be carried on under such conditions. 
 The Jews were at that time, to a considerable extent, a 
 cultivated and reasoning people, with settled institutions, 
 political experience, and commercial aptitudes. They had 
 amongst them musicians, poets, architects, and thinkers, so 
 that we are obliged to imagine a state of society similar 
 to those which, in our experience, produce these intellectual 
 results. Furthermore, the performance of miracles had been 
 practically unknown among them for some considerable 
 time. Previous numberings of the people had taken place 
 at the express command of God Himself, and the indistinct 
 atmosphere in which the story is wrapped up is shown by 
 the fact that one account ascribes the temptation to God, 
 another to Satan. Lastly, it is a refinement of cruelty to 
 force the unhappy King to choose one out of three extreme 
 calamities. And yet the account is part of the history of 
 
192 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 David's reign, and cannot be rejected as fabulous without 
 throwing discredit upon the whole. Our problem is there- 
 fore this, Are there any means by which we can preserve 
 the fact of these two events (I mean Balaam's journey and 
 the census-plague, taken as examples of others), and 
 preserve also the bona fides of the men who recounted them. 
 I believe that it is quite easy to do so. 
 
 The key to all this and many another puzzle is simple 
 enough, and works easily enough when once discovered 
 and put in use. We have to remember that the modes of 
 thought and speech in the Bible were Semitic not Aryan, 
 ancient not modern, religious not scientific. As an instance 
 of the way in which the stand-points of men may vary, I 
 may mention that Keshub Chunder Sen regards inquiry 
 into the historical truthfulness of the life of Christ as part 
 of an "odious muscular Christianity which is fatal to its 
 spiritual meaning." Now, like all other historians whose 
 works have been worth preserving, the writers of the Old 
 Testament sought for facts, but then the facts they sought 
 for were primarily the works of God, and the operation of 
 His will and wisdom. If we would understand what they 
 mean us to understand, we must begin by accustoming 
 ourselves to the language of men to whom God was all in 
 .all, just as Greek art is unintelligible without a conception 
 of Greek mythology. Probably ten years residence among 
 Arabian tribes would contribute no less to the better 
 understanding of the Bible than much poring over modern 
 tomes. Moreover, the point of view materially affected the 
 arrangement and colouring of the facts. They were brief 
 where we should be prolix, and vice versa. They dwelt 
 upon the objective where to us the subjective side would 
 
The Miracles of Man. 193 
 
 be of most vital interest. They spoke of God where we 
 should speak of nature, and discerned His will where we see 
 only the operation of law. And so we come to a safe test of 
 the reality and meaning of these ancient narratives. Can they 
 be told in modern prose so as to give a natural explanation 
 of every fact ? Let us try the story of Balaam in this way. 
 " The travellers set out at early morning on the 7th day 
 of the third month. It was remarked by those about him 
 that Balaam's face wore an expression of unusual sadness, 
 and it is said that he intimated to more than one of those 
 who had assembled to bid him farewell that he was starting 
 on no prosperous errand. The journey was unusually toil- 
 some and difficult, and his spirits were visibly affected by 
 it. At one moment, indeed, his presence of mind gave 
 way altogether. His favourite ass, which had borne him 
 for several years without a mistake, turned suddenly restive, 
 crushed her rider against the wall, and at last fell under 
 him to the ground. The prophet, ordinarily a good- 
 tempered and kindly man, gave way to violent irritation 
 and beat the animal severely. Then, falling into a fit of 
 melancholy, he exclaimed with tears that the very ass was 
 declaring against his journey, and called God to witness 
 that he would proceed no farther. It seemed to him as 
 though the angel of the Lord was standing sword in hand 
 to bar his path. After a while he became calmer, and 
 was persuaded to continue his journey. No further incident 
 marked their way, but the prophet repeatedly declared 
 that come what would he would speak no word against the 
 God of Israel. ' His very ass/ he bitterly remarked, ' was 
 wiser than her master.' They arrived after (so many) days' 
 travelling, and his attendants noticed that when he saw 
 
194 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 the preparations made to receive him Balaam's spirits 
 began once more to rise, and he exclaimed with some exulta- 
 tion that perhaps after all he had done well to come." 
 
 Now, I ask except that the Bible narrative is infinitely 
 beautiful, dramatic, and suggestive what is the difference 
 in point of veracity between these two ways of stating the 
 same facts. Why will we persist in thinking that the 
 colouring of modern thought is the only medium through 
 which they can be regarded ? And why is it necessary with 
 so much labour and forcing to try to get rid of a history 
 which pleads the cause of its own truthfulness with all the 
 eloquence of unconscious sincerity ? If some later Jew 
 invented that story then he has accomplished more than 
 Shakespeare, for he has produced a character which sensible 
 men nearly 3000 years afterwards persist in believing 
 to be historical and not fictitious. Surely any attempt to 
 preserve a narrative so unartificial, so true in all the 
 essentials of truth, and of such permanent moral interest 
 ought to be welcomed with pleasure. Not one atom of 
 religious truth is lost if the facts occurred as I have repre- 
 sented them. Not one atom of scientific truth again is 
 sacrificed if we believe that to Balaam they bore the mean- 
 ing that came natural to the mind of an Oriental believer 
 in God. Religion like art may represent her objects in 
 ways very unlike the mere reproduction of bare outlines 
 and tame colours. She does not photograph, but paints.* 
 
 * If the account given above be true, then it disposes of the argument 
 against the authenticity of the narrative derived from its supernatural character. 
 But it may be well briefly to discuss the other line of argument, because it 
 affords an excellent instance of the extreme difficulty of arriving at a satisfactory 
 conclusion. The whole story is referred to a much later time, because it con 
 tains an obvious reference to Assyrian and Hellenic conquests. Now, it is no 
 answer to say that God might, if He pleased, cause His prophets to know all 
 
The Miracles of Man. 195 
 
 The explanation of the plague is still more easy, and we 
 may accept Ewald's account of it as probable and satis- 
 factory. The object of the king may have been connected 
 with some intention to organise the nation under a closer 
 despotism, possibly for increased taxation or more rigorous 
 military service. Anyhow it was secular, and was resented 
 by the popular mind as a departure from the religious basis 
 
 or anything about the future history of nations, then unknown to them except 
 (if even that) by name. It is sufficient to observe that there is no satisfactory 
 evidence that such stupendous inspiration took place, and we are bound to 
 assume that Balaam spoke in intelligible language, and that his references 
 were such as those who heard them could understand. But then the contrary 
 assumption that the narrative was foisted upon the Jewish sacred books at a 
 much later period lands us in difficulties at least as great. All the internal 
 evidence, such as the allusion to the " gardens by the river side " and the " two 
 buckets of water " (obvious references to life by the Euphrates), is in favour of 
 authenticity, nor are we entitled upon any ground of rational criticism to attri- 
 bute gross falsification to writers who seem very patterns of ingenuous veracity. 
 But more than this. It is difficult to see at what later time the prophecy could have 
 been written. If we postpone it a most daring proposition to the dawn of 
 Grecian power in its effects upon the East, then how are we to account for the 
 omission of all reference to Persia and Babylon? and what marvellously delicate 
 tact the forger (for so in this case he must have been) has displayed in his brief, 
 obscure, almost incorrect allusions to Asshur and Eber ! Further, every atom 
 of spiritual truth, moral value, and even poetic impressiveness vanishes if the 
 story be regarded as an ingenious legend. In such a strait one would sacrifice 
 some days of one's life to know the actual truth. Three possible explana- 
 tions occur to me : ist. The mere fact of the existence of the unknown 
 western world may have been enough to suggest its future power to one who 
 knew that he was face to face with God, and that the words which rushed to 
 his lips were no mere human fancies and delusions. Then, as in the middle of 
 last century, a prophetic spirit might feel that "westward, the star of empire 
 takes its way." 
 
 Secondly. Some great events entirely unknown to us may at that time have 
 powerfully impressed the leading minds of the age. Our knowledge of Aryan 
 migrations and their traditions in general, and of the ebbs and flows of different 
 races at that time in particular (adopting the earlier date of the Exodus), is such 
 mere ignorance that there is nothing to preclude the possibility of this. 
 
 Thirdly. If we accept the later date of the Exodus, that of Rameses IT. 
 and his son, then it seems probable that the names of western nations were 
 already known. Egypt had repelled an European invasion. 
 
196 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 upon which their national life was built. And so then, as 
 ever, there came from the heart of the people the prophetic 
 voice, secure in the consciousness that nature and history 
 were God's, and that He would punish the wrong. Then 
 comes the plague, the king's repentance, the dramatic scene 
 at the threshing-floor of Araunah, where once more the 
 religious imagination saw the angel of God with sword 
 drawn against the devoted city. What would be gained 
 supposing it could be shown that the pestilence was due, 
 as very possibly it was, to the defective drainage of Eastern 
 towns, if we stopped there and refused to see anything 
 more ? The course of history is the reverse of this. Men 
 were taught to realise the idea of a personal God as the 
 governor of the world and cause of all things, in order 
 that the secondary or natural causes, v/hen discovered, 
 might be attributed to Him. David's expression, " Let me 
 fall into the hands of God, for His mercies are great," re- 
 presents the religious aspect of the occurrence, and might, 
 as it seems to me, be with equal propriety used by a modern 
 man of science engaged in tracing an invasion of cholera to 
 the violation of law, the existence and persuasion of which 
 then becomes an incentive to the employment of means of 
 deliverance. " A moral will and not inexorable fate is the 
 cause of this ; " so thought David, and fought the battle of 
 religion. "Intelligible law and not mysterious chance is 
 the cause of this ; " so thinks the modern physician, and 
 fights the battle of science. And yet are not these two 
 fundamentally the same ? And is not defective drainage 
 ungodliness now, as the taking of the census was then, 
 because both are departures from the known or, at any 
 rate, from the knowable will of God ? 
 
The Miracles of Man. 1 9 7 
 
 These two instances will suffice to illustrate the general 
 law to which a great number of miraculous occurrences 
 may probably be reduced. They were natural events 
 occurring at critical moments and with decisive results, 
 interpreted by a prophetic mind, and recounted by narrators 
 to whom the divine, the religious, the objective, was the 
 one element of real importance, and God was literally all 
 in all. But it may be urged that this theory leaves a gap 
 between ancient and modern modes of thought, which 
 requires to be filled up. It may be that the two are 
 absolutely contradictory one of another ; it may be that 
 they are only parts of a continuous and orderly develop- 
 ment. Now, the test of this is, are there instances in which 
 the two are found in combination ? Can we anywhere 
 discern the process by which the former passed into the 
 latter ? Or are we to submit to the existence of tremen- 
 dous intervals in the history of the human mind, similar 
 to those by which geology works such mischief in the 
 doctrine of evolution ? Fortunately not. There is a story 
 which contains, as I believe, the secret of the meaning of 
 this class of miracles, which exhibits science and religion 
 at one with each other, and marks the precise way in which 
 the modern method of regarding things supersedes the 
 ancient. Beautifully enough this story is also the latest in 
 point of time recorded in the Bible ; after which I need not 
 say that I am referring to St Paul's voyage to Rome, or 
 more especially to Malta. 
 
 I confess that the admiration with which I regard this 
 narrative is such that the full expression of it would be 
 hardly suited to this volume. It might have been written 
 by Thucydides if he had been an officer in the Mediter- 
 
198 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ranean Fleet, with a sailor's natural religious trust in the 
 protection of Almighty God. In it nearly every object of 
 human interest seems to converge nature, science, in- 
 tellectual observation, moral grandeur, religious faith. It 
 is now fully understood by those who have examined the 
 subject, that every nautical and geographical detail is not 
 only practically, but technically, correct. No modern man 
 of science during the brief agony of an eclipse ever noted 
 down with keener and more accurate observation the 
 phenomena before him than did St Luke himself one of 
 the scientific class note the details of the storm, the dis- 
 position of the sailors to meet it, the direction of their 
 course, the soundings, the locality, the nature of the beach, 
 the method of escape. Again, side by side with this, con- 
 sider the display of human character delineated by single 
 graphic touches the selfishness of the sailors, who would 
 desert the ship to save their own lives the no less 
 characteristic selfishness of the soldiers, who, caring little 
 for anything else save doing their duty, gave it as their 
 counsel to kill the prisoners the calm, controlling 
 authority of the centurion, " willing to save Paul," himself 
 sustained and directed by a will more powerful than his 
 own and last, St Paul himself displaying exactly the 
 same characteristics from exactly the same motives as in 
 the midst of another sea, upon a still more awful night, 
 Moses, the founder, so to speak, of the miraculous, evinced 
 many centuries before. Everything passes in regular and 
 natural order, and yet the prophetic mind understands it, 
 uses it, masters it. He begins by fearing danger, not merely 
 for the ship, but for their own lives. Then, as the crisis 
 deepens, the faith that he should preach Christ at Rome, 
 
The Miracles of Man. 199 
 
 as God had promised, elevates him into the certainty that 
 come what would his life was safe. But then from this 
 and from his intense communion with God there springs 
 another certainty as well. These men were his companions ; 
 common danger and hardship had made them dear to him ; 
 it was impossible that he should be saved and they lost ; 
 in a most real sense, God had given him the lives of " all 
 that sailed with him." Then comes the exhortation not to 
 fear, and the suggestion of the means of escape " we must 
 be cast on a certain island." Then the rebuke of the 
 sailors' selfishness with its one invaluable lesson, that God 
 will not save the lives even of those dearest to Him unless 
 men do their duty "unless these abide in the ship we 
 cannot be saved." Then follows the courageous and wise 
 advice to take food, himself, in the very spirit that we 
 English like to see in our captains, setting the example by 
 cheerful words and grateful actions, not omitting the simple, 
 religious profession, " he gave thanks to God in presence 
 of them all." And lastly, the literal fulfilment of the 
 prophecy, " they escaped all safe to land." It is thus that 
 in one brief moment the old world of the supernatural, of 
 which Christ was the consummation, is seen passing into 
 the new world of the natural, of which He was the founder ; 
 with its soundings of twenty and fifteen fathoms ; its 
 practical wisdom, " they ran the ship aground in a place 
 where two seas met ; " its recognition of secondary causes, 
 " some on boards and some on broken pieces of the ship." 
 Is all this miraculous ? But it is most human. Is it then all 
 natural ? But it is most divine. Assuredly of this narra- 
 tive it may be said that in it nature and miracle have met 
 together, and science and religion have kissed each other. 
 
2OO Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 It may be convenient to sum up at this point the con- 
 clusions at which we have arrived. There are then three 
 distinct classes of miracles which may be described as 
 follows. First, those which God works alone, that is, those 
 events in which He approaches the minds of His servants, 
 and makes Himself and His designs known to them by 
 evidence, concerning the precise nature of which, whether 
 objective or not, it is futile to inquire. 
 
 Second, those in which man co-operates with God by 
 interpreting, and, in a measure, controlling the powers of 
 nature that do His will. Here once more it is also futile 
 to inquire whether these operations of nature are special or 
 ordinary, the whole subject lying beyond the range of our 
 experience. Only let us beware, in the interests of science 
 no less than of religion, in ascribing them to what we are 
 pleased to call chance. 
 
 Thirdly, those done by man of his own free will and 
 energy, in which class I place the works of Jesus Christ 
 alone. Here, most certainly, if we receive the history, we 
 can have no doubt that the miracles He wrought were not 
 merely the results of an interpreting mind, but of an 
 originating will. In short, upon the hypothesis of Christ 
 being more than man, we have just the phenomena 
 described in His life that we should have anticipated. By 
 His beneficent life and triumph over death He fulfils 
 prophetically that law whose interpreter is science, and 
 whose summum bonum is the attainment of the greatest 
 perfection by the greatest number. 
 
 It is necessary, however, to note an apparent exception, 
 not hitherto touched upon. The miracles attributed to 
 Elisha do not come strictly within any of these classes. 
 
The Miracles of Man. 201 
 
 In his case the miracles are the man. He is of little impor- 
 tance in the history save as a doer of wonderful works ; and 
 it concerns us at any rate to discover the idea which under- 
 lies the history of this, the last of the miraculous spirits of 
 the Old Testament. What is presented to us is a life spent 
 in doing good by supernatural means. Some of the stories 
 look like undoubted legends ; others, such as the healing of 
 Naaman, must be founded on fact, unless the whole history 
 is a pious fraud. Much, however, that seems to us impro- 
 bable, and even monstrous, would, no doubt, disappear if 
 the history were told in our modes of thought and use of 
 language : and in the place thereof might arise simply a 
 man gifted with extraordinary endowments of skill, know- 
 ledge, benevolence, and assiduity in helping his fellow 
 creatures. Around the life of one to whom men habitually 
 resorted for advice and healing might easily grow up a halo 
 which prevents us from seeing him distinctly, though 
 enough remains to reveal a man constantly employed in 
 relieving his fellow-creatures in famine, anxiety, sickness, 
 and even apparent death itself. And thus he closes fitly 
 the course of Old Testament miracles, announcing by 
 the whole tenor of his life that henceforth the domain of 
 religion was to be individual rather than national, in the 
 spirit rather than in nature, in deeds of personal beneficence 
 rather than of historical grandeur. And so he, too, becomes 
 a worthy representative of One who went about doing 
 good, and whose earliest description of the purpose of His 
 earthly life was this (preceding a reference to this very 
 same Elisha) : " The spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because 
 He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor ; 
 He hath sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach 
 
202 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the 
 blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the 
 acceptable year of the Lord." 
 
 There remains one other subject to be touched upon of 
 vital importance, I mean the investigation of the times at 
 which miraculous agencies were manifested, and the dis- 
 covery of the law, if there be any, to which these periodical 
 appearances were subject. The importance lies in this. 
 People are accustomed with the full approbation of 
 religious teaching, to speak of the Jews as though their 
 history was one prolonged record of supernatural inter- 
 ferences culminating in the life of Jesus Christ, and then 
 for ever withdrawn. I believe that half of whatever pre- 
 judice against the Bible exists is due to this, and to no 
 other cause. If the Jews were an exceptional people 
 altogether, then the student of human nature ceases to take 
 an interest in them ; if their history be nothing but a series 
 of marvels, then it becomes distasteful to those who have a 
 wholesome dislike of the merely wonderful. Moreover, the 
 sudden cessation of a continuous miraculous history creates 
 as much intellectual discomfort as does also its limitation 
 to one particular race. And yet it is hardly too much to 
 say that the moment we examine the history itself, 
 difficulties of the sort begin at once to fade away beneath 
 a closer scrutiny and clearer apprehensions of the facts. 
 
 As we survey the long drama of Jewish history we see 
 that there were in it three decisive epochs at which super- 
 natural agency is said to have been powerfully manifested, 
 and three men only who, in the strict sense of the words, 
 were gifted with original miraculous power. Who these 
 three were it is not difficult to determine. They are the 
 
The Miracles of Man. 203 
 
 men who founded the spiritual greatness of Israel ; who 
 held mysterious communion with God for forty days in 
 the wilderness, and there learned the secrets of true 
 religion ; whose deaths, so says the history, were not like 
 those of other men ; who met in awful mysteriousness on 
 the Mount of Transfiguration ; the Lawgiver, Prophet, and 
 Redeemer, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus Christ. 
 
 No sooner do we realise this than the mass of recorded 
 miracles begins to arrange and group itself, and we begin 
 to see a kind of law running through the epochs of mani- 
 festation. But before discussing it it may be well to 
 explain why Abraham is not included in the list as one of 
 the founders of religion. It is simply because, in the 
 strictest sense of the word, no miracle occurs in his history 
 or in the Book of Genesis ; by that I mean, that the dis- 
 tinction between special interferences of God and the 
 ordinary occurrences of life is so entirely non-existent in 
 the minds of the writers that we have no data by which to 
 define the miraculous element. Mysterious messengers 
 come and go, mystic voices are heard in men's minds 
 urging them to do the will of God and holding out far-- 
 reaching promises of reward ; visions occur which are 
 related as facts, and facts which are but as dreams to 
 those who saw them. And yet even so early as this, the 
 thoroughly Jewish appreciation of facts shows itself in the 
 vivid realistic story of Joseph, with whom nothing that 
 can be reasonably called supernatural is ever associated. 
 Strange old world that rests so securely upon its founda- 
 tion of simple facts, and yet associates them with a divine 
 will and presence, making them speak of God ! We can as 
 little realise it as we can re-animate an extinct geological 
 
2O4 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 epoch, and yet we are joined to it by closest ties of spiritual 
 descent. But it is well that those who dislike or disregard 
 the Book of Genesis should seriously consider how different 
 all this is from the earliest history of other nations, which is 
 for the most part buried beneath an accretion of fables and 
 legends, so that the lives and characters of real men fade 
 away beneath the unnatural glow of actions attributed to 
 heroes and other semi-divine beings. 
 
 With the Jews, on the contrary, the rise of miracles 
 coincides with the dawn and with the fulness of substantial 
 history. Moses is, of course, the one great originating 
 miraculous power of this period. The account as presented 
 to us is that God, in order to work out His eternal purposes 
 of benevolence towards mankind, gave to one man a com- 
 mand over nature which enabled him to fulfil the counsels 
 of Jehovah, and further to make His Being and attributes 
 a living object of faith to the Jewish people. This done, 
 the miraculous dies away, all that is left being merely as a 
 few flashes of lightning out of a departing storm. Joshua, 
 like Elisha and the Apostles, was set apart for his work by 
 special outward "ordination." Whatever he did, he did 
 because the spirit of Moses was upon him, and in the two 
 or three occasional miracles recorded of him there are plain 
 traces that the historical basis of fact is somewhat over- 
 mastered by the marvellous element. Thus we have an 
 imitation of the crossing of the Red Sea, picturesque and 
 dramatic effects at the Jordan and at Jericho, and poetical 
 embellishments, such as the standing still of the sun and 
 moon. And it is most necessary to remark that in what- 
 ever light we regard these incidents, they do not, as in the 
 case of Moses, belong to the essence of the history, which, 
 
The Miracles of Man. 205 
 
 in all its details of victorious invasion, might be told 
 equally well without them. Great events and wonderful 
 successes were invested with supernatural colouring by 
 minds fresh from the life of Moses and the deliverance 
 from Egypt. And this miraculous element, doubtful and 
 occasional under Joshua, dies away almost to nothing in 
 the time of the Judges, and ceases altogether under the 
 Kings. God did at times communicate with the spirits of 
 men, but not so as to elevate them into the sphere of the 
 miraculous. As to that wonderful period of Jewish history, 
 from the call of Samuel to the death of Solomon, how 
 many have realised that for all practical purposes it is 
 destitute of recorded miracles ? Who sufficiently considers 
 that the life of David, the most eminent representative of 
 the Jewish race and of the world's Messiah, is free from 
 any supernatural intervention ? Let us realise the evidential 
 value of this statement. It shows that the Jews conceived 
 of the most splendid period of their history under purely 
 natural ideas. If so, then why did they revert to the super- 
 natural under Ahab, unless they were constrained by the 
 force of facts ? How else are we to account for what we 
 find recorded, that to Moses and Elijah were attributed su- 
 pernatural gifts, while Samuel and David" did no miracle?"* 
 This is a question that requires a serious answer. 
 
 The second outburst of the miraculous spirit followed 
 the same law. It was caused by another revolution in 
 religious thought, by another crisis in the history of the 
 people, by another revelation of God's will, by the rise of 
 another institution the school of the later prophets. The 
 rise of Elijah is accompanied by full and authentic histori- 
 
 * The exceptions are such as only prove the rule. 
 
206 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 cal details ; his one decisive miracle is of the most public 
 character, and explains the course of future events. If at 
 the close of the day the assembled multitude on Mount 
 Carmel did not believe that fire had descended upon the 
 sacrifice from heaven, and if they did not act under the 
 inspiration of that belief, then I see no available distinction 
 by which any narrative in the Old Testament can be 
 rescued from the region of fable. How it happened, 
 once more I repeat, we have no means of deciding, the 
 one point of vital historical importance being, that those 
 present believed that something had taken place which 
 was due to the direct action of God. Elijah's spirit also 
 falls upon a successor, and then dies away as suddenly as 
 it arose. Henceforward we have that which he was sent 
 to teach and to found, namely, the prophetic spirit under- 
 standing and thereby controlling history, just as Moses 
 had controlled nature. But for eight or nine centuries 
 onwards no real miracle marks the course of Jewish 
 history, though God still speaks to the spirits of the 
 prophets in ways which do not purport to be miraculous ; 
 and yet in another sense they might be called so, because 
 they were only rendered possible and effectual by the 
 national belief in the works of Moses and Elijah. In short, 
 religion, like art and science, has its great eras of discovery 
 and invention, whereby its life is sustained and prolonged. 
 Again, and for the last time, when the final dominion 
 of God over man's inmost spirit, personal life, and future 
 destiny was to be asserted, the working of the miraculous 
 spirit was beheld, displaying the abiding purpose of God 
 against sin, disease, suffering, and death. We need not 
 for the purpose of this essay, examine the miracles of 
 
The Miracles of Man. 207 
 
 Christ; they tell their own tale of goodness and power, 
 and can by no possible means be explained away, except 
 by denying the historical nature of the documents that 
 relate them. The age was a scientific rather than a 
 religious one ; the distinction between miracles and 
 nature was clearly established ; the old prepossession in 
 favour of miracles had yielded by virtue of their long 
 cessation to a prejudice against them ; the events were 
 recorded in just the same spirit and with the same atten- 
 tion to outward details and inward impressions as mark 
 the writings of veracious and accurate historians, the very 
 discrepancies being signs of truth rather than of forgery ; 
 lastly, the most important biographer (from our present 
 point of view) was a member of a scientific profession, 
 Luke, the beloved physician. Here we are compelled 
 definitely to choose between two alternatives. If the 
 books were written by the men and at the time to which 
 they are assigned, then there is an end of the matter, and 
 the fact of God's intervention in the world by supernatural 
 means must be recognised. If they were compilations 
 of two or three generations later, then equally there is an 
 end of the matter, and of some other very serious matters 
 as well. But I pass from this to point out that the law to 
 which I have called attention is found working here also. 
 For a while the spirit of Christ's power lingered among the 
 apostles, whose faith in Him now and then enabled them 
 to do the works that He had done. Yet even here, and in 
 so sober a writer as St Luke, we find traces of that ex- 
 aggerated way of regarding things which seems to be the 
 link between the genuine actions of the original worker 
 and the purely fabulous stories of his religious descendants 
 
208 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 in later generations. Statements like that of Acts xix. 
 II, 12, do not however belong to the history as component 
 and essential parts of it, as do the miracles of Christ, and 
 one feels how easily general descriptions of this character 
 may be influenced by popular excitement. Still less need 
 we trouble ourselves with the fictions of later ages. It is 
 enough to say that when examined, the law of miraculous 
 appearances is completely against their credibility instead 
 of forming an d priori reason in their favour. There is not 
 much encouragement given to the invention of miracles in 
 a history which limits the power practically to three 
 persons, and consummates it in the person of the Son of 
 God, whose works are a prophecy and a foundation of that 
 spirit of beneficent working in which the youthful spirit of 
 science and the ancient wisdom of religion find a common 
 sphere for labour and usefulness. 
 
 I shall now attempt to illustrate and gather up all that 
 has been said by sketching the history of Moses, because 
 that is the crucial instance for deciding upon the reality and 
 the meaning of the supernatural. The case stands thus. 
 
 The sojourn of the children of Israel in Egypt is neither 
 more nor less true than the Roman occupation of Britain. 
 No reasonable man doubts that the Jews were a race of 
 bondsmen in Egypt, that they made their escape by some 
 means or other, wandered in the wilderness for a term of 
 years, settled in Canaan, and practised, with more or less 
 foreign admixture, the worship of Jehovah, to whose inter- 
 vention on their behalf they ascribed their redemption, 
 their victory, and their institutions. Now the question we 
 have to answer is this How did this escape from Egypt 
 with its accompanying foundation of the national life take 
 
The Miracles of Man, 209 
 
 place ? The later we place the Exodus, the more difficult 
 does the problem become. It has been remarked by Mr 
 Zincke, in his book on Egypt, that owing to its geographical 
 configuration, the country presents unusual facilities to the 
 de facto ruler for suppressing all rebellious resistance to his 
 power. And if we adopt the later date, which the present 
 tendency of modern research is tending to fix for the 
 Exodus (a more than doubtful result), then we are to 
 suppose that a tribe of bondsmen made good their escape 
 from the power of the then mightiest nation upon earth, 
 the Egypt of Rameses and his successors. The Egyptians 
 admit the fact, and account for it by a legend which is the 
 obvious production of national pride. The Jews also 
 account for it in a history which, if it were not in part 
 supernatural, would enforce not only consideration but 
 assent by its antiquity, its local colouring, its accurate 
 details, its artistic beauty, its moral sublimity, its religious 
 spirit, above all by its perfect adequacy to -account for the 
 phenomena to be explained. Yet, even apart from the 
 supernatural, there are things in it for instance, its dramatic 
 arrangement, doubtful chronology, inconsistency with hu- 
 man nature, and the like, which challenge closer scrutiny 
 and require some rational explanation. How then, suppos- 
 ing that we do not reject the supernatural upon d priori 
 grounds, are we to reconcile these conflicting elements, and 
 render the miraculous reasonable, and therefore credible ? 
 
 We picture to ourselves, first of all, Moses as the self- 
 elected deliverer of his people. We see him driven into 
 the wilderness by failure, the narrative of which, though 
 wonderfully true to human nature, and resting upon a clear 
 
 basis of fact, seems to suggest, what would appear to 
 
 O 
 
2io Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 nineteenth century modes of thought, a kind of ideal treat- 
 ment of the facts, in order to bring out the permanent 
 religious and human value. He remains in exile, still 
 hoping for deliverance, but destitute of that absolute 
 certainty as to God's designs by which men are impelled 
 themselves to undertake the work which they see is to be 
 done. So hesitating there comes to him the scene at the 
 burning bush, in which by outward signs that seemed to him 
 to bespeak the presence of God, and by an inward intimation 
 that he took for the voice of God, he is told that the eternal 
 Jehovah designs him to be the deliverer of Israel, Prac- 
 tically this is all the miracle that is required. God being 
 what He is, can and will save His covenant people from 
 the power of their enemies, and so, secure in this confidence, 
 he returns to Egypt. The methods of God's working 
 are suggested to him by the most obvious facts ; in the 
 plagues to which the land was from time to time subject 
 were to be found the ministers of the purpose of Jehovah, 
 to whom they belonged. The discovery that the nine 
 plagues were natural to Egypt (even to the ninth, darkness, 
 which appears at first sight well-nigh incredible), is a strik- 
 ing confirmation of the historical truthfulness of the Bible, 
 and creates at least as strong a presumption in its favour as 
 any difficulty that modern research has created against it. 
 Thus we have a picture of a succession of plagues natural 
 in themselves, but interpreted for a moral purpose by what 
 we may call a miraculous spirit. Moses rides as it were 
 upon the storm that bursts upon the devoted land, foretells 
 its approach, its duration, its departure, proclaiming in the 
 ear of king and court, " This is come upon you from the 
 eternal justice of the supreme God, whose laws you are 
 
The Miracles of Man. 2 1 1 
 
 breaking in your treatment of His people. Your divine 
 river, your divine cattle, your priests, your possessions, the 
 sun you worship, all are instruments in the hand of a moral 
 Being, whose will is righteousness, mercy, and judgment 
 for sin." * So far we can account for all the circumstances, 
 the hesitation of Pharaoh, his alternations of fear and pride, 
 his doubts as to the cause of these accumulated disasters, 
 the growing power and urgency of Moses as the heart of 
 Egypt waxed fainter and fainter. 
 
 Then we come to the tenth plague. Shocking as it seems 
 to our ideas, and unfitted to display the character of God 
 as we conceive it, yet I should accept it if there were no 
 other difficulty than an d priori prejudice as to what God 
 ought to do under a given set of circumstances, the true 
 bearings of which we most imperfectly comprehend. But 
 the difficulty lies in quite another direction. How, again 
 I must ask, could human life be carried on under such 
 conditions ? How is it possible that no true trace of such 
 a catastrophe should be found in the Egyptian annals ? 
 Or when we contemplate the remains of Egyptian civilisa- 
 tion and survey the grand wise heads that look down upon 
 us from temple and tomb, how can we picture to ourselves 
 the infatuation which could gather an army to pursue an 
 enemy whose God had smitten with instantaneous death 
 the first-born child of every soldier in its ranks ? May we 
 not also ask what is meant by the " first-born ? " Is it eldest 
 sons whose fathers were yet alive ? If so, then the warlike 
 strength of the nation must have perished. And when we 
 hear of the destruction of the first-born of cattle (a practical 
 impossibility), then we know that the sacred historian is 
 
 * This thought is, I need not say, familiar to all readers of Mr Maurice. 
 
212 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 drawing for us not a representation of literal fact, but such 
 a conception of the stupendous event to which Israel's 
 emancipation was due, as would be taken by a religious 
 mind of that or of a somewhat later time. 
 
 And when we come to inquire what the literal fact might 
 be, our only difficulty is that of making a choice between 
 two theories, either of which is probable and adequate. 
 The Jews, as Dr Stanley has pointed out, attributed their 
 deliverance to a pestilence, the Egyptians to a foreign 
 invasion ; and if to disbelieve the narrative, literally taken, 
 be rationalism, then it is a comfort to remember that 
 rationalism is of earlier origin than the Christian era, and 
 finds a place in the Bible itself. Twice over we have the 
 simple statement : " He smote the first-born of Egypt, the 
 chief of all their strength." And this is the best commentary 
 upon the story. In a moment of prostration and alarm, 
 caused by some terrible national disaster, the Israelites 
 made good their escape; with returning strength and pride 
 carne the resolution to pursue them. Moses acted, under 
 the influence of religious faith, exactly as any modern man 
 of science would have done if he could calculate to a nicety 
 the force and laws of winds, currents, tides, and storms. 
 What he did was natural, his power to do it was miraculous. 
 He knew that God was master of the sea, and that across 
 the sea lay the only hope of the salvation solemnly pro- 
 mised to him. If ever there be a story which, upon the 
 face of it, rejects any marvellous interference with nature, 
 this is the one. The idea of the Egyptians plunging madly 
 into a sea miraculously divided before their eyes in order 
 that their enemies might escape, passes the bounds of 
 human credulity, and reminds us of certain words of St 
 
The Miracles of Man. 2 1 3 
 
 Paul's, "Be not children in understanding; howbeit be 
 children in malice, but in understanding be men." 
 
 The actions of Moses in the wilderness are all susceptible 
 of a similar explanation. The man was miraculous, all 
 else was natural. Nature once more waits upon the 
 servant of God in thunderings and lightnings, and a 
 terrible loud voice as of the trumpet of God, while under 
 the inspiration of her awful voice he lays the foundation of 
 the first great code of national law, and plants deep in the 
 heart of humanity the worship of God and the knowledge 
 of goodness. Just as all the plagues of Egypt were natural 
 to the country, so were the blessings of the desert. To 
 " discover the springs of waters/' to give manna for food, 
 to foretell the flight of quails, to predict military disaster, to 
 restore health by restoring faith and courage all this 
 is at once the work of a divinely-inspired man, and yet in 
 itself is no more than a scientific man could accomplish, if 
 he knew all the necessary laws, movements, and conditions 
 of external phenomena. There may have been, for what 
 we can tell, more of an originating power of Moses than 
 I think it necessary to suppose; what is required to be 
 believed is the working of a mind inspired by communica- 
 tions from God in and through nature, and therefore 
 enabled to overrule all natural events and agencies for the 
 work that lay before him of saving Israel and teaching 
 them religion. Beyond all question his achievements were 
 such as to convince the people by plain, palpable works of 
 help and deliverance that God was indeed with him and 
 amongst them : this much at least is attested by history 
 and poetry for many a succeeding generation. They made 
 no nice inquiries as to the limits of the natural and the 
 
2 1 4 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 miraculous ; nor can we, with the materials at our disposal, 
 do better than imitate their silence. Let it be enough if 
 where they saw nature obeying the will of God for their 
 good we can see nature obeying the law of God for ours. 
 And as moral beings let us call the result of this perception 
 by its one appropriate name faith. 
 
 I have already transgressed the limits I had imposed 
 upon myself, but there are two remarks which it is necessary 
 to make in order to obviate criticism that comes from two 
 very different quarters. In the first place I should like to 
 point out that what is required and has been here attempted 
 is not the employment of a mere critical destructiveness, 
 but the attainment of some positive result: we want to 
 know not what did not happen but what did. And if it is 
 at present impossible to explain minutely the method of 
 miraculous working, we must look to further discoveries in 
 the pathway of science as our only means of learning more 
 about the subject. And meanwhile, we can at least point 
 out, as I have endeavoured to do, some of the links that 
 bind sound science and true religion together. The time 
 may come when in the increased knowledge of mind and 
 matter, subject and object, together with their mutual 
 independence, any theories that may be adopted now will 
 be regarded as mere vague, tentative advances in the 
 direction where truth will ultimately be found. Or it may 
 equally come when supernatural events, explained in some 
 such way as we have been considering, will be accepted as 
 historically true (though intellectually inexplicable) because 
 the moral predispositions of mankind will have decided in 
 their favour. Or they may vanish out of history altogether, 
 and with them the religion to which they have given birth. 
 
The Miracles of Man. 2 1 5 
 
 In the second place I desire to ask those who are dis- 
 satisfied with the meagreness or doubtfulness of the results 
 attained this simple question Upon what basis is it 
 proposed to found religious belief? In religion as in other 
 matters possession is nine-tenths of the law, and men who 
 have inherited a beneficent, venerable, and beautiful system, 
 may be content to accept the goods provided for them 
 without any too curious inquiry into the validity of their 
 title-deeds. " The Bible must be true ; " " the Church can- 
 not be wrong ; " " Christianity is perfectly adapted to men's 
 moral wants ; " " it is the best account yet given of the 
 unknowable " any or all of these positions are sufficient 
 for men whose religious belief is not seriously threatened. 
 But in law, if a serious action is brought against the 
 possessor of property he is bound to make good his title; 
 and so in religion, if his position is actually assaulted, he 
 must be prepared to give some rational defence of it. Why 
 is the Bible infallible ? Why in religion alone does com- 
 mon opinion or a majority of votes decide what is and is 
 not true ? How do we know that the Christian morality is 
 the best possible for all ages ? Are we sure that science 
 cannot give a better account of things ? These are pleas to 
 which a man must find an answer, and come into court, and 
 take some trouble if he means to retain his estate. And I 
 suspect that the arguments and positions of his counsel are 
 as unsatisfactory to the mind of an ardent and self-con- 
 fident religionist, as are the unimpassioned statements of an 
 advocate to the client who does not like to feel that his title to 
 his paternal heritage dependsupon the right legal construction 
 of old documents and bygone transactions. If this be so, both 
 will discover their mistake only when their cause is lost. 
 
2 1 6 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Practically, indeed, there is but one defensible basis of 
 religious belief apart from actual facts. In defiance, as I 
 think, of history, and in opposition, I am sure, to the best 
 conclusions of modern thought, men may assert that the 
 knowledge of God is intuitional and immediate, independent 
 of experience, and obtained by a spiritual faculty designed 
 for this purpose. This may be the case, but truth obliges 
 us to say that the process and the faculty are themselves 
 that which science would call supernatural, and the God 
 thus attained nothing better in her mind than an idol. In 
 calling them supernatural, we mean to say that all human 
 thought is receptive not creative ; and so the legitimate or 
 natural province of the religious faculty is to accept or 
 deny, to combine or disentangle, to appreciate, verify, and 
 judge the objects presented to human consciousness. And 
 if man can reach the knowledge of God by innate intuitions, 
 then is there a kind of discordant dualism at the very root 
 of his reasoning powers. But the fact is that as men in the 
 natural world work with and upon existing materials with- 
 out any power of creating new ones ; so in religion man 
 cannot attain to a permanent belief in a personal God of 
 love and goodness merely by surveying the operations of 
 nature or the workings of his own soul. He turns anxious 
 eyes Heavenwards, but there is "no voice, nor any to answer, 
 nor any that regards." And, furthermore, call the object 
 of our belief what we will and worship it as we may, it is 
 but of the earth, earthy, or at best but of man, human. 
 We are worshipping ultimately the work of our own minds, 
 the creature, not the Creator, of our own imaginations, 
 whether it be an image, or the highest type of human 
 character, or the aggregation of all humanity become 
 
Miracles of Man. 2 1 7 
 
 subjective. It is, I suspect, this subtle taint of idolatry 
 that sets scientific men so resolutely against religion, 
 because they see the productions of man's genius or his 
 folly elevated into the rank of gods, and clothed with a 
 dignity and power that belong not to them, and that too 
 often impede the march of truth. It is this which drives 
 them into the opposite and, upon the face of it, unscientific 
 extreme of acquiescing in the existence of an unknown 
 God, in preference to worshipping an idol. I agree with 
 them ; but because the office of science is to know y I go on 
 to inquire into that history which claims to reveal the 
 unknowable to man by facts that fall within his experience. 
 The results of that inquiry I affirm to be as follows. God 
 has displayed Himself as a living personal Being in acts of 
 love, justice, and over- ruling power. These acts are not 
 incompatible with the scientific idea of law, but present 
 remarkable affinities not only with it but with the domain 
 of science in general. They give power and reality to all 
 the choicest hopes and noblest speculations of the human 
 mind Godwards, and do not rob the world of a single 
 religious intuition or idea. They account for the fact that 
 Christianity has become the religion of civilised humanity. 
 Finally, they require as the condition of being believed a 
 moral predisposition in the age or in the individual which 
 does not reject the supernatural as such, but is willing to 
 accept any revelation of God that can be legitimately 
 proved, rationally explained, and beneficially employed. 
 
 I venture to express a hope before I close that some of 
 my readers will be induced to compare for themselves the 
 method and the results of natural and revealed theology 
 respectively. In spite of the ability which marks the 
 
2i8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 writings of the former, I am compelled to assert that as to 
 method it seems to me to cast about high-sounding words 
 and phrases which have no reality in the world of facts 
 and things : while as to results, it has not practically 
 advanced one step beyond the most commonplace, but by 
 no means satisfactory, positions of such a book as Paley's 
 " Natural Theology." If, indeed, any one cares to see what 
 Natural and Revealed Religion respectively can accomplish 
 in the way of advancing truth by persuading the minds of 
 men, let him read Paley's " Natural Theology," and then 
 his " Evidences of Christianity," together with the " Horae 
 Paulinas." I am greatly mistaken if he do not come to the 
 conclusion that the value, indeed the very meaning, of the 
 first varies with every shifting shadow of metaphysical belief, 
 while the latter remain just as true, as substantial, and as 
 convincing as when they first saw the light. I am very far 
 from denying that Natural Religion has its own proper 
 sphere of usefulness, but I do deny that this is the sphere 
 which Paley himself claimed for it namely, to demonstrate 
 by intellectual process the existence of God, and thus 
 prepare the way for a future Revelation of God to man. 
 On the contrary, I believe the right and reasonable method 
 to be this. When the mind has become convinced that 
 Revelation conveys a true account of the otherwise un- 
 known God by facts that fall within man's experience, it 
 will then turn to Natural Religion for proof that the 
 existence of such a God is not inconsistent with nature, but 
 is rather the one thing needed to give life, meaning, and 
 beauty to the universe in which we find ourselves placed. 
 
 Since the above essay was written a passage has occurred to me which seems 
 to throw immense light upon the origin and nature of Hebrew theism, upon 
 the effect of the inspiration which comes from nature, and upon the real mean- 
 
The Miracles of Man. 219 
 
 ing of the earliest Scriptural phraseology. Let me quote the words in their 
 archaic simplicity. After a solemn sacrifice, in which the people entered into 
 eternal covenant with Jehovah, we read in Exodus xxiv. 9-11, as follows : 
 " Then went up Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders 
 of Israel ; and they saw the Lord God of Israel : and there was under His feet 
 as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of 
 heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel He laid 
 not His hand : also they saw God, and did eat and drink." 
 Upon this passage I desire to ask two simple questions. 
 
 1. Will any reasonable man deny that this is a faithful tradition of some 
 real event ? Not unless we are to apply totally different tests to the Bible 
 from those by which historical criticism judges other books. 
 
 2. Will any reasonable man assert that the words are to be understood 
 literally ? Not unless he is prepared to assert that man can see God and live. 
 Now, the explanation of this event lets a shaft of light deep into the hidden 
 sources of Jewish religion. 
 
 After the most solemn and awe-inspiring ceremonies being nothing less 
 than the national dedication to Jehovah the elders of Israel are led up by what 
 they believe to be the summons of God to the mount, where His presence was 
 attested by natural wonders all around them. Upon their eyes, the eyes of men 
 accustomed to Egyptian flatness, and expecting a vision of the Almighty, 
 there bursts that glorious desert view, clear, blue, expanded, arched, radiant. 
 And to them it was the very God who was with them. Not precisely visible, 
 yet not wholly invisible. Here was the God, their God, who was greater than 
 all the gods of the earth, who comprehended the world, who rode on the wings 
 of the wind, whose path was in the waters, who made the winds His messengers 
 and flames of fire His ministers, of whose majesty and creative power, thus 
 realised, the iO4th Psalm is the latest and most complete description. This 
 conception was at once a vast step upwards above all other ideas of God, and 
 yet still a step in the natural evolution of religious belief, not an unnatural 
 break in it. It was akin to Pantheism, it was consistent with Polytheism, and 
 these two modes of thought formed an element in the future religion that warred 
 against the truth. But it was preserved from the first by their unquenchable 
 belief in a God who had performed personal actions towards them, from the 
 second by their belief that the One Righteous God must be Lord of all, be the 
 others what they would. 
 
 I do not know how far this explanation may satisfy the theology or the 
 philosophy of the day. Of one thing I am very sure, that in method it will 
 satisfy science, because it attempts to explain the origin and nature of Jewish 
 religion by and from the recorded facts of their history. Perhaps, indeed, that 
 religion might have seemed a more excellent thing, and more adapted for the 
 purposes of nineteenth-century controversies, if these awe-stricken Bedouins 
 had exclaimed one to another, " Brothers, let our God henceforward be ' a 
 power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.' " But, alas ! poor people, 
 they were not Mr Matthew Arnolds ! 
 
A SCIENTIFIC ACCOUNT OF 
 INSPIRATION. 
 
 subject of Inspiration is beyond all contradiction 
 -1- the most important of the many religious questions 
 that now agitate men's minds, and it may be taken as a 
 sign of the worthlessness of common religious thought that 
 so little of the attention abundantly bestowed on minor 
 points of doctrine is turned in this direction. In the most 
 general terms it may be defined as the communication of 
 the spirit of God to that of man, and its importance lies in 
 this : that it covers the meeting-point of religion and 
 science. No doubt there are many who would prefer that 
 the two lines of thought should be drawn parallel to each 
 other and so never meet. But I am afraid that the principle 
 of competition so dear to mercantile instincts will not avail 
 where the journey is that of the human mind towards truth ; 
 or rather, it is more correct to say that it will avail, and that 
 the traffic of human thought will prefer the swiftest, easiest, 
 and most commodious route. Up to a certain point, which 
 may be described as the consciousness of being able to 
 think, science claims, and justifies her claim, to be able to 
 conduct the intellect by her own methods exclusively ; 
 beyond it lies that region of the unknown cause or author 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 221 
 
 of the human consciousness which is the province of religion. 
 The point, therefore, at which this unknown cause makes 
 itself felt within the limits of common experience is the 
 junction between science and religion, and belongs to both 
 alike so far as use is concerned. But to which of the two 
 does it belong to give an account of it ? Hitherto religion 
 has claimed the right for herself and undertaken the duty 
 with no other resources than her own to keep her. It may 
 be worth while to point out the very deplorably meagre 
 and indefinite results which have been attained. 
 
 For instance, how inspiration operates ; within what limits 
 and to what extent ; whether there is or has been any 
 special manifestation in a particular book or among a chosen 
 people ; how far, if at all, it is to be distinguished as a 
 religious influence from the inspiration of the artist or the 
 mathematician ; what authority it carries with it, wherein 
 that authority resides, and upon what evidence it rests, 
 these and many similar questions are still the subjects of 
 interminable controversy. Everybody wants to have the 
 authority of Inspiration on his side, few will condescend to 
 examine its real nature with the view of ascertaining from 
 that source alone what its legitimate authority is. In short, 
 every school of Christian thought accepts Inspiration as an 
 ultimate fact, and from it derives with equal assurance of 
 conviction, vehemence of assertion, confusion of thought, 
 and absence of solid proof, the authority of Pope, Church, 
 Bible, and private judgment. But the dictum of science is 
 that wherever opposing or various theories are formed con- 
 cerning the operation of any given force, it is a pretty clear 
 proof that the real nature of that force remains yet to be 
 discovered. And so she goes on building up her impregnable 
 
222 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 rampart of facts, much as the Roman army built their wall 
 around the Holy City while the defenders were exhausting 
 their rage upon each other. Thank God, in the last resort 
 religious truth always escapes with the Christians to Pella ! 
 Again it is a noteworthy fact that while the authority of 
 Inspiration is abundantly claimed, the thing itself has never 
 been authoritatively defined. Thus it is frequently asserted 
 as a proof of the admirable wisdom of the English Church 
 that she has nowhere defined the exact nature and extent 
 of Scriptural Inspiration. Upon the moral side this 
 admiration is perfectly justifiable. To define by dogmatic 
 authority what the teachers of a national church are to 
 believe upon such a subject is no doubt a grievous wrong, 
 fatal to truth, because fatal to sincerity and inquiry. Nor 
 is the reason of this reticence at all difficult to discover. 
 There was at the time of the Reformation no method by 
 which reasonable men, such as were the English reformers, 
 could arrive at any positive conclusion upon the subject. 
 But that which is right and befitting in the articles of a 
 national church, or in a pre-scientific age, may, viewed in 
 another aspect, become entirely unworthy of rational 
 religion. Explanations which theology may very properly 
 decline to lay down as essential to a right belief may, 
 nevertheless, be clearly demonstrated by the ordinary 
 methods of investigation as they are adopted by positive 
 thought. Science is justly impatient of open questions : a 
 thing is either true in this way or in that way, and the 
 question remains open only until some man solves it or, 
 more accurately, till some man persuades the world that he 
 has solved it And of all religious questions that of 
 inspiration is the very last that men should acquiesce in 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 223 
 
 leaving open. It falls in its phenomena strictly within the 
 limits of human experience, and it forms the basis of all 
 practical religion. No doubt in the last resort it is incom- 
 prehensible, just as is the law of gravitation, but like this and 
 every other law it may be, and ought to be expressed in 
 scientific terms and be capable, to speak generally, of 
 scientific treatment. Failing this, there is no other course 
 left for it but to disappear with all convenient speed from 
 the number of the things that are admitted as suitable and 
 fruitful objects of human thought. 
 
 It is generally observed that just in proportion as the 
 mass of men have no definite or accurate information about 
 a given fact, so much the more positively do they dogmatise 
 concerning it, and so much the more resolutely do they seek 
 to enforce the necessity of a belief in it upon other people. 
 They call it a mystery and bow down before it with a 
 delight as genuine and as unaffected as ever filled the heart 
 of a savage contemplating his idol of shapeless wood and 
 stone. It has so fared, with the Inspiration of the Bible. 
 Together with the kindred and no less important truth of 
 the Divinity of our Lord it has become the standard of 
 orthodoxy, the test by which opinions are measured, the 
 object of just admiration, of real eloquence, of elaborate 
 discussion, but not of serious and rational explanation. 
 A book on Inspiration was indeed published some years 
 ago by the Rev. C. A. Row, which honestly undertook not 
 indeed so much to ascertain the nature of inspiration as to 
 define its sphere and to describe its effects by the inductive 
 method. But though warmly praised by the few who were 
 capable of entering into the author's spirit, it did not, I 
 believe, obtain a very wide acceptance in the general 
 
224 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 religious world one more proof that the popular religious 
 mind cares little or nothing at present for serious subjects 
 that lie outside, or rather underneath, the topics of party 
 contention and passing popular interest. What, indeed, 
 popular religion chiefly hates is a new method of treatment. 
 New opinions, it can answer, or failing that can persecute, 
 or failing that can meet by fresh definitions of the faith, by 
 revivals of ancient errors that from long lying by have 
 almost the gloss and air of novel truths, or by a clamorous 
 and more persistent assertion of its undying belief in the 
 authority which it has set up over itself. But it sees with 
 the instinctive perception of fear that a new method such 
 as the application of scientific thought to religious pheno- 
 mena cuts away the ground from all parties alike, forces 
 them to consider ultimate truths, puts the whole question 
 in a new light, and makes useless much of the old 
 machinery, formulae, definitions, and dogmas. With the 
 men of the new method it has but one way of dealing to 
 take as little notice as possible of their existence, and to 
 weigh their conclusions in the old balance, stigmatising 
 them as mere revivals of ancient heresies. And when it is no 
 longer safe or possible to ignore the new spirit, then it only 
 remains to turn round and affirm stoutly that orthodoxy 
 all along meant and said the same. I have no doubt that 
 the popular theologians of the next generation will be 
 chiefly occupied in singing the praises of the scientific 
 method, and in finding, amidst the chance rhetoric of the 
 popular theologians of the present, intimations that they 
 too were the precursors, the prophets, and the enraptured 
 admirers of that tendency of thought which they are strain- 
 ing every nerve to repel from the field of religion. 
 
A Scientific A ccount of Inspiration. 225 
 
 It is best, however, to let the facts of the case speak for 
 themselves, and I go on, therefore, to inquire what is the 
 received account of inspiration. I cannot find that it 
 amounts to anything more definite than this : that the 
 Spirit of God has entered into the minds of certain men 
 whether Jewish chroniclers or Christian bishops or the 
 successor of the Pontifex Maximus in such a way as to 
 make them infallible under certain conditions, as to which 
 there is the very widest difference of opinion. It is, however, 
 agreed that this influence was and is supernatural and over- 
 mastering, so. that in some way the words they spoke (and 
 speak) must be taken to express the mind and judgment 
 of the Almighty, who interfered to secure this express 
 result. Now, surely what one instinctively asks for is some 
 verification of a phenomenon so extraordinary. No one 
 denies that this or any other astounding occurrence may 
 take place if God so wills it ; but this concession so far 
 from dispensing with the necessity of proof only makes the 
 conceder more rigorous in his demands for it. It is, indeed, 
 a very fair remark that men may require evidence that, 
 either in amount or kind, cannot possibly be obtained, but 
 in the case before us the evidence is practically nil. Let 
 us, however, examine this account of inspiration more in 
 detail. 
 
 I. In itself it explains nothing. It is the mere descrip- 
 tion of a mystery in terms of religion, and reminds one 
 somehow of an unsolved equation. It takes the fact (ad- 
 mitted pro hac vice) that communication from a personal 
 God to the spirit of man is possible, and upon this founda- 
 tion goes on by a simple dogmatic process to build up the 
 inspiration of whatever authority it selects. But it fails to 
 
226 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 give any reasonable description of the thing itself, because 
 it does not attempt to distinguish it from other things that 
 resemble it or to adjust its relations with them. To be 
 particular, it is justly chargeable with these two capital 
 omissions. It does not distinguish religious inspiration 
 from other communications of God in poetry, art, or 
 science ; and it does not distinguish the inspiration of the 
 Jews and early Christians from that of other nations and 
 religions. And if we are met by the vague proposition that 
 the difference is in degree and not in kind then another 
 remark is at once suggested. 
 
 2. Why to take the one instance upon which there is 
 the most general agreement is the Bible said to be inspired 
 so as to become an authority, indeed an infallible authority, 
 upon religious subjects ? Why is it to be accepted as true ? 
 There are, for instance, elements in it such as the discourses 
 of our Lord in St John that transcend the ordinary powers 
 of human memory. Why are we to believe these to be 
 true ? Generally the answer is that we know the Bible to 
 be true because it is inspired, to which a more rational 
 school of thought replies that we know it to be inspired 
 because we know it to be true. But then why once more 
 do we believe it to be true, or, more pertinently, if it be true, 
 why do we need theories of special supernatural inspiration 
 to sustain the burden of truths which have been satis- 
 factorily proved to our reason by other means ? But in 
 point of fact this assumption that what seems true to me, 
 or my age, or my church, or my family of nations, is there- 
 fore true, is only the right of private judgment, however 
 skilfully disguised, pushed to the extreme, that ends in 
 absurdity. Far be it from me to speak with anything but 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 227 
 
 respect of that Protestant form of it to which we owe the 
 most precious privileges of spiritual freedom, but it is im- 
 possible not to discern the destructive effects of scientific 
 thought upon that corner-stone of Protestantism, the right 
 of private judgment. No man has any real right to think 
 what is wrong, and to believe what is untrue, merely because 
 he likes it. Ultimately the question resolves itself into the 
 nature of the authority that shall decide the faith and 
 practice of mankind. Catholicism sets up one authority 
 purporting, and that falsely, to be based upon a specific 
 revelation of God. Science sets up another claiming, and 
 that truly, to be derived from the acquisition of positive 
 truth ascertained from time to time by the reason which 
 God has given us. And between this upper and lower 
 mill-stone Protestantism is likely to be crushed to atoms 
 unless it elects frankly to make common cause with the 
 latter, to set up no authority as final, and to allow no 
 authority at all except such as can be verified by reasonable 
 evidence, and satisfy the progressive moral instincts of 
 mankind. 
 
 3. I am, however, well aware that logical victories of this 
 kind do not decide the matter for what may be called the 
 practical purposes of life. It will be answered that the 
 Bible as a mere fact in itself, previous to and in spite of 
 any analysis, carries its own conviction to the practical 
 religious mind as speaking the mind of God. It is its own 
 authority for its own inspiration. At the risk of seeming 
 to abate somewhat from the rigour of scientific demonstra- 
 tion, I must confess that this seems a practically valid 
 position to take up. After all, no argument for the 
 authenticity of St John's Gospel is half so convincing as the 
 
228 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 fact that the man who was capable of writing that book 
 gives his readers to understand that he was no other than 
 St John himself. But even after this very considerable 
 concession is made, we are no whit nearer either to a 
 demonstration or an account of the special inspiration, 
 the existence of which we have admitted. No such proof, 
 no such account, is given in the Bible itself. It is impossible 
 to do justice to the strength of this position in a few 
 sentences, but fortunately the facts are well known, and 
 the deductions to be derived from them as obvious as 
 candid minds can require. 
 
 The plain truth is that the Jews found themselves 
 possessed of a national literature of the most exalted 
 character, and, in a time of religious feebleness and decay, 
 learned to attach an extraordinary and to a certain extent 
 artifical value to it ; and that the early Christian Church 
 followed their example. They adopted this literature with- 
 out any critical discrimination of its contents apparently 
 upon no other system than that of receiving all the frag- 
 ments of early Jewish writings, and writings that were 
 supposed to belong to apostolic times. They erected no 
 test of inspiration, for the very simple reason that the books 
 themselves afforded none. These range over the whole 
 compass of literature, come before us in the most natural 
 manner as records of what has been done or said, deal with 
 the most insignificant no less than with the most important 
 events in the same tone and spirit, make no claim to 
 authority, much less to infallibility. The utmost that can 
 be said is, that just as the Jews regarded God as the author 
 of every good thing which they enjoyed, so they regarded 
 Him as the inspirer of every good thought which they 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 229 
 
 possessed. Exactly as men fell away from inspiration 
 itself did they begin to perceive the necessity of theories, 
 definitions, and a recognised canon. I entirely agree with 
 them in believing in this necessity, but I affirm that a 
 reasonable account of inspiration must be derived, not from 
 the authority of the Bible, which nowhere pretends to give 
 it, but from the methods of science investigating the nature 
 and the history of man. 
 
 It may be well before leaving this part of our subject to 
 consider the supreme wisdom with which St Paul treated 
 this question. It was brought before him in the most 
 direct way by the difficulties of the Corinthian Church con- 
 cerning " spiritual gifts." His position may be summarily 
 stated as follows : 
 
 1. All these gifts alike are to be traced to one and the 
 self-same Spirit, so that no distinction between the greatest 
 and the least of them is to be made in point of origin. 
 I Cor. xii. II. 
 
 2. The most ordinary and fundamental Christian thought, 
 namely the recognition of Jesus as the Christ, is equally due 
 to the direct influence of the Holy Ghost. I Cor. xii. 3. 
 
 3. In deciding a plain question of moral expediency, 
 that of marriage and re-marriage, he claims to have, and 
 feels the need of, the help of the Spirit of God. 
 I Cor. vii. 40. 
 
 4. But this spiritual power may be expressed in 
 ordinary moral terms, for it is also described as his "giving 
 judgment as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to 
 be found faithful." I Cor. vii. 25. 
 
 5. Lastly this spiritual power is to be regarded in a 
 natural sense, because the spirits of the prophets are subject 
 
230 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 to the prophets, God being the author, not of confusion, 
 but of peace. I Cor. xiv. 32. 
 
 It is thus that inspired wisdom deals with theories of 
 inspiration. No attempt is made to go beyond the line of 
 strict deduction from facts then ascertained, but at the same 
 time a prophetic intimation is given which it is the business 
 of science to realise. For if the spirit be subject to the 
 prophets simply as men, then since everything that is 
 natural and human falls within the sphere of science, it is 
 clear that the mental sciences, in taking cognisance of man 
 as a thinking being, take cognisance also of that inspiration 
 which in time and in history has been wrought in man in 
 such a way as to be subject to him. Furthermore, if God 
 be the author, not of confusion that defies analysis, but of 
 an order that invites knowledge, then it is possible to dis- 
 cover the law upon which that order reposes. All which is 
 plainly the work of scientific investigation. 
 
 Following, then, the spirit of St Paul, we turn from the 
 region of dubious authority, confused beliefs, and half- 
 concealed ignorance, which make up theology, and we go 
 on to inquire whether it is not possible to obtain a reason- 
 able meaning for inspiration, and a definite place for it in 
 the domain of facts by the ordinary methods of inquiry. 
 And as it is of the greatest importance to know what the 
 requirements of science are, I will lay down the eight 
 following propositions which I think, it will be confessed, 
 are as stringent, and, at the same time, as impartial as can 
 fairly be desired. 
 
 i. The communication of the Spirit of God to man may 
 be accepted as an hypothesis to be proved or disproved by 
 evidence, and tested by time. 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 231 
 
 2. It may be granted that this communication, sup- 
 posing it to be possible, operated to an unusual degree 
 and in a remarkable manner among the Jewish people 
 at various periods, up to the final destruction of the na- 
 tional life. 
 
 3. It is not necessary that this communication should be 
 apprehended by sensible means, but only that it should be 
 demonstrated by the phenomena it presents : these would 
 then be the results of a cause, the absolute nature of which 
 is beyond our faculties. No one has seen or touched that 
 power of attraction called gravitation : thought is real but 
 not perceptible by the senses: the moral emotions are 
 cognisable only by the effect they produce. 
 
 4. But though positive demonstration is by the nature of 
 the case excluded, yet it is absolutely essential that a clear, 
 definite account of inspiration should be given in plain, 
 intelligible language. It must be assigned a place in the 
 number of facts, and must be distinguished from other facts, 
 not by being dismissed as supernatural, but by having its 
 place in nature scientifically defined. It must be in accord- 
 ance with all known analogy in other spheres of thought, 
 and must not introduce disturbing forces into the course of 
 ascertained law. 
 
 5. A scientific account of inspiration must explain all the 
 phenomena that fall legitimately within its scope, and must 
 be expected to clear up difficulties as yet unsolved. The 
 immoral conduct of religious people and the moral conduct 
 of non-religious people is a case in point. 
 
 6. It must derive its authority from no other source than 
 that of truth ascertained by inquiry and capable of recom- 
 mending itself to men's minds. And it must exercise none 
 
232 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 except by persuasion and by the penalties which befal 
 those who disregard proved facts. 
 
 7. It must on no account take sides in any discus- 
 sions still pending, for instance, the existence of free will, 
 or the nature of morality. To be true it must be capable 
 of being harmonised with any doubtful opinion that may 
 ultimately turn out to be the right one. On the other 
 hand it cannot be expected to be more precise in its con- 
 clusions than are the mental sciences with which it is con- 
 nected and upon which it depends. It must be content to 
 share the uncertainty or the ignorance which characterise 
 these, provided that it is always enabled to keep pace with 
 their improvement in certainty and knowledge. In the 
 present state of these sciences any account of inspiration 
 must of necessity be superficial and tentative, but not 
 therefore useless or untrue. 
 
 8. In an inquiry of this description it is obvious that 
 words descriptive of abstract realities must be employed. 
 Now, of these science has one set, such as nature, law, 
 experience ; and religion has another, such as God, will, 
 faith. Hence it is necessary that the propositions should 
 be so framed as to suit both classes of words and of ideas 
 expressed by them ; that is to say, that supposing the propo- 
 sitions are drawn up with the signs #, y, and 2, then it must 
 be possible to substitute for these letters either the religious 
 or scientific terms. I shall use the former of course, but (I 
 hope) in such a way as not to make any assertion that would 
 be untrue if stated in the phraseology of the latter. No 
 more rigorous or satisfactory test could I think be employed. 
 
 It is then with these trammels, treading every step upon 
 explosive missiles, threading a doubtful path amongst old but 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. . 
 
 not exhausted controversies, blinded by the dust and rubbish 
 of metaphysical discussions, hated by theology and slighted 
 by science, that the men who are to re-form religion upon 
 the basis and by the methods of science, must make their 
 way to truth and contumely. 
 
 And yet, when we come to deal with the facts of the case, 
 difficulties, however real, are apt to disappear speedily 
 under the powerful solvent of some principles recognised 
 in other branches of knowledge, but of novel application to 
 the one under discussion. This is ever the way with truth. 
 By means of statements so obvious that people do not 
 only accept them but even try to persuade themselves that 
 they have all along held them, light and order immediately 
 begin to drive away the doubts and mysteries that only 
 derive an apparent reality from the darkness in which they 
 are enveloped. The simple affirmation of facts is much 
 like striking a match in the dark. Accordingly all that I 
 feel called upon to do is to give an account of the being of 
 man so framed as to enable us to include in it that one of 
 his faculties called religion. 
 
 Now, the first fact presented to consciousness as con- 
 stituting man is the power of thought Mind comes to him 
 as something from without, which he owns in company 
 with other men, which he cannot originate himself, nor 
 discover the origin of outside himself. Whether we de- 
 scribe it in the language of science or religion it remains 
 incomprehensible, because thoughts are not the essence 
 but the actions of the mind, of that which religion calls the 
 divine in man, and from which it endeavours, laboriously 
 or intuitively, to frame its own idea of God. It is true in 
 a sense, and false in a sense, if we say either that man 
 
234 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 thinks with the brain, or that the brain thinks. All we 
 can be certain of is a succession of thoughts, suggested to 
 us, coming upon us, taking possession of us, blowing like 
 the wind where they list. They are primarily independent 
 of us though subject to us the moment they become our 
 thoughts. In sleep, indeed, all control by the will vanishes, 
 and thought, as a thing outside of us and presented to us, 
 is plainly apparent. It is not at all necessary to draw any 
 line of distinction between men and the other animals ; the 
 bare fact that we share with other creatures a power of 
 thinking, which it is not ours to create, is enough for our 
 present purpose. Religion, while leaving to science the 
 analysis and examination of the phenomena of thought, 
 would call the fact itself the gift of God, and would claim 
 for those who possess it a share of the divine essence. 
 
 The next fact that belongs to us is the material organisa- 
 tion with which this power of thought is connected, by 
 which, and through which, alone it has for us any positive 
 existence. The general power of thinking is conditioned 
 and shaped into various faculties by the varying bodies of 
 different individuals. Of the general truth of this pro- 
 position no scientific man will, I presume, entertain any 
 doubt, though we are as yet merely upon the threshold of 
 the sciences that deal with the subject. At present all that 
 can be said for certain is, that no other explanation of the 
 phenomenon presented by the existence of widely different 
 intellectual gifts, has been suggested or appears to be com- 
 prehensible. Not, indeed, that we are without more direct 
 evidence than this. It is certain that human reasoning 
 requires a certain amount of brain, that it varies with the 
 size and formation of the brain, and grows with its growth 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 235 
 
 from childhood to age. Moreover, children are born with 
 certain mental faculties in an extraordinary state of develop- 
 ment, for which no possible reason can be assigned, except, 
 to use the widest phrase, the physical arrangement or 
 condition of their bodies. Some are musical, others 
 artistic, others literary. Some have prodigious gifts of 
 memory, or surpassing capacities of reflection, or an innate 
 power of acquiring languages, or special moral aptitudes. 
 In some the mind seems to proceed naturally by an 
 elaborate process of association of ideas, in others it leaps 
 to its conclusion or performs its work by a process so swift 
 and unforeseen as to deserve the name of intuition. How 
 all this comes about, by what laws of inheritance, by what 
 variations (small or large) of nature, by what union of 
 parental temperaments, by what local, national, or climatic 
 influences, to what part of our cerebral, nervous, or, more 
 widely, our physical organisation each mental faculty is 
 allied, remains the secret of to-day, the inquiry of to- 
 morrow, the discovery, so men dare to hope, of days to 
 come. All I need to affirm is that the mind is distributed 
 into its various channels by the disposition of the atoms of 
 the body, and that this disposition comes to each individual 
 from without, that it is a gift of that power which religion 
 calls God. Science once more explains by the operation 
 of natural laws that arrangement which religion attributes 
 to the providential order of a beneficent Creator. Both 
 mean the same thing, and both confess that thing to be in 
 its essence incomprehensible. 
 
 So far for man's mental and bodily nature ; there remains, 
 to complete the description, his history. Circumstances, 
 events, surroundings come to him and fashion him as by the 
 
236 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 impression of an external moulding instrument. He does not 
 make his history any more than he makes his mind or his 
 body. All his faculties are discovered, educated, and wrought 
 upon by the things that come to him. Village Hampdens 
 die, and unknown Miltons remain mute and inglorious, 
 because nothing occurs to call their faculties into action. 
 To what extent, indeed, the lack of opportunity operates in 
 preventing the development of individuals remains, and 
 perhaps must remain, uncertain ; it is one of those negative 
 questions of which wise men fight shy, for wisdom occupies 
 herself in discovering the causes of the things that are, not 
 the reason why things are not. But the positive assertion 
 that the gift of opportunity exercises the greatest influence 
 in altering the whole course of men's intellectual lives is 
 true beyond a doubt. By opportunity I mean all that 
 ranges between the startling events in human life called 
 crises, and the daily press of surrounding circumstances 
 that stimulate the mind in one direction and train it for 
 a special work. The things that are, and the events 
 that happen are the only known source of special 
 inspiration. Each faculty of the mind, in short, energises 
 by feeding upon these, and thrives by the work which it 
 performs. 
 
 And here, with every intention to be impartial, I must 
 confess that in my opinion religion can give an adequate 
 account and a reasonable name for this state of things, 
 whereas science can do neither. What is the cause of 
 either the striking events or the overwhelming pressure of 
 circumstances which are producing at every moment such 
 tremendous effects upon the mind of man, and through him 
 upon the universe ? The work of science may be not 
 
A Scientific A ccount of Inspiration. 237 
 
 unfairly described as the undertaking to explain why a 
 thing is, and must be, in this way rather than in that. It, 
 or rather the common sense of which it is the outcome, can, 
 for instance, tell us why the discovery of a heathen idol 
 washed from the Atlantic (by the way is the story true ?), 
 stirred up within the mind of Columbus new and stronger 
 thoughts of a world beyond the sea, but it cannot so much 
 as form to itself an intelligible reason why the little image 
 was brought within his view, instead of being picked up by 
 some incurious passer by. And yet all the instincts of our 
 nature proclaim that there must be some reason for this as 
 for anything else, we have here a vera causa if only we can 
 discover it. The mere existence of such words as fortune, 
 luck, fate, chance, proclaims the necessity under which, as 
 a mere matter of fact, we find ourselves, of attaching some 
 word to a notion that rests upon a real something. If, 
 indeed, science could prove that this something was no- 
 thing, or even if it could rid itself, not to say the human 
 mind, of the necessity of accepting it as a fact, and of 
 applying some description to it, then there would cease 
 to be an absolute necessity for religious conceptions, 
 though the room for them would remain as ample as 
 before. But this is not the case, as can be shown by a 
 recent instance. An article recently appeared in one of the 
 reviews in which the evolution of man is attributed to 
 "a chain of antecedent events not provably elaborated 
 under supreme guidance but probably simply from that un- 
 calculating necessity of sequence inherent in the very existence 
 of matter" words in which the negation of thought, to- 
 gether with the necessity of thinking, is expressed in pre- 
 tentious language that seeks in vain to avoid those ugly 
 
238 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 words fate and chance by an unmeaning combination of the 
 two. For these religion substitutes the designing will of 
 an overruling and omniscient Creator, by whose arrange- 
 ment the circumstances of men are correlated to their 
 faculties and their work by unerring and unvarying law. 
 And thus as I maintain, history, that is revelation, is the true 
 domain of religion, because it is the only sphere in which 
 religious ideas are needed to give a rational account of ad- 
 mitted facts. Mind and matter may and must be admitted 
 by religion, as well as by science, as ultimate facts of con- 
 ciousness that do not require, or rather that do not suggest 
 the possibility of explanation ; no one ever actually asks 
 why they are of this sort rather than of another : they admit 
 the possibility, but do not demand the existence of God. 
 Whereas the events and circumstances that make up indi- 
 vidual history, and form the connecting link between sub- 
 ject -and object, just because they fall within experience, are 
 for ever demanding explanation ; a man cannot choose but 
 ask why a given grave event has happened to him or to some 
 one else in a particular way. In short, just as mind is known 
 only by its thoughts, matter by its qualities, so is God (and 
 man also) recognised primarily, if not solely, by His actions. 
 The first and truest revelation of God is then in history 
 and not in nature, exactly as we realise a man by what he 
 does and not by what he has made. 
 
 In abandoning, however, for the moment a position of 
 neutrality, I have run some risk of losing the chain of argu- 
 ment which it is above all things necessary to keep clearly 
 before us. To sum up, then, we have seen that man is the 
 result of three factors, each of which may be expressed in 
 religious or scientific terms these are God or mind ; crea- 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 239 
 
 tion or matter ; government or what shall I call it ? the 
 fortuitous combination of accidents. It follows next to trace 
 the relation of man as an independent, self-conditioned be- 
 ing with the three elements which he derives from an ex- 
 ternal and, as religion would say, a superior power. 
 
 Thus, then, we are brought to the subject of the will, con- 
 cerning which I do not mean to make a single statement 
 that goes beyond the clear and admitted facts of human 
 consciousness. These, I express in the words of Locke. 
 " This at least I think evident that we find in ourselves a 
 power to begin or forbear, continue or end several actions 
 of our minds and motions of our bodies barely by a thought 
 or preference of the mind, ordering or, as it were, command- 
 ing the doing or not doing such or such a particular action ; 
 this power which the mind has thus to order the considera- 
 tion of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it, or to pre- 
 fer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice 
 versd in any particular instance, is that which we call the 
 will ; the actual exercise of that power by directing any par- 
 ticular action or its forbearance, is that which we call voli- 
 tion or willing ; the forbearance of that action, consequent 
 to such order or command of the mind, is called voluntary ; 
 and whatsoever action is performed without such thought 
 of the mind is called involuntary." 
 
 Beyond this description it is not necessary for me to ad- 
 vance a single step, however firmly I may believe that 
 Locke's further account of the will contains the substance 
 of all true and possible philosophy of human free agency. 
 It is enough to say that man does not know either that 
 his will is free or that it is bound. The one fact pre- 
 sented to my consciousness is this I know that I do not 
 
240 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 know that I am compelled to act in any particular way. 
 Practically, therefore, man finds himself an independent (I 
 avoid the use of the word free) agent, mediating, as it were, 
 amidst the three elements that make up his existence. To 
 hazard a passing definition, the will is the balance of mind, 
 body, and circumstance. Each of these comes to us from with- 
 out, and is primarily beyond our control. But, secondarily, 
 they may be manipulated by us to an illimitable extent 
 The power of thought itself may be educated, may be 
 fashioned by application, may be diverted into channels 
 prescribed for it. The body itself is susceptible of change, 
 improvement, or deterioration, according to the way in 
 which we treat it. And events may be moulded to an in- 
 calculable extent in various directions. We might, indeed, 
 be tempted to say that they can be originated, but this 
 is not the case. For instance, Wordsworth's character and 
 poetry were influenced enormously by the fact of his living 
 in the Lake district, still he did but select one out of many 
 possible alternatives ; ultimately to him as to all men cir- 
 cumstances exist independently. The most important, how- 
 ever, of the different directions in which events may be 
 moulded, or of the modes in which they may be used, are 
 those which the common consciousness of mankind has 
 agreed to call good and evil. 
 
 Here, again, I must decline as entirely unnecessary for 
 our present inquiry all consideration of the amount and 
 reasonableness of the blame and censure to be awarded to 
 the human agent. As a mere matter of fact we know that 
 men may produce good or bad results by means of their treat- 
 ment of their lives and history. We can distinguish, indeed, 
 roughly between productions of man's faculties and moral 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 241 
 
 actions strictly so called. An artist or a poet may make good 
 or bad art, good or bad poetry according to the use to which 
 he puts his powers or his materials. The fault, if fault there 
 be, may be ascribed either to the pernicious tendencies of 
 his age, to his own defects of character, or to both combined. 
 Different schools of philosophy will attach more importance 
 to one cause of failure or the other ; wiser people may decline 
 the dangerous, if not impossible, task of awarding moral 
 praise or blame to any man at all, except in the broadest 
 and most sweeping outlines, for any productions of his 
 faculties, and may limit these words to his actions. But 
 the exact relations of morality and inspiration will have to 
 be discussed separately. For the present it is enough to 
 say that men may make good or bad use of their various 
 faculties according to the " orders " of their wills. 
 
 We have thus then described, and, I think, with reason- 
 able clearness and precision, what inspiration is in general. 
 It is the power of thought, conditioned by the peculiarities 
 of each man's physical nature, directed by the government 
 of God over events, and applied by man's will in each of 
 his various faculties to the objects with which these faculties 
 severally have to do. These belong to all men more or 
 less, but to some men they belong in an unusual measure, 
 so that one is musical, another scientific, political, or 
 philosophical. Thus, then, in the operation of human 
 faculties we have divine thought in human fashion, seeking 
 to discern, appropriate, and reproduce the spiritual realities 
 of the universe, that is, the divine thoughts of beauty, good- 
 ness, and order, which underlie its various phenomena. 
 
 If it should seem to any that the way has been long and 
 
 tedious towards a very simple conclusion, yet the trouble 
 
 Q 
 
242 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 may be forgotten if it can be shown that a single further step 
 will lead us to the definition of religious as distinguished 
 from general inspiration. That step consists merely in the 
 statement that as there are faculties of art, science, and the 
 rest, so is there a specific faculty of religion. I believe 
 that this assertion ought to carry its own conviction with 
 it, but as confusion of thought upon this subject is general, 
 and prejudice inveterate, I will proceed to prove it by a 
 further account of the nature of the faculties. 
 
 I have already said that of the essential nature of these 
 we are in ignorance, and that the utmost we can hope is 
 that, perhaps, in some yet distant day, light may be thrown 
 upon them. Plainly they are the result to a considerable 
 extent of natural bodily organisation, and it may be that 
 the artistic, speculative, and practical faculties represent 
 three broadly different conditions of the human brain. On 
 the other hand, they are equally plainly acquired, to a 
 considerable extent, under the stress of circumstances, so 
 that, perhaps, within the above-named genera there may 
 be species so closely allied as to allow the mind to be turned 
 into various channels by events that happen. This appears 
 certain when we remark the affinities that subsist between 
 various gifts, so that it seems a mere chance in which way 
 the possessor of them distinguishes himself. In the present 
 state, then, of our knowledge, all we can do is to fall back 
 upon the phenomena which the faculties present, and 
 distinguish and describe them by these alone. These are 
 mainly twofold, the materials upon which the faculties are 
 employed, and the productions which they severally bring 
 forth. The mind is drawn off to the study of nature, 
 humanity, God ; here are distinct spheres of thought and 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 243 
 
 operation. We call that, then, a faculty which has its 
 own definite object, and produces its own special results. 
 Tried by this test it is easy to prove that religion is as 
 much a distinct faculty as music or mathematics. 
 
 I. Religion has its own special object of thought, the 
 unknown element in things. Where the province of the 
 other faculties ends that of religion begins. The unknown 
 cause of life and matter, the unknown world that lies 
 beyond the grave, that which comes before and that which 
 comes after experience, in fine, God and immortality are 
 the two poles towards which religious thought gravitates. 
 And we gain a reasonable and legitimate explanation of 
 the saying that theology is the crown of sciences, while yet 
 distinguished from them. It deals with that element which 
 is common to them all and underlies them all, by which, if 
 ever at all, they are to be combined in one harmonious 
 whole. But it must be observed that this is in no ways 
 contradictory to the position elsewhere adopted, that the 
 religious faculty has no immediate, intuitive knowledge of 
 God or of immortality, but apprehends them through the 
 medium of facts. 
 
 2. Religion has its own special instrument faith. It is 
 by this that we take an interest in the unknown. That 
 general power of mind which, in the various faculties, 
 discerns and realises the objects presented to it, may be 
 properly called the imagination. This is that which forms 
 a picture or an idea of things, such as beauty, law, truth, 
 goodness. In none of the faculties, so much as in religion, 
 does this imagination deserve a special name and perform 
 appropriate functions. Elsewhere we speak vaguely of the 
 sense of harmony, or of the discernment of the relations of 
 
244 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 numbers, or of logical power. But in religion the imagin- 
 ative power which realises God and immortality, and forces 
 us to act as though they were the most essential of verities, 
 is itself one of the most obvious of existing facts. The 
 definition in the book of Hebrews is scientifically accurate 
 " it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of 
 things not seen." I do not, however, deny that closer 
 analysis might show that faith, as thus described, exists 
 also in the operation of other faculties besides religion. 
 But such analysis is, I think, at present hardly possible ; it 
 is not certainly possible to me nor necessary for my pur- 
 pose. It may, however, show, what is probable in itself, 
 that the faculties are composed of the same elements, 
 though combined in different proportions, as determined 
 by the physical or external conditions with which the mind 
 is correlated. Thus, a musician may be said to have the 
 essential element of faith because he is haunted by the 
 presence of an unapproachable beauty and harmony. Plainly, 
 however, the musical faculty can be scientifically differen- 
 tiated from the religious, even if we admitted that it 
 ultimately led up to it. Religion would, in that case, have 
 the same kind of relation to other faculties that pure 
 mathematics have to mixed. 
 
 3. Religion has its own special production prayer. 
 The score of one of Beethoven's symphonies is not more 
 truly the creation of the musical, nor the differential calculus 
 of the mathematical, nor the doctrine of evolution of the 
 scientific faculty, than is the prayer of Moses, the man of 
 God, the distinctive product of religion. The power of 
 composing a prayer (I will not say the power of praying) 
 belongs to a man in proportion as he is religious, just as 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 245 
 
 the power of painting a picture belongs to him so far as he 
 is an artist. Nor is this all. Religion creates a special 
 type of those productions which it has in common with 
 other faculties. Hymns, as Mr Matthew Arnold with cruel 
 candour pointed out, are very different from poetry ; sermons 
 are not like speeches; the Vedas,Old Testament, New Testa- 
 ment, and the Koran, however much they may differ from 
 each other, have something in common, an undefinable air 
 or tone which separates them from other books. And, not 
 to multiply instances, the religious spirit has called into 
 being special types of music, art, and architecture; the 
 latter especially being made subservient to religious uses> 
 and adapted to express religious ideas. If the name and 
 memory of religion could be supposed blotted from the 
 earth, sacred music and pictures would still be intelligible 
 to mankind, but the cause and meaning of Pagan temples 
 or Christian cathedrals would become an insoluble mystery. 
 4. Religion has its own special heroes and masters. 
 There are men whose genius takes from their cradle a 
 religious bent ; the emotions, actions, and aspirations 
 peculiar to religion come as naturally to such men as 
 those of science or literature to others. There are others 
 in whom the inspiration of religion is so absorbing and 
 marvellous a power, that we should as soon think of 
 imitating Newton or Handel as them. St Francis of Assisi 
 may be taken as a type of religious genius, and so may John 
 Wesley, the more so as morally he is by no means so 
 attractive a character as St Francis. The whole bent and 
 form of the mind of St Francis, his prophetical power of 
 utterance, his scheme of life and duty, his principles of 
 action, his peculiar virtues, in short, the whole nature of 
 
246 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 the man was instinct with a genius of religion, which we 
 stand afar off and admire. Moreover, the rule is, though 
 St Francis is hardly a case in point, that this genius is 
 apparent in extreme youth, and is therefore in all pro- 
 bability connected with natural, physical temperament. It 
 is, too, especially connected with parental and, above all, 
 maternal care. 
 
 5. It follows from this that religion has its own special 
 epochs. In religion, as in other departments of thought 
 and action, certain traceable causes produce great develop- 
 ments, and lead to new discoveries or even inventions. 
 There was a time when the men of the most religious 
 people ever known were not taught to pray ; the highest 
 conception of the eternal God as a Father of men is a 
 Christian, and therefore a comparatively modern, idea. 
 Moreover, the same law holds good here as elsewhere, that 
 the greatest men come first in each successive period of 
 development. The cause of this is obvious. It is only 
 one man who can be the first to climb a mountain, many 
 may follow his steps with more ease and rapidity, but none 
 with the same original daring and success. To take modern 
 times, there is one Luther, just as there is one Shakespeare, 
 one Newton, one Handel, and one Columbus. Of course 
 these men have their companions, and even their rivals, 
 but the general law plainly holds good. 
 
 6. It follows once more from this that religion should 
 have its special varieties of type and variations of history. 
 The religion of any given nation is just as truly part of 
 its general history as its art or science. The forms 
 that religion may assume are almost infinite, but each is 
 adapted to the general culture, politics, and position of the 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 247 
 
 nation in which it exists. There is, no doubt, an ideal 
 form to which the various types seek, with more or less 
 success, to approximate, but men are beginning to catch 
 some faint glimpse of the absurdity of supposing that their 
 religion is the only true one because they may chance to 
 have been born Protestants at Geneva, Catholics at Madrid, 
 or Anglicans at Oxford. Whether Christianity itself may be 
 said to be true in any pre-eminent sense depends entirely 
 upon our belief as to the nature and person of its Founder. 
 Again, religion shares the fate of other faculties in such 
 respects as the following. It never attains to existence at 
 all amidst savages of extraordinary brutality. It some- 
 times, on the other hand, reaches a strange beauty and 
 power under what seem abnormal conditions ; as, for in- 
 stance, among some tribes of American Indians. It dies out 
 in individuals, and almost in whole generations, so that men 
 cease to devote thought or care to God and immortality. 
 Elsewhere it grows to excess and ends in the wildest 
 fanaticism. Everywhere it is capable of the less and more, 
 the true and false, the useful and the pernicious. 
 
 7. It follows from this, finally, that religion should have 
 its special moral phenomena. We may assert confidently 
 that these are the same in kind, but not in degree, as those 
 presented by other facultie-s. The facts which go to prove 
 this are so abundant and so notorious, that to record them 
 would be to rewrite some of the best known pages of 
 religious history. Briefly, they may be summed up as 
 follows : Like other faculties religion may have the most 
 noble or the most degraded conceptions of its objects, its 
 instrument, and its productions. The idea of God may 
 range from a fetish to a Father ; immortality may be con- 
 
248 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ceived as the realisation of the kingdom of goodness or as 
 a happy Paradise ; faith may be the yearning of the heart 
 after the eternal Spirit, or a superstitious reliance upon 
 outward machinery, such as the Apostolical Succession ; 
 prayer may be the i/th chapter of St John, an impreca- 
 tion of vengeance, or a Chinese wheel. Religion again 
 calls into being special virtues and vices of its own, just as 
 a certain moral character belongs to the artist, thinker, and 
 statesman as such ; humility and philanthrophy are practi- 
 cally Christian virtues, as being the products of Christian 
 thought ; fatalism and sectarianism have a distinctively 
 religious flavour. And, what is still more conclusive, true 
 religion may exist in thoroughly bad men, as in the instance 
 of Rochester's prayer quoted by Lord Macaulay, and false 
 religion may turn the qualities of good men into evil, as all 
 history bears but too sad testimony. The mere faculty of 
 religion is not in itself moral or immoral, but neutral. 
 
 I submit, then, that with these facts before us, unless in 
 religion we refuse to attribute like effects to similar causes, 
 merely because they are religious, we have no choice but to 
 describe religion as one out of the faculties belonging to man s 
 the constitution of which has been before described. And 
 thus our definition of religious inspiration emerges in some 
 such shape as this : it is the power of thought (that is, 
 mind) united with certain inherited, physical conditions and 
 outward circumstances, directed towards thinking about 
 the unknown, and towards the performance of all the 
 actions which such thinking inspires. 
 
 Thus far for inspiration in general, and religious inspira- 
 tion in particular. There remains a branch of the subject 
 too essential to be omitted, too vast to be attempted with 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 249 
 
 much hope of success ; I mean moral inspiration or the 
 communication of the Spirit of God to man in the direction 
 of those common actions of life called moral. This in- 
 cludes what men feel and say, no less than what they 
 actually do. 
 
 Now, to begin with, we are here brought face to face 
 with the source and nature of evil, and with the existence 
 and nature of conscience, two things of which it is impos- 
 sible to give even the most superficial and neutral account 
 without offending some school of thought or other. But, 
 sticking as closely as I can to simple facts, I can trace the 
 workings of inspiration as follows 
 
 Conscience is thought applied to the decision of the 
 Tightness or wrongness of any proposed course of action. 
 But thought being the one divine or perfect thing in man 
 has an inherent attraction towards discerning what is right 
 and desiring to do it. Let us reflect on this for a moment. 
 Pure thought is pure goodness ; we may call God himself 
 perfect thought or absolute goodness. If we could imagine 
 thought set free from all personal conditions, we could only 
 imagine it as purely and essentially right, without taint of 
 selfishness, corruption, or falsehood. Humanity seems to 
 mean the upward progress of thought in combination with 
 those material and outward elements which make up man. 
 The attraction of thought, therefore, towards correctness 
 of action is as natural as that of the tongue for what is 
 palatable, or the ear for harmony of sound, and the authority 
 of conscience is at once real and legitimate. 
 
 Again evil is, according to the profound instinct of the 
 first pages of the Bible, a thing that comes afterwards. It 
 seems to be essentially involved in the idea of progress 
 
250 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 and education which is suggested by the combination of 
 mind and matter in time. Whether it is due primarily to 
 defect of individual will, to stress of circumstances, or to 
 inherited fault of character, or to all combined, does not 
 affect our present purpose. It is enough to say that we 
 find it in existence and closely allied with thought itself in 
 all the operations of all the faculties, religion included. 
 
 Neither does it matter what view we take or whether we 
 take any view at all of the nature of the standard by which 
 conscience decides. These views are mainly three, and are 
 probably all in a measure real, and possibly all ultimately 
 identical. They vary according as men refer things to their 
 judgment of what is right for themselves as individuals, or 
 to their sense of duty towards mankind, or to their responsi- 
 bility to the unknown, unattainable truth of things, which 
 we call divine art, heavenly knowledge, God himself. 
 
 Now conscience acts on all the faculties alike, and within 
 the sphere of each the conscience of each is supreme. The 
 artist paints, the philosopher thinks, the statesman rules, 
 primarily because the voice of his artistic, philosophic, or 
 political conscience impels him to do so ; it is a mere theolo- 
 gical impertinence, a gross intellectual inaccuracy, and a de- 
 plorable misrendering of facts, to call the duty so performed 
 religious in any distinctive sense. But it is quite within the 
 limits of truth to point out that religion begins at this point 
 to exercise a special moral influence above and beyond that 
 of the other faculties. No doubt, the moral influence of all 
 the faculties is closely interdependent; there is something 
 artistically right, for instance, in the pursuit of science after 
 truth. But whereas the influence of any two of the above- 
 mentioned faculties (art, philosophy, politics) - upon the 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 251 
 
 actions of the third is so vague and visionary as to be 
 almost a matter of words, that of religion upon all three 
 of them is manifest and decisive. It may exist for good 
 or for evil, but of the fact of its existence as a deepening, 
 intensifying, encouraging power there is no question at all. 
 This power religion owes to her position as the " crown of 
 sciences," as before described. I do not, however, dwell 
 further upon this, partly because it is abundantly clear in 
 itself, partly because it comes out more strongly still in the 
 class of actions which now claim our attention those I 
 mean that make up ordinary human conduct, and cannot 
 be attributed to any special faculty, but are described 
 merely as the duties we perform as men among men. 
 
 Now it is possible that closer analysis might prove that 
 there was an element belonging to all the human faculties 
 in every action of life. Assuredly, art has represented, 
 poetry described, science defined, and religion consecrated 
 the very commonest and most homely duties of man to 
 man. But certain it is that the moral power of the other 
 faculties in helping the will to do what is right is incom- 
 parably less effectual than religion. No doubt, a well- 
 trained and truthfully-working faculty, whatever it be, estab- 
 lishes a general disposition towards goodness, which, as a rule, 
 enables a man to walk uprightly and in the spirit of self- 
 sacrifice. An enthusiastic love of beauty, or an intense 
 yearning after justice, or an ardent pursuit of law creates a 
 moral tendency to which we owe some of the noblest and 
 purest lives. But it is a mere truism that the moral force 
 of religion, whether in a good or evil direction, is infinitely 
 stronger than any or all of them. Taking only the good 
 side, and remembering that every bright part of the picture 
 
252 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 has its dark and shameful counterpart, the testimony of 
 history and experience to this effect may be summarised 
 as follows : 
 
 In no faculty so much as in religion does thought find so 
 easy and direct a channel for moral influences, and in none 
 do events exercise so strong an inspiration towards good. 
 I may have to recur to this again in speaking of the 
 morality of the Jews, and therefore leaving it, I go on to say, 
 that religion has been much more universal in its effects, 
 because it has reached hearts and minds to which science 
 and philosophy were closed doors. It has shown an 
 especial power of protesting against a narrow, exclusive 
 morality engendered by a too-absorbing cultivation of 
 one faculty, though none alas can be so narrow and exclu- 
 sive as religion itself. It has created transcendent bursts of 
 enthusiasm, and yet has directed a constant, minute, pene- 
 trating pressure towards goodness. It has brought into 
 being a vast array of rules, guides, outward helps, for the 
 special purpose of enabling people to be and to do good. It 
 has produced the best accounts of morality, the highest 
 precepts, the noblest spirits, the most beneficent lives. It 
 can reach the conscience from the intuitional, utilitarian, 
 and religious side. Thus it can say to people, and has said 
 to them with marked effect, You must do your best in art 
 and science, peace and war, home and business, politics and 
 philosophy, because you, the actor, are a child of God ; the 
 thought that works in you is divine and eternal, incapable 
 of destruction, fraught with immeasurable consequences 
 through countless ages. Or you must do your best 
 because mankind is in very truth the brotherhood that 
 your insight teaches you to call it ; men are children of a 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 253 
 
 common family, whose Father is God. Or you must do 
 your best because the truth and beauty which you desire 
 are a part of the life of God, and to every other motive we 
 can add this constraining one, " whatever you do in word 
 or deed, do all to the glory of God." 
 
 I would fain spare myself the saddening reflection that 
 religion has also taught men that they are half animal, half 
 devil ; that only a chosen few are the objects of God's 
 favour ; that His glory demands the everlasting torments 
 of myriads of His children. But after all it is consoling to 
 remember that the inherent, moral power of religion has 
 been strong enough to survive these doctrines, and to 
 make some of those who have held them to rank among the 
 most beneficent and unselfish of men. And it is still more 
 consoling to hope that these doctrines are vanishing before 
 that general progress of mankind towards which religion 
 has contributed so much in times past, and may yet con- 
 tribute so much more in times to come. Her ability to 
 do so will increase just in proportion as she claims for 
 herself that supreme power of influencing men for good 
 which will be produced whenever she identifies herself 
 with goodness, teaches art, philosophy, and science to do 
 the same, and proclaims that the unknown will of God has 
 been revealed as the salvation of men from evil here and 
 hereafter. 
 
 Thus, then, our definition of moral inspiration takes this 
 form. It is thought exercising itself in and through all 
 the faculties, but pre-eminently in and through religion, 
 towards the right appreciation and due performance of the 
 various actions of life, which make up human conduct. 
 
 That this agrees with all our personal experience I 
 
254 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 venture to affirm. What do we mean by our own inspira- 
 tion ? It seems that we .mean this. Thoughts come to 
 us in connection with our various faculties that prompt us 
 to goodness ; habits are founded upon them that keep us in 
 the right way ; sobriety and health of body are a natural re- 
 straint upon evil and an instrument of good ; circumstances 
 and events fill the soul with the desire to do right, with 
 the deepest appreciation of the will and love of God. It is, 
 indeed, thus that we may ascertain whether this account 
 (it makes no pretension to be anything more) of inspiration 
 is a true one. Does it explain the phenomena of religion 
 in persons, in nations, and in history ? Not one of the 
 chief of these, so far as I know, has been omitted in this 
 necessarily rapid survey, though it still remains to write the 
 history and account for the facts of Jewish inspiration upon 
 the data and by the method thus described. For the 
 present I content myself with asking Do the facts agree 
 with the account here given of them ? All results beyond 
 this are immaterial to me, for I am now simply an 
 inquirer after scientific truth in the field of religion. If it 
 be asserted that the principles here enunciated lead to Ultra- 
 montanism, Infidelity, or Anglicanism, it would not affect my 
 mind unless the statements could be proved inaccurate in 
 point of fact. If, indeed, I were asked my own opinion, I 
 would say frankly that I think the position here taken 
 up is one more forward step in that reconstitution of theology 
 by scientific method which is likely to exercise so profound 
 and destructive an effect upon the present creeds and 
 received opinions of the Christian religion. At present 
 between these two, religion and science, there yawns a gulf 
 across which men hurl defiance and contempt at each other. 
 
A Scientific Account of Inspiration. 255 
 
 Years hence when that gulf is crossed by many a secure 
 line of acknowledged truth, men will easily forget then, as 
 they readily ignore now, the few who were the first to stretch 
 a frail and trembling bridge of rope above the abyss, and 
 to trust their lives and hopes along that perilous pathway. 
 So be it but for all that God is just. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE JEWS. 
 
 ' I "'HE object of this and the following essay is to give a 
 -* scientific account of the special form of religious 
 inspiration that produced the Jewish and Christian religions. 
 Or to speak more correctly and more modestly, it is to 
 make an effort in that direction ; a direction to which 
 modern thought is steadily tending, though for the present 
 with imperfect knowledge and insufficient materials. The 
 religion of the Jews (the dawn of Christianity being 
 included) must not be separated from the other religions of 
 humanity, but must be regarded as the type to which they 
 all approach with more or less success, the standard by 
 which they are to be judged, the best illustration of the laws 
 and the most perfect embodiment of the truths common to 
 all religions alike. If we desire to study the highest form 
 of law we go to Rome ; or of philosophy, to Greece ; or of 
 music, to Germany ; or of natural science, to England ; in 
 the same way the national religion best worth studying is 
 that of the Jews before the downfall of their country. In 
 all these departments of thought the various nations here 
 mentioned may or may not be surpassed in the course of 
 time by others : but to them belongs the inalienable glory 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 257 
 
 of having laid the foundation upon which others must build. 
 This is emphatically the case with the Jews in the province 
 of religion. 
 
 The special task before us is then to explain the most 
 remarkable phenomenon in history the Jewish nation, their 
 history, their beliefs, and their literature. I remember 
 reading somewhere the assertion that the causes of the out- 
 burst of Grecian intellect remain yet to be discovered. So, 
 too, do the causes of Jewish religion, though the inquiry is 
 by no means so difficult, and is much more practical in itself r 
 But in spite of all the attempts that have been made, it is, 
 I think, clear that men are very far indeed from realising 
 either the importance of the phenomenon or the difficulty 
 of accounting for it by ordinary means. And it may well 
 be that repeated failures will drive men to the necessity of 
 accepting the events, supernatural though they be, which do 
 account for things otherwise insoluble. If so, then the 
 supernatural element must be reasonable in itself, and con- 
 sistent with general experience. It becomes therefore the 
 task of liberal theology to define this element, and provide 
 a sphere for it. Hitherto it has been represented especially 
 by the word inspiration, which is always associated with 
 the idea of something supernatural. This is the point I 
 shall now proceed to discuss. 
 
 Recurring to the former essay, it will be found that our 
 apparatus for attempting this task is as follows. Inspiration 
 is thought working in the various faculties which are pro- 
 duced by material or external circumstances. Religious 
 inspiration is thought working in the religious faculty. 
 Moral inspiration is thought working through the various 
 
 faculties towards Tightness of conduct and action. Jewish 
 
 R 
 
258' Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 inspiration is thought working through a specially de- 
 veloped religious faculty. We examine first the thought, 
 then the external organisation, then the nature of the 
 events, these three being the constituent elements of that 
 which I have called " faculty." 
 
 The origin of Jewish religion, the growth of the constitu- 
 ent thought by which it was dominated throughout its long 
 career, and which it has implanted in the heart of humanity, 
 can be traced with more or less distinctness, even though 
 we should be compelled to reject the details of the narra- 
 tive. It was born into the world at that great seed-time of 
 human thought, concerning which we must look to the 
 study of comparative religion for future disclosures. (As I 
 write these words the Times of the day contains Mr George 
 Smith's paper on the Chaldean account of the Deluge.) 
 Long before this men awaking from a savage existence had 
 found themselves capable of reasoning, and reason had 
 impelled them to ask whence they came, whither they were 
 going, who and what was the dread mysterious element 
 in themselves and in nature ? We know something of the 
 nature of the conclusions to which they had been brought, 
 though it would be foreign to the purpose of this essay to 
 do more than indicate the sources from which our informa- 
 tion is derived. The Assyrian and Egyptian empires had 
 settled forms of belief and worship ; the causes that pro- 
 duced the Vedas, and not so many centuries afterwards the 
 Homeric mythology, must have been in strong operation ; 
 the civilisation of the Bronze age represents a parallel stage 
 of religious development. I have certainly no right to pass 
 an opinion upon the question of the origin of the belief in 
 the Unity of God : whether, that is, it was the original 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 259 
 
 religious idea of the human mind which was afterwards 
 corrupted, or the result of increasing mental growth and 
 knowledge. But this much at least is certain, that with 
 Abraham monotheism became a possession of the human 
 mind. In his age the mind of God, which we call reason, 
 was moving mightily upon the souls of men. And the 
 first efforts of reason in any new direction are always of 
 transcendent power and truthfulness. Genius shines out at 
 the beginning of the new order of things which it is sent 
 into the world to create. And Abraham was a religious 
 genius, as were in other faculties Socrates, Bacon, and 
 ^Eschylus. As Socrates to the sophists, Bacon to the 
 schoolmen, ^Eschylus to the old satiric drama, so was 
 Abraham to the representatives of religious thought in the 
 time at which he lived. Into his soul came the thought, 
 straight from the original mind, that God was one, and that 
 God was holy. And if so, then the one holy God must 
 needs have no false gods to share His dominion : truth of 
 this kind cannot die ; to him it was given, childless as he 
 was, to found a people who should bear witness to it ; upon 
 him it was incumbent to go forth in the direction in which 
 thought, like the sun, has ever travelled, westward, to the 
 very verge of the sea, there to live and rule apart from 
 those who were unable to realise the new thoughts. No 
 miracle was needed in an age when the minds of men were 
 steeped with the thought of the Divine, dawning more and 
 more clearly upon their awakening reason : every event and 
 every thought were His alone. That the faith of Abraham 
 was created in a time of intense religious excitement is 
 surely more than reasonable ; man's business was to believe 
 in God, his righteousness was to believe in the one holy 
 
260 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 God of Abraham. In due course of time came the birth 
 of the son, which set the seal and assurance of truth upon 
 his faith, and told him that the God he worshipped was 
 able to raise up children from the very stones in place of 
 the son of promise, if needs must that he should be sacri- 
 ficed. The tone of the Book of Genesis, its utter oblivious- 
 ness to the distinction between natural and supernatural, 
 its testimony to Abraham's faith as consisting in the inward 
 thought of his mind about God and the reliance of his soul 
 upon Him, make all this as natural and as probable as can 
 be imagined. To me the religious genius of Abraham does 
 not appear nearly so startling or supernatural a phenomenon 
 as the poetic genius of Homer or Shakespeare that is to 
 say, I can account for it much more easily. In an age when 
 everybody was beginning to think more and more about 
 God, he caught the true expression of the divine mind, and 
 believed with a reverential awe that sent him forth alone 
 into a lonely land, that the true God would not suffer His 
 truth to fail for want of witnesses and worshippers. Did 
 true genius, when discovering, revealing, beginning, invent- 
 ing, ever act or believe otherwise ? 
 
 Now, such a thought as this possesses, in common with 
 other dominant ideas, the power of transmitting itself from 
 generation to generation, by natural descent from parent to 
 child. By what means this is accomplished it is at present 
 nearly useless to inquire, though I cannot help but think 
 that the nature and origin of the various faculties proper to 
 man present the one great field of research upon which the 
 human mind will ere long exercise itself. Of the fact itself, 
 however, there can be no doubt, and, so far as religion is 
 concerned, the strong impressions received in early educa- 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 261 
 
 tion are quite enough to account for the transmission of any 
 specific type of belief and worship. And yet, if we were to 
 hazard the assertion that Jewish children were born with 
 some innate predisposition to the national religion, Locke 
 himself, in view of the tendency of physiological inquiry, 
 would hardly demur to the statement. This at least is cer- 
 tain, that the special thought was accompanied (and if so, why 
 may we not say correlated ?) by a physical type, perhaps 
 the most pronounced that any one nation has ever been 
 distinguished by. The thought, moreover, so transmitted 
 and so accompanied was wrought into the very texture of 
 the race by the physical facts that surrounded and moulded 
 them. Their sojourn in Egypt taught them the vileness 
 of nature-worship ; their wanderings in the desert brought 
 them face to face with the living God, unknown, spiritual, 
 Lord of the created world, of national existence, of human 
 life ; their narrow strip of territory, infertile save to an eye 
 accustomed to the barrenness of the Sinaitic peninsula, 
 intensified their religion, and kept them apart, " a holy and 
 peculiar people." It is striking to observe how soon the 
 tribes east of Jordan drifted away from the national faith, 
 and sank to the level of the surrounding nations, apparently 
 because they were deprived of the material help provided 
 by the physical geography of Canaan proper. It is strik- 
 ing also to observe at the other extreme how the sea was 
 to them almost alone of nations that have dwelt upon its 
 shore a barrier and not a pathway. There is a touch almost 
 of pathos there is certainly a true " inspiration " in the 
 simple statement in which the annalist seems to confess 
 that, in spite of a period of delusive splendour, the genius 
 of his country was not to find its expression in maritime 
 
262 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ascendency. " Jehoshaphat made ships of Tharshish to go 
 to Ophir for gold, but they went not, for the ships were 
 broken at Ezion-geber." But I need not pursue a well- 
 known tale. Whatever of redemption from evil, of associa- 
 tion in the bonds of national unity, of successful conquests, 
 victorious struggles, regal glories, return from captivity, and 
 ultimate independence crowned their history, was due to 
 the faith in the God of Abraham, which Abraham had 
 bequeathed to them. That thought never died ; when it 
 seemed at death's door," then it revived with a new and 
 more exalted life. Our Lord could find no more serious 
 and overwhelming reproof than this, " If ye were Abraham's 
 children ye would do the works of Abraham ;" and it ex- 
 plains another saying of His, so difficult to our practical 
 mind, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and 
 he saw it and was glad." St Paul, when building the 
 bridge that was to connect the Jewish religion with the 
 Gentile world, laid the foundation in the "truth that the 
 promise was given, "not to the seed which is of the law, but 
 to that also which is of the faith of Abraham, who is the 
 father of us all." The truth of the belief that God was the 
 one holy covenant God was proved to them by the only 
 method of proof possible to man an experience ranging 
 over, perhaps, 2000 years. In a people so constituted, with 
 such thoughts and such a faculty, their history being in- 
 ternally and externally what it was, the divine mind poured 
 forth its inspiration abundantly. God thought in them the 
 thoughts that make up the highest truths of religion. 
 They were, as has been over and over again observed, an 
 inspired people, inspired in religion as other nations in war, 
 commerce, law, philosophy, and art But this brings us to 
 
The Inspiration of the yews. 263 
 
 the special inspiration represented by their literature, and to 
 the events by which this was produced. 
 
 Now, all the highest forms of inspiration, in every faculty 
 alike, come to humanity through certain chosen instruments. 
 Amongst a people in whom any faculty is widely spread, 
 there arise from time to time men in whom that faculty 
 attains an extraordinary elevation. These are, in one sense, 
 the outcome of the age in which they live ; they are, in 
 another, instances of the abrupt changes in which, whether 
 intellectually or physically, nature rejoices, and which she 
 refuses to surrender to theories of gradual variation of type 
 and imperceptible modification of tendencies. They are at 
 once creatures and creators of events and circumstances, and 
 there is always a strict correlation between them and the 
 history of their times. Now, the history of Jewish religion 
 presents a remarkable exemplification of the influence of 
 the greatest minds ; it concerns itself almost exclusively 
 with them, and by a curious instinct the people invariably 
 attributed their national literature to their national heroes. 
 The instinct is a true one, for it points to the fact that the 
 one source of special inspiration, whether of works, actions, 
 or books, were the events which kindled the flame of religious 
 thought in the minds of their great men. 
 
 That the Jewish writers derived their inspiration from 
 events, whether of special occurrence or derived from the 
 general condition and history of the people, is true beyond 
 a doubt. I have said in a previous essay that the true 
 sphere of divine operation, recognised as specifically divine, 
 is in events ; so assuredly the Jews believed. They were 
 compelled, by the instincts of humanity, to ask why things 
 happened to them in such and such a way : they were 
 
264 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 taught by the tradition of their fathers, and by the asser- 
 tions and testimony of their leading minds, that it was the 
 hand of God. God was dealing with them in a special way 
 because He was in covenant with them, because He had made 
 them what they were, had a favour unto them, and designs 
 on their behalf, transcending the utmost power of the pro- 
 phetic spirit to discern, though the vague outline was always 
 being filled up by new touches, and the oft-thwarted hope 
 never ceased to exert its overpowering fascination. Under 
 this inspiration they thought and wrote, sang and prayed ; 
 and they needed no other. The earliest songs of the desert 
 at the marching of the host, or the digging of a well, down 
 to the last psalm of the Maccabaean uprising, bear ample 
 testimony to the truth of this assertion. The mind of God 
 flashed itself upon them in the things that happened. It 
 was as the reflection of the sun upon the brightest mirror. 
 Some of the events might be deemed miraculous, others 
 accepted as natural ; some were the heroic actions of great 
 men, others the punishment of their sins and follies : some 
 were material, some visionary, some usual, others extra- 
 ordinary. But all alike were believed to be the actions of 
 God, and the Jews understood that which men are so slow 
 to perceive even now, that if we want to know the will 
 and character of any person, and therefore of God, we 
 must find them in the things He is believed or known to be 
 doing for us and towards us ; and this knowledge was their 
 inspiration. 
 
 I do not wish to disguise the effect of this position upon 
 accepted theories of inspiration. It is common ground, as 
 we know, to all of them alike, that thoughts were and are 
 supernaturally infused into men's minds ; that certain men 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 265 
 
 were thus miraculously preserved from error on at least 
 certain points, and were enabled to declare truths that were 
 beyond the unaided intelligence of mankind. All my life 
 I have been disturbed by the difficulties inherent in this 
 view, and have felt that they presented an insuperable 
 barrier to the reconciliation of religion and science. The 
 received accounts of inspiration have appeared to me 
 untenable, because they explain nothing, are incapable of 
 verification, intrude into the province of reason, cannot be 
 expressed in intelligible language, rest upon no basis of fact, 
 and are capable of being wrested to support any authority 
 that it may please the believer in them to set up. And 
 regarding, in common with all Christians, the Bible as con- 
 taining the chief results and loftiest productions of religious 
 inspiration, I believe that we mean no more than to say 
 that it is the perfectly natural play of human thought about 
 events and facts believed to come from God, Whether this 
 definition can be shown to be true and sufficient remains 
 now to be ascertained. 
 
 This can be done in two ways. First, we may inquire 
 whether it is in agreement with the facts of the case as 
 presented in the Bible itself; secondly, we may inquire 
 whether it is in harmony with the operations of inspiration 
 elsewhere. The first of these questions must be answered 
 in a separate essay, the second has been answered already 
 to a great extent, and in a general way by the comparison 
 of the religious with the other faculties. It remains how- 
 ever to say something more upon what may be called the 
 inspiring power of facts. 
 
 Now, the end of the religious faculty is to have right 
 thoughts about God and about His relations towards man- 
 
266 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 kind. If such thoughts, supposing them to be possessed 
 by any person, are plainly the results of other people's 
 experience and instruction, then no question arises as to 
 his being inspired in any special way. Meditation and 
 education are rightly set down as sufficient to account for 
 their existence. But the question does arise at once in 
 those cases in which the thoughts are new, and we are 
 entitled to ask whence they came. To say that they are 
 supernaturally inspired says nothing ; this is equally true 
 of all new thoughts in every faculty, unless we can discover 
 some test by which they may be distinguished. By what 
 possible means can any person decide that a given thought 
 in his mind comes from God in a way that other thoughts 
 do not ? Of course I readily grant, or rather insist, that all 
 religious thoughts of thankfulness or sorrow or prayer in 
 every individual life, are caused by the action of God upon 
 the soul through facts or events, and that in this sense our 
 "hearts are cleansed by the inspiration of His Spirit." But 
 I am seeking now for some test which shall enable us to 
 distinguish between the special inspiration which we attri- 
 bute to the Jews, and the general inspiration which we claim 
 for all religious persons. Why has an almost universal 
 Christian instinct attached the idea of supernatural inter- 
 ference to the results of Jewish religious thought ? Why 
 was St Paul inspired in a sense in which Luther was not ? 
 Unless scientific theology can discover the reason on which 
 this instinct rests, so as to be able to account for it, we must 
 be content to submit to the strangest opinions upon the 
 subject, to verbal or plenary inspiration, or still worse that 
 which comes from dreams, oracles, ecstasies, and poetic 
 extravagancies. The thing then that we have got to inquire 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 267 
 
 about is the phenomenon presented by the existence of 
 those great, original, and absolutely true ideas about God, 
 which have passed from the Jews to humanity itself, and 
 which constitute their claim to special inspiration. 
 
 I must not allow myself to be led astray from this inquiry 
 by the temptation of enlarging upon the genesis of all new 
 ideas. But I repeat what I have said elsewhere, that all 
 genius is the application of the mind to facts, whence it 
 brings back new discoveries and civilising truths. The word 
 Revelation may be quite correctly applied by religion to this 
 process in every human faculty, to the discovery of evolution, 
 or of the nature of God as contained in the word Jehovah. 
 But the methods by which the process is carried on 'are of 
 course innumerable, varying with the nature of the facts 
 under investigation. Science again may, with equal correct- 
 ness, be the name applied to the process on the human side ; 
 it is trained reason exercising itself upon phenomena : still 
 the scientific method assumes very different forms in, e.g. y 
 history, music, and natural science properly so called. 
 
 Now, religion is the science of God that is, of a personal 
 being ; and whereas the natural science which discovered 
 evolution consisted in the play of thought about facts of 
 nature called material phenomena, the religious science (if 
 so it is to be called) which discovered the name Jehovah, 
 was due to the play of thought about facts of history, called 
 events. Increased knowledge of a person is derived from 
 what he does; things that happen produce new ideas in the 
 mind, because they form a new experience concerning the 
 source from which they come. From them I learn that any 
 given man is selfish, good tempered, favourable or unfriendly 
 to myself. Hence it is that though it is possible to give a 
 
268 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 scientific account of a person's character, it is not possibel 
 that such account should be exhaustive, because some new 
 phenomenon, or a new action, may upset all our previous 
 calculations and conclusions. Accordingly, our only method 
 of growing in the knowledge of God is by receiving and 
 pondering over the actions in which He reveals Himself to 
 us. This is exactly what the Jews were always doing. 
 Believing, rightly or wrongly, that all their national history 
 proceeded from the will of God, they were enabled to con- 
 ceive and to utter those new ideas which were suggested to 
 them by the actions of the Person concerning whom they 
 were thinking. The character and purpose of God stood 
 revealed in their history. Events believed to be supernatural 
 that is, to come direct from God created ideas which 
 seemed to them entirely natural and obvious. Nor is there 
 any reason that I can discover why they should not seem 
 the same to us. 
 
 But while making this claim on behalf of these ideas, it 
 must not be forgotten that their supernatural appearance, 
 the something about them which has given rise to a belief in 
 special inspiration, can be easily accounted for. A new 
 revelation lays hold of the minds of its first recipients with 
 an overmastering power. It is as though something of the 
 reverent awe which we attach to the power of God as the 
 author of the beginning of Creation, accompanied every 
 fresh manifestation of creative energy displayed in the up- 
 rising of new ideas. Men are carried away beyond them- 
 selves, they overpass the limits which before this seemed to 
 have been set for them by nature. Even natural science in 
 her majestic way feels this overpowering influence, and men 
 are carried away by a boundless enthusiasm when the dis- 
 
7 "he Inspiration of the Jews. 269 
 
 covery of such laws as gravitation or evolution, and of such 
 facts as the movement of the earth or the circulation of the 
 blood, starts scientific research upon new and hitherto 
 unimagined careers of investigation. So men passed into a 
 delirium of enterprise at the discovery of the New World. 
 So also the mind of Thucydides was saturated with those 
 impressions of contemporary Greek life which suggested to 
 him the philosophy of history. But, far beyond this, men 
 are transported into new regions of thought and action by 
 the belief that they have received some special revelation 
 of the character and intentions of God. New thoughts seize 
 upon them as the first acquisition of knowledge lays hold 
 'upon a child. A few dominant thoughts possess their souls 
 and exert a transforming, intensifying influence upon their 
 lives. Under such influences laws, poems, prophecies, 
 histories, are poured forth abundantly ; magnificent enter- 
 prises are undertaken and prosper beyond men's hopes ; the 
 very nature of the people seems as though cast into a furnace 
 of mental heat, whence it emerges in new and strange forms. 
 To illustrate this in the case of the Jews would be to tran- 
 scribe Ewald's history, in which the spiritual life of the 
 people is traced with unsurpassed power. What wonder, 
 then, that as the actions of God cease to speak directly or 
 are at least no longer believed to do so, men who inherit the 
 ideas by ordinary laws of intellectual descent begin to 
 regard their spiritual ancestors as recipients of a special 
 inspiration which separates them from the crowd of ordinary 
 men. So in truth they were, if facts, newly revealed, go for 
 anything in the history of mankind. But everything is 
 gained for the cause of rational religion, if it can be shown 
 that inspiration itself is the same in every faculty, and is in 
 
270 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 its essence that is, as a mental impulse no more super- 
 natural in religion than in politics or philosophy. 
 
 It would be possible, I think, to draw an instructive 
 parallel between the prophetic writers and the author whose 
 book presents the strongest points of contrast to them, I 
 mean Thucydides. He was inspired at once by the past 
 history of his people, and by the events which were daily 
 unfolding themselves before his eyes and suggesting to 
 him new ideas. But whereas he described the actions 
 and analysed the character of the nation, the Jew described 
 the actions and realised the character of God, whom 
 he discerned in all the events of history as truly as 
 Thucydides perceived the genius and, so to speak, spiritual 
 personality of Greece. Nor are the thoughts of the Jewish 
 writers at all more difficult to account for than those of the 
 great historian ; in one there is a rush, in the other a load 
 of thought that almost baffled expression. The incon- 
 sistencies and contradictions natural to the human intellect, 
 when brought face to face with a new revelation, find a 
 place in Jewish inspiration, for instance in St Paul, as in 
 other regions of thought. I turn, however, now to point 
 out the effect of this theory of the naturalness of inspiration 
 upon the relations of science and religion. 
 
 Now it must be clearly understood that the quarrel of 
 science with the received doctrine of inspiration by super- 
 natural infusion of thought is by the nature of the case 
 internecine. A miraculous event is not as such necessarily 
 opposed to any fundamental law of science ; it is at most 
 a contradiction to the sum of human experience. No doubt, 
 a strong prejudice is created against the miraculous by the 
 scientific way of regarding things, but the prejudice may 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 2 7 1 
 
 turn out to be unfounded, a mere passing result of the 
 astonishing growth of scientific thought. And if any 
 miraculous event can be proved by evidence enough to con- 
 vince the final court of human appeal that is, the mature 
 and definite decision of enlightened opinion to have taken 
 place, then, as I have repeatedly affirmed, science will have 
 no choice but to accept it as a fact, to find some reason for 
 it, and to analyse its effects upon human thought. For 
 myself, I hope I may live to see the day when such an 
 admission will be on the whole made, upon the simple and 
 satisfactory ground that some such cause is needed* to 
 account for phenomena otherwise inexplicable. But the 
 case is far otherwise with the received doctrine of a super- 
 natural inspiration conferring dogmatic authority upon 
 those to whom it is vouchsafed, for this cuts at the very 
 root of scientific method itself. This method rests upon 
 the assumption that the reason of man is sufficient to ascer- 
 tain by ordinary intellectual processes whatever truth can 
 be attained from the contemplation of facts presented to 
 consciousness. If, then, it is possible for any man to say, 
 " This is true, not because my reason has thought it out, 
 but because God, in a way I cannot understand myself nor 
 explain to you, has put the idea in my mind " then the 
 very instrument of scientific thought is wrenched from its 
 grasp, and truth is discoverable no longer by reason, but by 
 authority to which reason must submit. Step by step 
 indeed authority is yielding the ground it has invaded ; at 
 present it may be said to have finally abandoned the 
 domain of material phenomena over which law now reigns 
 in place of the dethroned usurper. But the very formula 
 by which it seeks to cover retreat and take up a new posi- 
 
272 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 tion, shows how very far the spirit of authoritative dogma- 
 is from apprehending the aim and forces of its opponent. 
 We leave, it explains, the region of physical law to science, 
 because God has not revealed by supernatural means truths 
 which unaided reason can discover for itself. To which the 
 answer is that reason is competent for the investigation 
 of every fact, be it spiritual or material, in nature, history, 
 or man himself; and further, that no truth deserves the 
 name that cannot be demonstrated by argument or sub- 
 mitted to human judgment. Poetry, for instance, has its 
 laws, by which poems must be judged. This assertion will 
 cause no trouble to those who believe that all thought is 
 essentially divine and absolutely good till it comes within 
 the corrupting influences of individual men. To such it 
 will appear evident that religious inspiration is only one 
 (the chief, it is true) of the manifold workings of the Spirit 
 of God, " who worketh in us both to will and to do accord- 
 ing to His good pleasure." 
 
 Perhaps, however, the difference of attitude towards 
 supernatural events and supernatural inspiration may be 
 illustrated as follows. Science can raise no fair objection 
 to any claim, however preposterous in itself, which is willing 
 to be judged according to accepted methods of inquiry. 
 If then any claim is made in these days, as indeed is very 
 commonly made by spiritualists and others, to the possession 
 of miraculous powers, science can at once put such claims 
 to the proof, and, as in the well-known case of Faraday, 
 expose and annihilate them. But the claim to the posses- 
 sion of supernatural inspiration, and to authoritative know- 
 ledge derived therefrom, eludes any test to which reason 
 can submit it. If, therefore, any man claims to speak the 
 
The Inspiration of the yews. 273 
 
 words of God by virtue of special mental communication 
 from Him, common sense has no means either of detecting 
 the lie or approving the truth, unless, indeed, it is false or 
 immoral upon the face of it. Science must therefore either 
 admit that the reasoning powers upon which it rests are 
 capable of being directed by supernatural agencies, and are 
 therefore in themselves insufficient and deceptive ; or it 
 must drive these rival pretensions from the field by bend- 
 ing the whole force of human experience and feeling against 
 them. If the Pope, or any writer, or any institution, or any 
 body of men, be infallibly inspired, there is an end of reason, 
 and therefore of science as the only authoritative leader of 
 mankind and guide to truth. Religious minds may uncon- 
 sciously seek to disguise the nature and extent of this 
 antagonism between two mutually exclusive powers, and 
 may wonder that science rejects with increasing confidence 
 the various compromises from time to time suggested, 
 and insists with what seems unjustifiable arrogance upon 
 overstepping and obliterating the lines of demarcation 
 so painfully traced out. But reason coming to claim her 
 rightful kingdom is not likely to leave one of its fairest 
 provinces in the hands of a power that persists in setting 
 up a rival claim to the allegiance of mankind. 
 
 So much then being decided we are now brought face to 
 face with a very serious question. The more stress we lay 
 upon facts as being the ultimate source of inspiration, the 
 more necessary does it become to arrive at some conclusion 
 as to their nature. This I have attempted to investigate 
 elsewhere with a success that no one sees more clearly 
 than myself to be indifferent. Upon the subject of miracles 
 there is yet much to be learnt, but it is satisfactory to 
 
274 Reconciliation, of Religion and Science. 
 
 remember that as they purport to be facts, they court the 
 closest scrutiny that reason can apply to them. For our 
 present purpose, however, no such scrutiny is required. It is 
 enough to say, first, that the Jews thoroughly and honestly 
 believed that they received communications from God 
 through outward events, either in the call of their great men, 
 or in the providential circumstances of their history; second, 
 that these events did as a matter of fact create certain 
 ideas about God and life and goodness ; third, that the 
 ideas so created were legitimate results of the facts, suppos- 
 ing them to be true. Of these three propositions there can, I 
 suppose, be no doubt. If God was that which they believed 
 Him to be, if He had acted and was acting as they supposed 
 Him to be acting, then their conclusions about the divine 
 nature and human duty were warranted by the plainest 
 considerations of reason and common sense. I shall have, 
 however, to allude in my next essay to the connection of 
 Jewish inspiration with the revelation which they supposed 
 had been granted to them. But though it is impossible to 
 foretell what will be the ultimate verdict of men upon the 
 truth or error of the Jews' belief in God's special dealings 
 with them, yet it is very possible indeed to foresee what 
 will be the effect of that verdict upon the future of 
 Christianity. It may take one of two forms. Either the 
 Jewish mind imagined, honestly enough, though mistakenly, 
 the occurrence of miraculous events, and then derived 
 its religious ideas from them ; or such events did actually 
 from time to time occur, and so created, kept alive, 
 guided and developed that type of religion which God 
 intended to be the universal religion of subsequent ages. 
 Let us examine the effect of these alternatives separately. 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 275 
 
 If the first be the true one if, that is, there was no such 
 intervention in the history of the Jews as could be clearly 
 and decisively traced to the power of God then it requires 
 but small power of prophecy to discern that Christianity 
 will perish, probably amidst such an outburst of human 
 wrath as will throw into shade the wildest excesses of the 
 Reformation or the Revolution. Just in proportion as its 
 religious ideas are strong, decisive, and predominant, so 
 will its errors appear gross and injurious. If the Jews and 
 early Christians were the victims of delusions upon which 
 they founded their faith, then it will be argued that they 
 went astray exactly in proportion to the strength of the 
 religious faculty which they possessed. At present the 
 faults of Christian teaching are condoned, and much more 
 than condoned, for the sake of the invaluable truths derived 
 from the facts to which Christianity bears continuous testi- 
 mony. Nay, I will go further and assert that in spite of 
 appearances to the contrary, very few scientific men really 
 believe these facts to be devoid of substantial foundation. 
 No doubt it falls in best with the natural tendencies of 
 positive thought to accept them as untrue, just as it is 
 natural to the religious faculty to accept them as real. 
 But for the most part, a few enthusiasts excepted, men are 
 contented with this lazy, indifferent attitude, and do not 
 care to advance to the more serious task of proving them to 
 be false to their own satisfaction, and with the intention of 
 convincing others. They are so bound up with the opinions, 
 traditions, and institutions of modern human life, that men 
 instinctively prefer to leave them alone, lest society, and 
 themselves with it, should be cast adrift into a shoreless sea 
 of darkness and despair. They cling to the idea while 
 
2 76 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 nominally rejecting the facts which alone give the ideas any 
 vitality. But if men believed with the inward assurance of 
 positive faith that the facts of Christianity were untrue, 
 their attitude would soon be changed from the negative, 
 scornful, half-silence of the present day into that which 
 Christian apologists are fond of attributing to them a 
 resolute, combined, unswerving hatred of superstitious false- 
 hood, ending in a determination to uproot it at whatever 
 cost of human agony and suffering. And to this cold- 
 blooded resolution of intellectual men would soon be added 
 the passionate fury of the common crowd, red-hot with 
 justifiable anger at the reflection that they had been 
 deceived and traded upon in matters that concerned their 
 dearest hopes. This is what they would say 
 
 " For all these long centuries, then, we toilers and 
 sufferers have been victims of gross imposture. We have 
 been taught to look forward to immortality because one 
 man has vanquished death death which to common 
 experience vanquishes man ; we find now that death 
 vanquished Him also, and that He was Himself a victim to 
 His own delusions. We have been taught to pray to a 
 common Father of whose existence we have no positive 
 proof, except what He, who chose to call Himself His Son, 
 has thought fit to give us, drawn from the depths of a 
 bewildered self- consciousness. Let us think of the im- 
 measurable waste of time, of wealth, of thought which might 
 have been applied to temporal and human ends, but which 
 have gone to aid the purposes and swell the power of those 
 who have profited by our superstitions. Above all let us 
 remember that we, reasonable creatures, have been lavishing 
 our best thoughts and deepest feelings in prayer that was 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 277 
 
 mere idle breath cast to the scoffing winds." He must 
 indeed have a strangely constituted mind who believes that 
 any part of the Christian religion would survive the dis- 
 covery that the history of Jesus of Nazareth was a series ot 
 well-intentioned fables, and Himself an impostor with or 
 without His own connivance. In that outbreak of human 
 indignation against the religion and the teachers by whom 
 the world had been so long enslaved, short work would 
 be made of all that appertained to the name of Christianity. 
 Churches would share the fate of monasteries, and clergy- 
 man become as hateful a word as priest. And in my 
 opinion quite rightly. 
 
 But then we are told that the ideas would remain because 
 they are eternally true, or true to the individual conscience. 
 I am not sure that I know what this means, or how an idea 
 can be true to me which is independent of facts, and cannot 
 be demonstrated to any one else. No doubt ideas that 
 concerned the duty of man towards man might remain the 
 law of self-sacrifice, for instance, might take its place in the 
 great code of human duty as part of the experience of 
 mankind. But in what practical vital sense God could be 
 considered my Father, who had never done to me an 
 action that I knew to be fatherly, passes my understand- 
 ing. As, however, we are in the region of the future, there 
 is no power of hindering people from prophesying what- 
 ever their personal inclinations predispose them to desire. 
 Only I take leave to call the attention of any who may be 
 tempted to " prophesy out of their own hearts, who follow 
 their own spirits and have seen nothing," to three of those 
 simple, obvious facts which are to plain people the true 
 " word of the Lord." 
 
778 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 First, truth that is true to me is no truth at all, unless I 
 can convey it to my neighbour in some such way as will 
 convince him, unless he himself is in fault. And in the 
 sphere of religion I have no other means of doing this 
 except by reasoning founded upon the facts of the case. 
 In vain do I urge that the truths in which I believe are very 
 consoling and animating to myself ; they may not be so to 
 other people. One man's truth is another man's lie, and 
 perishes with the idiosyncrasy or the selfishness which gave 
 it birth, or made it attractive. Such truths therefore, have 
 no inherent power of self-propagation nothing but their 
 correspondence with some outward reality can enable them 
 to be transferred from one mind to another. False ideas 
 either invent a fictitious reality or impose themselves upon 
 people by an appeal to their enthusiasm or their credulity. 
 Therefore a religion which rests upon a supposed intuitional 
 apprehension of truths that have nothing to recommend 
 them to other people save the satisfaction which they give 
 to the person who apprehends them, cannot in the long run 
 subsist. Hence it is that speculative religions invariably 
 perish or sink to the level of man's selfish desires. Truth in 
 religion, as elsewhere, is that common property of mankind 
 which reason has thought out, time tested, experience 
 approved, so that the human intellect has set to its seal that 
 it is true. This by no means excludes the operation of the 
 heart or emotions of man : their province is to afford the 
 motive power required for actions, and furthermore to com- 
 pel the mind, by the strong craving of the desires, to do its 
 work. My desire for a heavenly Father is no proof of His 
 existence, but it is a very strong reason why I should 
 endeavour to search if there be not proof to be found. 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 279 
 
 Secondly, if Christianity as a revelation to man through 
 facts were to perish, it must be remembered that there would 
 be theories of life, of duty, of expediency and morality, 
 which would neither require nor leave room for religious 
 ideas, not even in the form of Positivism. Such theories, 
 call them materialistic or scientific, are in existence now ; 
 they claim to be workable, to be sufficient, to be satisfactory. 
 Nothing stands between them and victory save man's 
 belief in the events by which God has made Himself 
 known. But by degrees the spiritual instincts would fade 
 away with the facts to which they owe all their vitality, and 
 men would more and more find their only goodness in duty 
 to the race, their highest wisdom within the limits of experi- 
 ence, their supreme happiness in the negation of God and 
 immortality. What chance in the present temper of man- 
 kind would intuitions have when brought into conflict with 
 facts ? 
 
 For, thirdly, that some such conflict must of necessity 
 arise between the recognised theories of life and the religious 
 instinct is abundantly apparent. History tells us that it did 
 arise once, and that thought and virtue went one way with 
 philosophy, devotion, or rather superstition, another way with 
 the mass of men. But seeing that Christianity has gained 
 an empire over men's minds infinitely stronger and more 
 enduring than Paganism, it is reasonable to suppose that the 
 new philosophy, based as it would be upon ascertained facts, 
 would be compelled to hunt religion out of life altogether, 
 perhaps with sharp and systematic persecution. The very 
 gist of the charge against the old religion would be then, 
 as it is now, that it calls men away from sensible realities 
 and obvious duties into an imaginary and delusive region 
 
280 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 of faith. No heretic would be half so detestable as the man 
 who, without the shadow of a fact to rely on, persisted in 
 doing what the community thought wrong, because he felt 
 sure that the sufferings he received at their hands would be 
 made up to him in a future life. This and similar ideas 
 might be allowed to linger in the minds of certain men, like 
 the odour of cedar in old fashioned rooms, provided it did 
 not interfere with the course of life by leading to practical 
 results. Not indeed that it would much matter. Ideas 
 that are true only because true to me, are very seldom 
 practical to anybody else. 
 
 Let us now see how the adoption of the other alternative 
 would affect our views of the nature and authority of in- 
 spiration. There is good reason for believing that there were 
 three distinct miraculous epochs in the history of the Jews, 
 from which they derived their certainty that their history 
 was the result of God's direct action upon their affairs. But 
 it is important to observe that, so far as we are at present 
 concerned, the acceptance of any one miraculous event is 
 sufficient. Let that event be the Resurrection, because 
 it is the best authenticated and the most intrinsically pro- 
 bable. If this be accepted, then it follows not only that 
 there is no antecedent improbability for any miracle, but 
 that the Jews were right in attributing to God's over-master- 
 ing will the whole course of their history, miraculous or 
 otherwise. If God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, that 
 fact puts the crown of reality upon all their beliefs and 
 hopes. If, to put it strongly, every atom of miracles could 
 be removed from the Old Testament, the life of Christ 
 would still be sufficient to show that the finger of God was 
 visible in all that befell them from Egypt to the destruction 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 281 
 
 of Jerusalem. They were in a special way the subjects of 
 divine government, and their national instinct, that they 
 could discern the character and purposes of God in events 
 that happened, is proved to be a true one. And thus the 
 mainspring, so to speak, of all the complicated machinery 
 of inspiration is furnished to them. 
 
 And the dynamic force of this mainspring is simply incal- 
 culable. All that men were required to do was to receive 
 and detail the facts with tolerable accuracy, and to think 
 concerning them with powers of mind that were up to a 
 fair average when contrasted with other nations. History, 
 poetry, statesmanship, and that vast amount of literature 
 which is in one form or another practically preaching (the 
 declaration, that is, of truths and their consequences), occupy 
 themselves chiefly with the actions of living beings, of man 
 and of men. This is the main source of their work and use ; 
 it is their glory and delight. Now let us for an instant 
 imagine the effects upon a religious faculty, strong in native 
 genius, traditionary instincts, and individual enthusiasm, of 
 the thought that God was acting towards the nation by 
 deeds of mercy, judgment, redemption, and chastisement. 
 The utterances of such a faculty carry with them the same 
 kind of authority as those of other faculties under analogous 
 circumstances. There is no need of supernatural infusion 
 or overpowering guidance in one case more than another. 
 Events inspired Moses as they inspired Homer the differ- 
 ence lay in the nature of the events. Brought face to face, as 
 they believed, with the will and deeds of God, the Jewish 
 writers believed that the thoughts that rose spontaneously 
 to their minds came from Him. There may be much in 
 them that is wanting in knowledge, inaccurate in fact, 
 
282 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 defective in argument. They may share to the full the 
 idiosyncrasies, bad or good, of their nation. The Psalmist 
 may give utterance to uncharitable maledictions, St Paul 
 may "hebraize," St Peter "judaize." Their opinions may 
 be open to correction and criticism. But when all this is 
 granted, there will remain, instead of the old artificial non- 
 human authority which aroused opposition because it re- 
 pelled intellectual sympathy, that genuine reverence which 
 man pays to the greatest and wisest spirits of his race, to 
 the recipients and preachers of new truths, to God's chosen 
 servants, according to the exquisite Jewish conception of 
 great men. And if which may God grant the prejudice 
 against these actions of God called miracles disappears 
 before our growing knowledge and a fairer spirit of inquiry, 
 then science herself will bring her ungrudging homage, the 
 homage that all that is best in positive thought seems to 
 me so ready to bring now if difficulties could be removed. 
 One of those difficulties is the feeling of repulsion felt by 
 religious minds towards the scientific method of inquiry in 
 a province that they conscientiously believe to be alien from 
 it. But how gladly St Paul would have accepted that 
 homage in his Master's name, those who have realised his 
 character may be permitted to picture to themselves. And, 
 on the other hand, were he to be offered the spurious de- 
 ference paid to supernatural or semi-divine beings (for such 
 upon the ordinary theory of inspiration he becomes), we 
 may imagine how swiftly he would run in among the people, 
 " crying out and saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We 
 are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you 
 that you should turn from these vanities unto the living 
 God." 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 283 
 
 An objection may be raised to the foregoing view that 
 facts cannot prove spiritual truths or, as I have seen it stated, 
 that it is absurd to ask for a purely intellectual proof of the 
 existence of an all-loving Father. Now there is a sense in 
 which this statement is true, and, as I shall show presently, 
 in agreement with what I have maintained throughout these 
 essays. But as, taken literally, it reduces them to an ab- 
 surdity, I must go on to show in what sense an intellectual 
 proof can be given of even this ultimate spiritual verity. 
 
 Now, the only proof that can be given in such a case must 
 be derived from the performance of fatherly actions. If 
 faith without works is dead, much more is love. And if 
 we eliminate from history the possibility of any direct 
 personal action of the unknown Being whom we call God, 
 I am at a loss to know how we are to believe that He is 
 our Father, or what good that belief would confer upon us. 
 It seems to me not easily distinguishable in kind (though 
 raised far above it, if by nothing else, at least by its pathetic 
 unselfishness), from the caresses and pleadings which the 
 savage lavishes upon his insensible idol. But granting the 
 historical truthfulness of the life and person of Christ, then 
 its effect in affording intellectual demonstration of the 
 fatherhood of God may be made clear by the following 
 illustration. 
 
 Intellectual proof means nothing more than arguments 
 appropriate to the nature of the case, and sufficient to con- 
 vince reasonable people that the thing in question is true. 
 Legal proof is one thing, scientific (in physics) another, 
 historical (perhaps) a third. Now, let us suppose a child 
 brought up in ignorance of his father, who was obliged to 
 live a long way off. The child would know that he owed 
 
284 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 his existence to a father, but whether he was alive and lov- 
 ing him would be quite an open question the balance of 
 probability inclining towards the negative. Let us imagine 
 next a man presenting himself, bearing a strong family like- 
 ness, and claiming to be an elder brother. He informs the 
 child of his father's existence and character, tells him that he 
 has come thousands of miles to make this clear, gives ample 
 explanation of the necessity for living apart, proves to him 
 that all his education and comforts have been due to his 
 father's care, loads him with benefits and good advice, and 
 departs promising a speedy meeting in the father's home. 
 Is not such proof as this intellectually convincing, none the 
 less so because, being in the sphere of the feelings, it takes 
 care to address itself to them as well as to reason properly so 
 called. But it is the kind of proof which, mutatis mutandis, 
 Christians believe that they possess in the life of Christ, who 
 declared, amongst many similar assertions, "My Father 
 worketh hitherto and I work," as though He would say, 
 " My Father has all along been working on your behalf, and 
 my works are but His works, evidently done among you, 
 that you may know Him that sent me." 
 
 What, however, I suspect to be the meaning of the asser- 
 tion above quoted is merely this that no intellectual proof 
 of spiritual truths can be given except to those who are 
 morally predisposed towards them. This is what I have 
 insisted on throughout these essays ; indeed, the right under- 
 standing of it is necessary to a right conception of my posi- 
 tion. To repeat it once more, it is this : all proof in 
 religion as elsewhere must be primarily addressed to the 
 reason, must be itself therefore rational, based upon facts, 
 and capable of historical verification. But the actual proofs, 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 285 
 
 as we have them, are such that men may at any rate at 
 the present time honestly accept or honestly reject them ; 
 and the turning point in their decision will be whether the 
 facts sought to be established are in agreement with man's 
 moral nature and requirements. And, on the other hand, 
 any attempt to establish religious truths by appeals to the 
 inner self-consciousness, or the voice of nature, or d priori 
 considerations of causation and design, or the hopes and 
 wishes of mankind, will end in confusion and scepticism. 
 Such appeals, it must be added, have their invaluable but 
 still lower office. They may be suitably made in conjunc- 
 tion with the arguments derived from revelation, and may 
 either prepare the way for it by creating an antecedent pro- 
 bability, or supplement its force by conclusions derived from 
 wider and further-reaching premises. But considering how 
 total has been the failure of " natural" religion in past ages, 
 and how entirely religion is now the creature of revelation, 
 I am inclined to think that the use of the former is mainly 
 supplementary, and suitable for speculative minds to whom 
 religion is an excuse (often the only one they have) for 
 embarking upon comprehensive inquiries. 
 
 Once more an illustration will make my meaning clear. - 
 The authority of the fourth Gospel is one of those questions 
 upon which the arguments for and against hang at present 
 evenly balanced, so far as purely intellectual proof can go. 
 Hence, the judgment of each man now, and of all men finally, 
 will turn upon personal predispositions. A man's love 
 for the Christ he finds there, his moral yearnings after God, 
 may be so intense as to sway his judgment in one way 
 rather than another ; and this, whether right or not, is, I am 
 very sure, the way in which all the practical affairs of life 
 
286 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 are ordered. But a certain class of minds find the cultus of 
 the Virgin Mary equally attractive, and, as they think, 
 essential to them. Yet, as that cultus is absolutely devoid 
 of proof that could be based on facts, or called reasonable, to 
 believe in the Roman view of the character and position of 
 the Virgin, because it is lovable and attractive, is simply to 
 ignore the intellect and do despite to facts. Nevertheless, 
 I do not see what answer those who accept an opinion, 
 because it suits them, can give to the votaries of the legend 
 of the mother of God. 
 
 This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. The 
 Jews, who were the religious nation par excellence, were 
 inspired by events exactly as religious persons, par ex- 
 cellence, are inspired now. Once more I appeal to 
 common experience. Let a man be fully persuaded, by 
 any means whatever, that he is in the hands of an over- 
 ruling God, and then the events of life inspire his mind with 
 the thoughts, the feelings, the words, and the actions which 
 make up his religion. Daily cares, sorrows, blessings, 
 occurrences, and above all sins, make him think in a cer- 
 tain way about God, and address Him in certain words. Re- 
 ligion is not and ought not to be a perpetual straining of 
 the religious emotions, or an artificial inspiration that comes 
 of ceremonies and outward observances. It is the whole- 
 some reflection of serious minds about the daily experience 
 of lives believed to be ordered and guided by God here, and 
 subject to His judgment hereafter, and, therefore, now as 
 in the days of old, may men pray with full assurance of 
 faith for the inspiration of God's Holy Spirit. 
 
 So then, inspiration is neither above thought or inde- 
 pendent of fact. Rather it is one out of the many ways in 
 
The Inspiration of the Jews. 287 
 
 which thought may regard facts, and with the special 
 events the special Christian inspiration must stand or fall. 
 If they fall Christianity expires with them, and with Chris- 
 tianity dies religion, as one of the powers that rule the 
 hearts of men. One other possible alternative there is, so at 
 least some persons are found to think. It is that the spirit 
 of philosophy should sit in judgment upon the mass of hopes, 
 desires, beliefs, and words in which the religious instinct has 
 found expression, and should, after careful balancing and 
 earnest scrutiny, agree to recommend some of them as on 
 the whole the most suitable, useful, and becoming ; con- 
 cerning which religion I can only say that I hope I may 
 be comfortably in my grave before I am obliged, by the 
 tendency of thought or the progress of know! edge, to accept 
 and practise it. 
 
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. 
 
 TT is impossible to begin this essay without once more 
 * calling attention to the difficulties which surround this 
 and similar inquiries. In the first place, those who agree 
 with me that there is no such thing as supernatural infusion 
 of thought, deny also that there has been in history any- 
 thing that can be called a specific revelation from God. 
 Those, on the other hand, who believe that God has inter- 
 vened by certain personal actions in the affairs of man, 
 have no sympathy with the doctrine that He has not, and 
 thought being what it is, cannot have supernaturally inter- 
 fered with their thoughts. I have no right therefore to expect 
 sympathy from any quarter beyond, I hope, that of candid 
 minds who are willing to recognise what seems to be on the 
 face of it an honest investigation, be its results what they 
 may. And this would be fatal if my object were to convert 
 a certain number of persons to a given set of opinions to 
 construct a system of religious belief in its relations to 
 scientific thought. But I have no such ambition. This 
 book is not, it must be remembered, after all so much a 
 reconciliation of religion and science, but " Essays " or 
 attempts in that direction. It aims at throwing some light 
 upon the conditions of the problem to be solved, and at 
 suggesting a new method of approaching them. What we 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 289 
 
 want is a novum organon of theology, the application, 
 that is, of rigorous scientific tests to the phenomena of 
 revelation i.e., of historical religions in general, and of 
 Christianity as the crown of them in particular. And the 
 first condition of such a task must be the absence of any 
 d priori opinion for and against the supernatural. No 
 inquiry can be satisfactorily conducted in which the main 
 point at issue is assumed, not provisionally, but as an 
 absolute not-to-be-questioned truth, beforehand. I fear it 
 must be confessed that theological animus has crept (a 
 mild word ! ) into scientific thought when brought into 
 contact with religious questions. Hence the impossibility 
 of reconciliation. 
 
 It is not, however, merely want of sympathy which I 
 have to fear, but also the unfeigned aversion felt by religious 
 minds towards an investigation of the phenomena of the 
 divine life in man. Men demand a " margin for mystery," 
 and Science, by the mouth of her wisest interpreters, con- 
 fesses the reasonableness of the demand and the reality of 
 the fact demanded. But the question arises, " Where is the 
 line to be drawn ? " The dictum of science is plain, and in 
 my judgment incontestable. The Bible, view it in what- 
 ever way you please, comes within experience, and is 
 therefore capable of rational treatment. Everything about 
 it its composition, facts, thoughts has a meaning which 
 that trained common-sense of mankind called science can 
 discover and explain. 
 
 But it is said that the special grace and power of religion 
 perishes under such treatment. Thus, if we dissect a flower, 
 we gain, indeed, some knowledge, but at the cost of its 
 
 fragrance and beauty. But the facts of Jewish history are 
 
 T 
 
290 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 rather to be compared to geological formations which lie 
 deep down in the constitution of things, and may be 
 explained, but never explained away. And so they grow 
 in dignity and worth the more closely they are examined. 
 It is one of the many points of resemblance between the 
 Christianity of the first and the science of the two last 
 centuries, between the genius of St Paul and Newton, that 
 they set themselves to reduce the sphere of the unknown 
 within limits which are felt to be legitimate only because 
 they are pushed as far back as the faculties of man can 
 reach. In the mind of St Paul religion was no longer 
 mysterious : in the clear light of the revelation of Jesus 
 Christ, God's character and purposes towards man, man's 
 duty and relations towards God, shone transfigured as with 
 celestial glory, in which every feature and outline might be 
 traced, not of necessity all at once, but in time and with 
 patience. No man of science, when grasping the key with 
 which to unlock the door of many mysteries, ever felt a 
 deeper gladness than St Paul when it became apparent to 
 him that in the life and person of Jesus Christ every ques- 
 tion that the religious mind could reasonably ask would be 
 without fail rationally answered. We must remember that 
 St Paul is in no sense answerable for that other method of 
 dealing with religious questions which delights to draw 
 distinct outlines of vague impalpable realities, to label them 
 as " mysteries," and propound them authoritatively for the 
 acceptance of mankind. Who wrote the Athanasian Creed 
 may be very uncertain ; one thing at least is certain, that 
 St Paul did not. 
 
 For myself I must take leave to assert that no one can 
 approach the history of the Jews from Abraham to St 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 291 
 
 John with so real an appreciation of its sanctity as they 
 who, in the humble spirit of scientific research, seek to 
 discover the secret workings which produced results 
 so unusual and so entrancing. The spirit of Voltaire is 
 indeed very far from being extinct, and there are even 
 signs that it may revive. But I attribute this partly to the 
 determination of the dominant school of religious thought 
 to treat the Bible in an unnatural way, partly to the per- 
 verted theories such, for instance, as the whole theology of 
 types to which the most popular among them still adhere. 
 But upon the whole, if we may judge by some of the 
 utterances of the leaders of science, the Bible still leaves 
 upon the minds of even " advanced thinkers " an impression 
 of genuine sanctity. Events that would be commonplace 
 in any other history, challenge our reverence here from the 
 way in which they are treated with a constant reference to 
 the will of an overruling God. Here is an instance. The 
 fall of Athaliah is in one sense a very ordinary Eastern 
 palace revolution, yet listen to the story especially as told 
 in Mendelssohn's immortal music, which it in turn inspired, 
 and a strange feeling of the awfulness of Jewish life creeps 
 upon the mind. Put it as you will, here were a people alone 
 among nations who believed that they were living in the 
 presence and under the controlling power of one holy and 
 Almighty God, and who somehow or other depicted His 
 character and attributes in a way that no other nation has 
 ever even attempted. Not the vulgar awe that comes of 
 gazing at mysteries, but the profound reverence that 
 enchains the human mind when searching into facts that 
 seem to speak closely and clearly of God, is the spirit with 
 which the Bible must be approached. 
 
Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 The theory of Scriptural Inspiration which this essay is in- 
 tended to maintain, is, to repeat it once more, that it was the 
 result of the play of human thought according to its natural 
 ordinary methods about the events that made up Jewish 
 national and individual life. The advantages thus obtained 
 for the cause of rational religion have been in part already 
 pointed out, and will appear still more clearly as we pro- 
 ceed. They may be summed up in the simple statement, 
 that human life becomes possible to the Jews and their 
 experience useful for us. What we have to ask, then, is 
 whether it is possible thus to account for those special 
 features of Jewish life and thought which distinguish them 
 from other people ? To this we now address ourselves. 
 
 At the outset it is necessary to recall what has been 
 already said as to the events by which God was believed 
 to have "called" all the chief persons of Hebrew history, 
 and to have given them a commission to perform the work 
 He had in hand. The more I think of it, the more sure I 
 feel that in these calls lies the root of all that is special in 
 the Bible. I have attempted in its proper place to give 
 some account of them regarded as divine actions ; but it is 
 obvious that, regarding them as we do now in their effects 
 upon the recipients, we may adopt any account of their 
 external reality that seems good to us. Either they 
 occurred as related, or the recipients honestly believed so, 
 or the narrators honestly thought so, or the people honestly 
 so accepted them. If they were mistaken, that does not 
 alter the fact that they derived their special ideas about 
 God from their mistake. The inspiration remains, valeat 
 quantum, whether the events were real or not. 
 
 And it is distinctly as an inspiration that the events come 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 293 
 
 before us. In all of them, no matter what their outward 
 form, or whether they were represented as supernatural or 
 not, the voice of God is represented as making itself heard 
 by man. The effect upon Moses or St Paul was as though 
 words had been addressed to their understandings. Whether 
 the voice was objective or no seems to me the idlest of 
 inquiries, so long as it is admitted to be real in its effects 
 upon the mind. It concerns us, however, to inquire a little 
 more closely into the nature of that pregnant word voice. 
 
 Voice is simply the external utterance of the inner spirit. 
 It is, therefore, the most spiritual thing of which we can have 
 a sensible perception. But a kind of prejudice is felt, that 
 even so it is not spiritual enough adequately to represent 
 the communications of God with man. I suppose that such 
 reasoning means, that God being a Spirit can only approach 
 men through their thoughts or moral emotions. No doubt 
 any method of representing God's communications to man 
 must be inadequate, but I contend that the voice is the most 
 purely spiritual thing that can be imagined ; and thus we 
 are led to a question of the most serious importance, What, 
 in plain words, is the meaning of " spirit " ? 
 
 For hundreds of years the world, as it seems to me, has 
 been haunted by the notion of a spirit as a house is plagued 
 by ghosts. It has been regarded as an immaterial some- 
 thing, a substance, because separable from the body, nowhere 
 discoverable, everywhere present. It has affected philosophy 
 with vain inquiries as to the nature of that which being 
 incapable of analysis is beyond knowledge. It has driven 
 men to Atheism by the sheer impossibility of discovering 
 its existence, or it has conducted them to Pantheism by the 
 determination to believe in that for which no separate 
 
294 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 existence could be found. It has plunged theology into 
 wild speculations as to the origin of "souls," whether they 
 are specially created or derived by inheritance. It has 
 taught men to speak of the immortality of the soul instead 
 of the immortality of persons, and has made them desire to 
 save their souls as a thing separate from themselves, instead 
 of saving themselves as moral and rational beings ; and 
 this although the great Teacher Himself uses the two 
 phrases loss of self and loss of soul as synonymous (St 
 Luke ix. 25). It has created dreams of purgatory, inter- 
 mediate states, spiritual manifestations, ghosts, devils, and 
 witches. It has filled men's minds with Manichaean con- 
 tempt and hatred of matter, and Gnostic fables concerning 
 the nature of Christ. And now men tremble and despair 
 of religion because science begins to declare, " This spirit 
 of yours, I can nowhere find it : matter I know, life I know, 
 and thought I know ; but what is this which is and is not, 
 which exists for your purposes but not for mine, and which 
 digs a wide impassable gulf between knowledge and faith?" 
 Of all the benefits that science is conferring upon religion, 
 and, I must add, of all the testimonies that it is bearing to 
 the truth of revelation, none, I think, are so great and so 
 searching as this destruction of the old notion about spirit, 
 and the consequent necessity of finding a new one. What, 
 then, did Christ mean when he said that God was a Spirit 
 a declaration which M. Renan is good enough to honour 
 with special approbation ? He meant to declare authorita- 
 tively that which throughout the whole history of the Jews He 
 the Word of God had been engaged in making known 
 to them, that God is a Person. Personality is consciousness 
 of self, spirit is self-consciousness regarded in its effects upon, 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 295 
 
 or relations towards, others ; it is therefore the more com- 
 plete and fuller expression. The true antithesis, there- 
 fore, to spirit is not matter, but unconscious impersonal 
 existence. It is a moral and not a metaphysical word. 
 Are we really to be told that Jesus Christ entered upon 
 subtle metaphysical discussions, when from this premise He 
 drew the conclusion that men were to worship God in spirit ? 
 The addition of the words " and in truth " that is, sincerity 
 of self shows that He meant to declare that God, being a 
 Personal Being, was to be worshipped with personal love 
 and devotion, irrespective of place and circumstance. How 
 easily the language of religion lends itself to this idea ol 
 spirit may be seen in the words of the prayer in which " we 
 offer and present unto God ourselves, our souls and bodies, 
 to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice," spirit being 
 here regarded as the personality which is the result of the 
 combination of mind and body. And thus a real basis is 
 laid for the permanent union of science and religion. The 
 former asserts that only in the ultimate incomprehensibility, 
 called the power of thought, is there room for any conception 
 of God ; the latter affirms that this power of thought resides 
 in a person. The former insists that no positive conception 
 of God can be formed from the contemplation of mind and 
 matter in nature ; the latter proclaims that He has made 
 Himself known by His voice, the one only means by which 
 beings like ourselves are primarily and directly reached by 
 spiritual influences from other persons. It only remains 
 that each should examine the facts upon which the other 
 relies science reverently and religion rationally for this 
 union to become an accomplished fact. 
 
 The difficulty of making an assertion, such as the preced- 
 
296 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ing definition of spirit, lies in one's knowledge of the different 
 ways in which it will be received. To some it will appear 
 as though with much parade I had stated the alphabet of 
 science. To some it will appear as though the essence of 
 religion had been then and there destroyed. And there are 
 some of whose opinion it is impossible to form even a con- 
 jecture. Thus one of the leaders of contemporary English 
 theology, after describing with great eloquence and power 
 the self-conscious personality of man as constituting his 
 spiritual being, goes on, apparently under the constraint of 
 an exacting orthodoxy, to say that " God is perpetually 
 creating souls out of nothing and infusing [!] them into 
 bodies. He creates each soul at the moment when the 
 body which is destined for it enters really and properly on 
 its inheritance of life." Surely the pleasure of quoting 
 Jerome as a psychological authority in the nineteenth century 
 is dearly purchased at the price of such inconsistency as 
 this. However, be the opinion received as it may, I wish 
 to point out that it has been reached from no metaphysical 
 predilections, and quite irrespective of the conclusions of 
 modern psychology. It has forced itself upon my mind as 
 the only rational means of explaining the history of the 
 actions of God as detailed in the Bible, and if it agrees with 
 the scientific conception of spirit, so much the better for 
 me. As, however, I have unwillingly strayed into the 
 domain of metaphysics, it may be well to digress for a 
 moment, in order to show how the truth that spirit is simply 
 self-conscious personality enables us to harmonise the 
 needful requirements of religion with the conclusions of 
 science. Let us take as instances free-will and immortality. 
 It is essential to religion, as being based upon the re- 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 297 
 
 sponsibility of man to God not that the will should be 
 demonstratively known to be free, but that it should not 
 be known to be bound. Consciousness testifies to an ap- 
 parent freedom beyond which it is impossible for knowledge 
 to pass. We are not justified, therefore, in founding a re- 
 ligious system upon man's free agency, as though that were 
 an absolutely positive fact ; on the other hand, if the con- 
 sciousness of freedom were rendered impossible, then all 
 religion perishes at once, and those who will have brought 
 about so vast a revolution must be left to say how morality, 
 or, indeed, human action of any sort, can survive. The latest 
 and most complete philosophy of science affirms that man 
 is a succession of psychical states produced by physical con- 
 ditions, arising from the circumstances which " environ" him. 
 If this be true (and I neither deny nor affirm it, it lies beyond 
 my scope), then it is plain that spirit as a separate entity can 
 have no existence ; but it is by no means so plain that spirit 
 as self-conscious personality, involving the consciousness of 
 free agency, is at all affected. For it is a simple fact that I 
 know myself as a being with a continuous history past, pre- 
 sent, and to come. Consequently, in addition to all other 
 psychical states that determine my action at any given 
 moment, there is one which does not result from my en- 
 vironment, but from my direct apprehension of myself as a 
 being to whom something is due, whom something may 
 hurt or advantage, not necessarily now, but ten years 
 hence. So far, therefore, as the consciousness of personal 
 identity enters as a motive into my actions, so far they 
 are not determined by external agencies exclusively. No 
 doubt by far the greater part of our actions are not free 
 in any real sense of the word. If, for instance, food is set 
 
298 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 before me when I am hungry, I eat it with no more actual 
 consciousness of freedom than an animal. But if I decline 
 it upon the -plea that it may in some small degree prejudice 
 my health hereafter, the consciousness of self and its dues 
 becomes the deciding motive of what I do, and this even 
 though my knowledge is (like all memory in this philosophy) 
 a psychical state ; and if this be so, then virtue is essentially 
 a rightful consciousness of personality, of what is due to and 
 from one's self. Evil, on the contrary, is that which men do 
 to their own harm and the hurt of other people, because 
 they do not think rightly of what is due to and from them- 
 selves. (I say "to and from," because both views of the 
 nature of morality are thus included.) Evil has therefore its 
 primary root, as men have been long tending to think, in 
 the intellect : it is in its lowest forms want of thought about 
 self, and in its more refined forms the misapplication of 
 thought from mistaken selfish predispositions. And thus 
 thought, becoming conscious of self,* is the one divine thing 
 in mankind, that which answers to the idea of the creation 
 of man. I think that is, I exist. 
 
 Next, it is essential to religion that the hope of immor- 
 tality should not be quenched. What men desire is not 
 that any part of their friends should exist after death, but 
 that the persons themselves should continue a self-conscious 
 life. In this sense the spirits of the dead live even upon 
 earth for a little while. What they were still strives, so to 
 speak, amongst those who knew them. But let us trace 
 this idea of spirit in its bearings upon the fact of evolution. 
 
 * As this self-consciousness is due to the correlation of thought with various 
 bodily conditions, the body is seen to be an essential part of each man's 
 personality. 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 299 
 
 A certain unknowable entity called mind is correlated with 
 a certain unknowable entity called matter. By slow pro- 
 cess through countless generations a being is formed who 
 thinks that is, becomes conscious of himself. The ques- 
 tion, whether this final step is due to natural evolution, or 
 requires to be accounted for by some special creative act, 
 is purely a scientific and not a religious one. This being, 
 so compounded, dies with every fibre of his personality cry- 
 ing aloud for life. If he has but a doubtful metaphysical 
 theory to rely on namely, that spirit is an entity separable 
 from matter he is, indeed, in a sorry plight. If he rejects 
 with disdain evidence merely because it is supernatural, 
 for a belief i.e. t in his own immortality which belief in- 
 volves, if true, the most supernatural thing that can be 
 imagined, his reasoning must be in as sorry a condition ac 
 his hopes. Driven by the impossibility of drawing a line 
 anywhere between man and animals, he is compelled to 
 assert that if spirit lives after death, then animals, 
 though no glimpse of the idea can be known to have 
 crossed their minds, also are immortal. He exclaims in 
 defiance, My body is not me but mine, just at the moment 
 that science is more and more clearly discovering that body 
 is neither more nor less an essential part of ourselves than 
 soul, life, will, or anything else that a person can call his 
 own. But let him grasp firmly the idea that spirit is merely 
 self-consciousness, and then he may go with safety into the 
 furthest extreme of Materialism, far further, indeed, than 
 sober science would carry him. Supposing my body is not 
 mine but me, what then ? The same power which by 
 chemical action, molecular combination, call it what you 
 will, built up my personality, and made phosphorus to live 
 my rational life, and kept my personal identity safe amid 
 
300 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 the perpetual change and flux of the matter which com- 
 poses me, can do so after my death if it pleases, as it pleases, 
 when it pleases. But if I am asked why a bare possibility 
 should become positive fact, and how I know anything of 
 what this power is and what it pleases to do, I answer that 
 the resurrection of one Person under circumstances that 
 make it a crucial test converts this potentiality into actuality, 
 verifies an hypothesis, and substantiates faith. This was 
 the reconstitution of a personality that, so far as we know, 
 perished at death. His body was the same yet different, 
 adapted to those spiritual functions which become a Person 
 who knew no sin, and whose body, therefore, knew no 
 corruption. More than this I do not know, but to know 
 this is more than enough. 
 
 We return now, after this long digression, to the con- 
 sideration of Inspiration viewed in its origin as the com- 
 munication of thought from God to man. To quote what 
 I have already said, " A voice from a living God made itself 
 heard by methods sufficient to satisfy rational and sober 
 minds of its reality, and thus revealed the abiding character 
 and present designs of Almighty God." And again, " The 
 men thus convinced acquired a mental certainty that the 
 thoughts which came and went were not the mere chance 
 workings of their own minds, but the inspiration of God." 
 In what way, then, these thoughts operated we are now to 
 inquire, with reasonable prospect of success. 
 
 That which distinguishes the history of the Jews from 
 every other nation is the recurrence of the expressions 
 "God did this "and "God said so;" the former of these 
 phrases describes the miraculous element, which I have al- 
 ready considered, the latter contains the claim to dis- 
 tinctive Inspiration. Under any circumstances, the mere 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 301 
 
 existence of such a claim, with all its past pregnant conse- 
 quences upon humanity, would demand the most earnest 
 attention. Here were a people whose statesmen, poets, 
 historians, and writers deliberately asserted and confidently 
 believed that the words they uttered expressed the mind of 
 God. If, to take one instance, a reformer had any abuse to 
 point out, he did not say that he had discovered either the 
 abuse or the remedy, but that God had sent him with a 
 message. What, then, did they mean ? To answer this 
 question all I can hope to do is to give the briefest sketch 
 of the meaning and the working of the various formulae of 
 Inspiration. These are as follows : 
 
 There are two sets of phrases to describe first, the 
 communication of God to the individual directly ; and, 
 secondly, of God to the people through the first recipient. 
 And then there are four sets, so to speak, of these phrases. 
 
 1. " God spake unto," with its corresponding phrase " I 
 am the Lord." 
 
 2. " The word of the Lord came unto," and " thus saith 
 the Lord." 
 
 3. " The Spirit of the Lord came upon," and " such a man 
 did or said so and so." 
 
 4. The word of Jesus Christ " I say unto you," who 
 spoke of His own authority as we might imagine God 
 speaking among men. This, therefore, does not strictly 
 belong to inspiration, but rather to the consideration of His 
 person and character. I shall confine myself therefore to 
 the first three, and show how each of them is consistent 
 with the theory that inspiration is the result of the working 
 of the mind about events believed to come from God. 
 
 The first formula belongs to the legal period of Jewish 
 
3O2 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 history, and is confined almost entirely to the Mosaic legis- 
 lation. Speaking of the expression " I am the Lord," 
 which is used to sanction certain of the laws, Ewald says : 
 " These words considered as to their outward form serve 
 only to mark the declaration as coming from Jehovah 
 Himself; but considered as to their inner meaning, they 
 flow out of that strong simple feeling, according to which the 
 true prophet announces what he receives not humanly but 
 divinely. In the earliest times this feeling was most direct 
 and powerful, so that the human being seemed wholly to 
 disappear in presence of the God who spoke through him ; 
 and the language corresponded with the feeling, expressing 
 in the strongest way that God alone spoke, and spoke, more- 
 over, as God that is, simply commanding : wherefore the 
 irresistible power of His word was announced by the 
 expression ' I am Jehovah' either preceding or closing it." 
 This contains the sum of the whole matter. Let it be 
 granted that Moses composed in the desert some at least 
 of the laws that bear his name, and especially the Ten 
 Commandments. Let it be further granted that he believed 
 himself to have been called by God to the work of making 
 Israel into a nation in the way that has been described. 
 Then the laws were simply such as might have occurred to 
 any great and original genius under the given circumstances. 
 They grew out of the events, the beliefs, and the wants of 
 the times. It rests with those who believe in a super- 
 natural infusion of thought to show what there is in them 
 that cannot be accounted for naturally. The evidence for 
 such infusion must be found either in the statements of the 
 narrative or in the nature of the results produced. Let us 
 look at each of these for a moment. 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 303 
 
 The words " God spake " need imply no more than the 
 use of a common Eastern expression, nor is there any hint 
 given that anything more was intended than that the law- 
 giver felt himself entitled to proclaim his enactments as 
 containing the will of God. On the contrary, there is much 
 to show that this explanation is the true one. The phrase 
 is used with an indiscriminate profusion, that shows how 
 general and universal its application must have been. Can 
 we seriously suppose that the minute and trivial regulations 
 concerning dress, ritual, and the like were spelt out to 
 Moses by the Divine voice, so that he, one of the greatest 
 of men, becomes a mere registering machine ? Again we 
 ask our old question, Is human life, intelligent life, possible 
 under such conditions ? Nor is this all. The appointment 
 of elders is in one case (Exod. xviii. 24) attributed to the 
 advice of Jethro, in another (Num. xi. 16) to the express 
 command of God ; nor is the force of the argument much 
 .diminished if we make the accounts to refer to two different 
 occasions, instead of being reminiscences, as surely they 
 are, of the same. Again, how can we account for the record 
 of long conversations between God and Moses except upon 
 the supposition that they are dramatic narratives of the 
 thoughts that swayed to and fro in the prophet's mind ? It 
 is, however, far more from a general survey of the use of the 
 phrase itself that we are irresistibly driven to conclude that 
 a natural intelligible meaning must be found for it. 
 
 Nor are there any claims in the narrative itself to lead us 
 to any other conclusion. It is most true that it is shrouded 
 in mystery and accompanied by awful manifestations of 
 divine power none the less awful because they are now 
 known to be natural to that awe-inspiring land. I do not 
 
304 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 wish to take refuge in the idea that these were accessories 
 added by later hands ; this is to sacrifice what purports to 
 be history for the sake of a theory. It may or may not be 
 so, but unless we are to make a clean sweep of the whole 
 narrative, we must admit that the " law was given " under 
 external circumstances that seemed to attest the presence 
 of Jehovah, and were calculated to inspire the mind with 
 the sense of His will and character. The surrounding 
 scenery, the attending storms, the sound as of a trumpet, 
 the withdrawal of Moses, all the phenomena of that rugged, 
 desolate, silent land, so strange to a people that had just 
 come forth from Egypt, so useful to a people that were 
 destined to conquer Canaan, must be in their general out- 
 lines frankly accepted if we are to preserve an historical 
 basis. But all this is compatible with the fact that Moses, 
 inspired by the tremendous solemnity of what had hap- 
 pened and was happening around him, filled with the 
 presence of God, composed those ]aws which have come 
 down to us from the desert life. The one exception 
 proves the rule. God is said to have written the Command- 
 ments on the tables of stone. But this, whatever view we 
 may take of it, is not inspiration but miracle, not a super- 
 natural infusion of thought but an action of God. More 
 than this I for one cannot take upon myself to say. 
 
 But let us now look at the results of this inspiration, and 
 ask whether there is anything in them transcending the 
 natural powers f the human mind, the circumstances being 
 granted. The giving of the law itself follows in natural 
 sequence, partly because laws are the necessary instruments 
 for giving form and duration to the free-will dedication of 
 the people to God ; partly because the drawing near to 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 305 
 
 God for direction and government is nothing else than the 
 wish for a better ordering of their newly acquired national 
 life. But the laws themselves must -plainly have existed 
 in germ before, just as the Lord's Prayer itself is adapted 
 from partially existing materials. Assuredly the people of 
 Israel must have been accustomed to most, at least, of the 
 Ten Commandments ; certainly to the fourth, and pro- 
 bably to all the rest, unless, what seems more than likely, 
 the addition of the tenth marked an upward step in the 
 great code of human morals. Then, again, there are others 
 which seem to refer specially to the old life in Egypt. But 
 that the whole code is founded upon one or two great ideas, 
 which ideas, again, spring naturally out of their history, has 
 been abundantly proved by Professor Ewald. God the 
 Holy One, the Personal Being, the God of their fathers, 
 above all the God who had delivered and would deliver 
 them yet again these were the animating thoughts. What 
 I affirm is that the laws were natural, in the sense that they 
 followed from the men, the events, and the national char- 
 acter, being what they were. And if it be argued that the 
 divine origin of, say, the Ten Commandments is proved by 
 the fact that they alone of ancient codes have passed 
 unchanged into the morality of mankind, I answer that I 
 admit this very cheerfully. But divine origin does not 
 imply supernatural infusion of thought into the minds of 
 men, but only a controlling influence, recognised as coming 
 from God, over their actions. 
 
 The second formula, " the word of the Lord came unto," 
 belongs to the prophetic period, and extends from Samuel 
 to John the Baptist. All that need be said upon it in 
 connection with our present subject, can be reduced within 
 
 U 
 
306 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 a small compass. On the one hand, it is clear that the 
 prophets believed themselves to be in communication with 
 a personal God ; on the other, it is capable of proof that 
 the results of this belief, as contained in their spoken 
 words, can be accounted for by what we know of the 
 ordinary workings of the human mind. Until some proof 
 to the contrary is alleged, we may be contented to believe 
 that prophecy is a natural product of Jewish life, thought, 
 and history ; and is explicable by some such account of 
 the religious faculty as was attempted in a previous essay. 
 The prophets performed the functions of public writers 
 and speakers ; they were critics, preachers, originators, 
 advisers, and forewarners. In what way the prophetic 
 influence first came to them is not very easy to determine, 
 except that in the best known cases their vocation was 
 generally determined by something partaking of the nature 
 of an objective occurrence. But it is clear that they were 
 men gifted with a strong religious faculty, men in whom 
 the genius of the people found its fullest expression. One 
 unfailing proof of this is that they sprang from every class 
 of society, as, to take one instance, the English poets have 
 shown how deeply seated the poetic faculty has been in 
 the very heart of the race. They knew what God had 
 done, and what He had promised; they believed that all 
 good thoughts came from Him ; they saw the sins of the 
 nation reflected in the holiness of God ; and their mistakes, 
 whether of policy, worship, government, or administration, 
 were made apparent by contrast with what the prophets 
 knew from the law and the history to be in consonance with 
 God's will and character. Above all, they realised, what 
 the mass of the people must have felt very faintly indeed, 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 307 
 
 that God was in covenant with them, and was a very 
 present help in time of trouble. Then came the impulse 
 to speak or to write which they felt within them, and with 
 noble faith declared to be the Word of the Lord. We 
 observe that the growing intelligence of the people no 
 longer rested satisfied with the simpler expression " God 
 spake;" room must be left for the play of individual 
 thought, and the human no longer superseded by the 
 divine. They did not claim any authority for their 
 declarations upon the plea that they felt a supernatural 
 interference with their thoughts ; it was because the 
 thoughts were natural, orderly, and suitable that they 
 were felt to be divine. In short, the inner consciousness 
 of the prophet responded to external religious truth, just 
 as the mind of the Greek artist drank in the laws of beauty, 
 and reproduced them in the forms that stood to him in 
 place of words. Their naturalness, their humanity, their 
 truthfulness, are the best proofs that they are divine. 
 
 Nor is there anything to be found, either upon the face 
 of the narrative or in the words uttered by the prophets, 
 to compel us to fall back upon the theory of supernatural 
 enlightenment of thought. Wherever the merely mar- 
 vellous occurs, and it occurs very seldom, further inquiry 
 proves that it rests upon a superficial mistake. The 
 mention of Cyrus in Isaiah and the apocalyptic visions of 
 Daniel are accounted for by the proved later authorship 
 of the books which bear the names of these great prophets. 
 The mention of Josiah by name is exactly what might 
 be expected of a writer who witnessed Josiah's reforms, 
 and was acquainted with the old story of the prophet who 
 denounced Jeroboam, and foretold the consequences of the 
 
308 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 disruption from the point of view that would be natural in 
 the kingdom of Judah. If marvels of this description 
 were meant to be relied upon as proofs of supernatural 
 power, it is the greatest marvel of all that there are not 
 more and better authenticated instances of them. The 
 really wonderful element in Hebrew prophecy is that the 
 prophets delineated the character and work of a Person 
 who, if the Gospels be true, appeared in history several 
 hundred years after the last of them was dead. But then 
 the modern view of prophecy, which may be regarded as 
 one of the best ascertained results of later theology, fully 
 recognises this, and adequately accounts for it without the 
 necessity of supernatural inspiration. We know what this 
 view is. The prophet taking his stand upon the circumstances 
 of the times, and contrasting the national religious ideas 
 with their realisation at any given period of history, was 
 enabled to foretell in dim outline a Person and a Character 
 who should answer to the idea that always was to be, and 
 never was, fulfilled, nay, rather that grew larger the more 
 it was fulfilled. Adopting this view, let us see what is lost 
 and what remains. 
 
 1. For supernatural interference with reason is substituted 
 a divine method of action, working through nearly 2000 years 
 in and by the minds of responsible, intelligent agents. 
 
 2. For a miraculous knowledge, which it is difficult to 
 harmonise with any possible conditions of free human life, 
 is substituted an astonishing development of the religious 
 faculty, which gave the Jews their peculiar character and 
 mission. 
 
 In this way, then, history reveals God. If, to take an 
 illustration from nature, I know that water freezes at a 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 309 
 
 certain temperature in England, I know that it will do so 
 all over the world. Similarly, if I know the character and 
 will of God from His dealings with the Jews, I know that 
 He is the same everywhere. Everywhere He carries for- 
 ward His designs by the workings of human genius, which, 
 no matter whether distinctively religious or not, then 
 becomes the object of earnest and, I must be allowed to 
 add, of religious investigation. The prophets remind us 
 most of God when they are seen to be most clearly men. 
 The stern morality the instinctive appreciation of the 
 divine will the enthusiasm that could not be quenched the 
 hope that would not die, but that, like certain fire, burnt 
 more intensely under the deluge of misfortunes the unerring 
 perception of the human heart, and of the nature, drift, and 
 tendency of passing events the marvellous manner in which 
 the future was described and spoken of under the guise of 
 the present, so that eternal truths were for ever revealing 
 themselves concerning the Eternal God the subtle in- 
 tuitions the faint indications the synthetical grasp of 
 facts the burning diction the words that meant at once 
 more and less than they intended, but where shall we stop 
 in the enumeration of the gifts and powers of the prophetic 
 order ? In the sense that all thought is divine, their 
 thoughts were divine, and call forth our gratitude to the 
 Giver of all good; in the sense that all thought is natural, their 
 thoughts were natural, and call forth the spirit of inquiry, 
 that desires to know what they said and why they said it. 
 
 There remains for our consideration the third formula of 
 Scriptural inspiration, "the Spirit of God came," the 
 importance of which is discerned the moment we remem- 
 ber that it was the formula adapted from the Old Testa- 
 
310 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 ment into the New to express that kind of inspiration 
 under which we ourselves live. It occurs in its proper 
 place of historical development. The overwhelming con- 
 sciousness of divine power which sent forth the lawgiver or 
 prophet upon their special message, more and more recedes, 
 so as to leave room for the gradual, invisible, peaceful 
 influence of the Spirit of God upon the lives of men. In 
 the theology of St Paul, indeed, no accurate distinction 
 seems to have been drawn between the spirit of man and the 
 Spirit of God that wrought in him. The two met together 
 in indissoluble harmony, just as the divine and human were 
 united, never to be put asunder, in the Person of Christ. 
 
 Now, when we examine the usage of this expression in 
 the Old Testament, we find two distinct phenomena de- 
 scribed by it, both of which find their counterpart in the 
 New. There is, first of all, the violent seizure by which men 
 were elevated into an ecstatic state and were enabled to 
 "prophesy" that is, utter ecstatic words of prayer and 
 praise. The instances of this are not very common, but 
 they begin as early as the seventy elders, appear to have 
 been a not uncommon occurrence in the schools of the 
 prophets, and extend as late as the apostolic times in the 
 form of the outpouring of spiritual " gifts." Now, it is neces- 
 sary to say distinctly that the best minds among the Jews 
 held these ecstasies in very little regard, and that they are of 
 little or no value in tracing the meaning of inspiration. It 
 may be that the thoughts uttered were wonderful, specially 
 divine, supernatural, anything we please ; but assuredly no 
 word has been thought worthy to be preserved. On the day of 
 Pentecost itself the results of inspiration are seen in St Peter's 
 speech, which is as calm and rational, and, in human terms, 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 3 1 1 
 
 as able and convincing, as was ever addressed to human 
 audience. It is the more necessary to insist upon this, 
 because it forms part and parcel of the Hebrew conception 
 of religion. No doubt their history contains incidents of 
 this kind ; and visions, though of an exceedingly calm and 
 rational character, occur now and then as a method of 
 calling prophets to their work. But as a rule the whole 
 set of the Jewish mind was against them. The law had a 
 sharp and decisive remedy for dreamers of dreams who 
 might be inclined to use outward tokens of spiritual 
 possession against the inner verities of the national faith. 
 Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel denounced enchant- 
 ments, magic, dreams, visions, divination, familiar spirits, 
 in terms that seem to show that these were the main 
 reliance of false prophecy in its contest with the true. And 
 St Paul crushed the nascent growth of the same reliance 
 upon ""spiritual gifts" by his disparaging remarks ad- 
 dressed to the Corinthian Church. In doing so he was but 
 faithful to the genius of his race. It must never be for- 
 gotten that the one out of the religions of antiquity which 
 has passed into modern life was that of a practical, rational, 
 realistic, unimaginative people, who had small fancy for 
 frenzies, poetic extravagances, and all the metaphysical 
 idealism which is in modern religion made to take the 
 place and do the work of solid facts. 
 
 I am not, however, to be supposed to deny all value to 
 these manifestations ; that, with the history of the day of 
 Pentecost before us, would be impossible. What I do deny 
 is, that they have any bearing upon the nature of inspira- 
 tion. Their real value would seem to be connected with the 
 religious life of the individuals who were affected by them. 
 
312 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 They represent a stage through which all religious minds 
 pass, and which in times of excitement assumes an extra- 
 ordinary form. There comes a crisis to all intensely 
 religious persons when for the moment the human per- 
 sonality is overpowered by the consciousness of the divine, 
 and God seems to take entire possession of the man in 
 order that the sense of His abiding presence may never 
 depart from him. Those who have passed through this 
 stage realise for ever that they are in the hands of an over- 
 ruling power. And where many persons are joined together 
 this " spiritual power " passes from one to another by means 
 which are probably distinctively material, due, that is, to 
 nervous operations. That God should use this fact of 
 man's nature as the vehicle of His actions upon one great 
 occasion, and for a special purpose, is consistent with all we 
 know of His methods ; it is only when an almost solitary 
 and transient event is made the excuse for all kinds of 
 irrational excitement and supernatural views of inspiration 
 that an outspoken protest becomes necessary. 
 
 The second use of the formula " the Spirit of God came " 
 in the Old Testament is to express the ordinary operations 
 of the human intellect carried to extraordinary perfection. A 
 more surprising and gratifying fact there cannot be, and 
 fortunately the proofs for it are overwhelming, and indeed 
 not denied. The Spirit is the creator of natural life, mov- 
 ing upon the chaotic void before the worlds were. It is the 
 giver of animal life, the breath or spirit of God which is in the 
 nostrils of man (Job xxvii. 3, Gen. ii. 7). Pharaoh regards 
 it as the source of intellectual excellence in Joseph (Gen. 
 xli. 38). God filled Bezaleel with the spirit of architectural 
 and mechanical skill, and Balaam's insight into the destinies 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 3 1 3 
 
 of the nations was due to God's Spirit resting upon him, a 
 Gentile and an adversary. When Othniel, Gideon, Jephtha, 
 aroused to patriotic valour, went forth to fight and conquer, 
 or when Samson felt the stirrings within him of great 
 bodily prowess, it was because the Spirit of the Lord came 
 upon them ; and it was the same Spirit that anointed a later 
 prophet (and afterwards Christ Himself) to lead a life of 
 practical religious beneficence. Thus, then, our view of 
 inspiration is found to be simply that of the Bible itself. 
 It is, first of all, thought working in all human faculties. 
 When recognised as proceeding from God it becomes 
 religious. And lastly, it is felt to be specially or even 
 exclusively religious in proportion as the divine Personality 
 is seen to be overpowering the human agent. These men 
 waxed valiant in fight, patient in suffering, skilful in art, 
 discreet in policy, virtuous in action, wise in thought, 
 because they believed that the Lord God of their fathers 
 was present with them, and had distributed to each man 
 severally as He willed. 
 
 But more than this. Though little is said upon the 
 subject, yet it is to this kind of inspiration that, if anywhere, 
 we are to look as the living force of Hebrew literature. 
 We are nowhere told that God spake unto the historians, 
 or that the word of the Lord came to the psalmists ; these 
 all write with the unconsciousness of men, to whom, as to 
 Christians now, the thought of the habitual indwelling of 
 the Spirit of God is an ultimate natural fact, rather than an 
 occasional supernatural occurrence. And it is thus that 
 we can account for all the peculiarities of Jewish historians 
 and poets. They composed as might be expected of men 
 who were inspired by events and facts which revealed God to 
 
314 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 them. Thus their poetry described God in nature in language 
 which, although at times pantheistic in terms, yet never lost 
 its hold of God as a Personal Being. Nature and history 
 were with them subordinated to the task of declaring His 
 actions and character, and it is thus that all our modern 
 difficulties in understanding them arise. They, for the most 
 part, recorded the lives of men only so far as was necessary 
 to make God apparent, and naturally this would be done 
 chiefly by way of moral contrast. Hence follows that 
 essential peculiarity of Jewish history, the unswerving 
 fidelity with which they described the sins and littleness of 
 their greatest men, and of their nation at its greatest moments. 
 It is, I must observe, a singularly unworthy return for this 
 honesty to use their descriptions to disparage the characters 
 of Jewish heroes, and at the same time to withhold all credit 
 from the writers upon whose conscientious veracity these 
 hostile criticisms are founded. But fairness in the mere 
 literary assailants of the Bible is as little to be found as in 
 the majority of its professed theological defenders. 
 
 We must, however, turn away from the tempting but too 
 vast an undertaking thus opened to us, and content our- 
 selves with giving one instance of the way in which all the 
 peculiarities of Jewish literature can be accounted for by 
 this theory of natural inspiration. Let it be the history of 
 the creation, and let us be allowed for convenience' sake, if 
 not for old associations' sake, to regard it as the composition 
 or the compilation of one mind. Now, what would be the 
 facts of the case which the author would have before him ? 
 First, the existence of the world itself, with its gradations 
 rising from inanimate matter to intellectual life. Secondly, 
 a number of traditions shared by at least the Semitic 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 3 1 5 
 
 family. Thirdly, an irresistible belief, probably but just 
 born into the world, in the existence of a Creating, Personal 
 Being, Lord of all other lords, be they what they might. 
 Now given these factors, is not the result just what might 
 have been expected ? He takes, in all the unconscious 
 simplicity of genius, just so much of the legends as would 
 suffice to give his account an historical form, and thus dis- 
 play the actions of a beneficent Creator. From the mere 
 survey of the world around him he caught the idea of pro- 
 gressive development as most suitable to the designs of an 
 overruling mind. He threw it into the form of days as the 
 simplest mark of time, and made the days into a week 
 probably because the Sabbath was in germ already estab- 
 lished. He was clear of one thing, however, that every- 
 thing came from the power of one Almighty God, because 
 he caught sight of that absolute harmony in nature which 
 it is the province of science to describe under the name of 
 law. And then having to account for man, he gave utter- 
 ance to one of the most sublime efforts of inspired genius 
 in the declaration that man was made in the image of God, 
 His delegate and representative upon earth, endowed with 
 that power of self-conscious thought which we call spirit. 
 Yet all this follows as rational conclusions from admitted 
 facts. If God had spoken to man, had formed designs and 
 exhibited a moral purpose, then as man also could do the 
 same, he must be in God's image, must be like Him. Many 
 centuries afterwards this thought received its full explana- 
 tion when Jesus Christ uttered the word " Father," and 
 crowned the fabric of God's revelation to man. Man made 
 in the image of God is the " fact " of the Old Testament ; 
 God made in the image of man is the " fact " of the New. 
 
316 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Now it is precisely this mode of inspiration that our 
 Lord and His apostles after Him selected as the most 
 fitting to express the communication from God to man in 
 its ultimate development. Discarding transient bursts of 
 enthusiasm and overwhelming manifestations of divine 
 power, they fixed upon the Old Testament belief that the 
 Spirit of God was the author of natural gifts as the best 
 method of explaining religious and moral inspiration for 
 all time. In so doing they definitely asserted that this 
 inspiration is natural also, and can be explained as in other 
 faculties of man. But they went on to make two final 
 assertions. First, they connected inspiration with an ever- 
 abiding personal influence, the Spirit of God. Second, they 
 definitely attached religious inspiration, as distinct from 
 others, to the notion of goodness ; this Spirit was the Holy 
 Ghost. The stages through which this grew up can be 
 easily traced from the time when our Lord began His 
 preaching by declaring that the Spirit of God was upon 
 Him, down to His promise that the Comforter should come 
 in His stead. This, too, follows from a natural necessity. 
 For as the whole object of revelation is to create permanent 
 relations between God and men as separate yet closely 
 allied persons, and as God in His essential being dwells 
 apart from man's knowledge, while Christ Himself was 
 shortly to be withdrawn from the world, the advent of the 
 Spirit is the crown and completion of all God's dealings 
 towards mankind. Unless science is prepared to exter- 
 minate religion, she is deeply and especially interested in 
 proving that after this final union of God and man in the 
 region of natural reason, no other revelation can be made, 
 and that all further miraculous manifestations are a going 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 3 1 7 
 
 back to " old and beggarly elements/' And so the union 
 between the divine and the natural, between religion and 
 goodness, having been once for all cemented, we have the 
 strongest a priori reasons reasons based upon analogies 
 drawn from universal experience against accepting any 
 fresh supernatural interventions-, even were the evidence as 
 strong on their behalf as it is almost grotesquely weak. 
 Surely we have here a satisfactory answer to a difficulty 
 which appears to puzzle many persons, that if we admit the 
 miracles of the Bible, we are obliged to admit the possibility 
 of the marvels of mediaeval history. The mere legal evidence 
 for the stigmata of St Francis may be as strong as that 
 for the Resurrection (it is nothing of the sort) ; but the 
 difference is, that the latter carries on the revelation of God 
 to its supreme point, while the former is a recurrence to 
 methods suitable, if at all, to the mere childhood of man, 
 and nowhere paralleled in Jewish history. It is as though 
 a man should complete the education of his children, and 
 then, instead of starting them in life to work out their own 
 experience by aid of what they had been taught, were to 
 insist upon teaching them the alphabet again. 
 
 It may, however, be asked whether any room for the 
 influence of the Holy Ghost can be found in the conclusions 
 of scientific psychology. Now let us remember that in 
 Him we have God dealing with us as a person with persons. 
 As the spirit of one man conveys thought to the spirit of 
 another, thereby influencing his character and conduct, so, 
 are we as Christians obliged and enabled to believe, does the 
 Spirit of God to man. As men amongst themselves, so He 
 reminds, instructs, cautions, exhorts, consoles, suggests in 
 a word, makes men holy as God is holy. How can this be ? 
 
3 1 8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Now, in our absolute ignorance of what thought is in 
 ultimate analysis, we might perhaps pronounce the question 
 to be insoluble. But I am not inclined so to leave it, and 
 think that something at least may be done towards clearing 
 it up. I have already said that man's belief in his own 
 free agency depends upon his consciousness of himself as a 
 personal moral being. In the same way the possibility of 
 receiving good thoughts from God depends upon our con- 
 sciousness of His personal existence and relations towards 
 us. We can be influenced by Him, as by any other 
 person, only so far as we realise Him as He is, or can be, 
 known from His dealings with us. Hence, when by any 
 act of our own, arising from our needs or our duties, we 
 place ourselves in communication with Him, then the 
 religious faculty is as it were opened and enlarged to 
 receive inspirations of goodness. This is what religion 
 specifically consists in, and it explains all the distinctive 
 Christian doctrines. In prayer, for instance, the spirit of 
 man is placed in condition to receive impressions from the 
 Person in whose presence we are kneeling ; nor is there any 
 necessity, from what we know of psychological laws, that 
 these impressions should come there and then. In the 
 Lord's Supper we feed upon that is, take into our spiritual 
 being His life and character, which were displayed, as must 
 be the case with all men, through a material bodily organisa- 
 tion, and which as a moral power culminated at His death. 
 In meditating upon the actions of God, or reading them in 
 the Bible and elsewhere, new thoughts and resolutions take 
 possession of our souls. This is exactly described in Christ's 
 own words. The Spirit takes of His goodness, and show- 
 ing it to us, inspires us to be and do the same. Lastly, 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 319 
 
 that shamefully abused word "grace" is seen to be not a 
 kind of spiritual substance infused into souls, but the influx 
 of good thoughts into minds that are in communication 
 with the object whence goodness derives its origin. If I 
 open my eyes towards the sun, natural light streams upon 
 them ; if I open my mind towards a friend, mental light 
 streams upon it ; so, also, if I open myself towards God, 
 spiritual light streams upon me. And thus, I think, I can 
 realise our Lord's promise, that the Father will give the 
 Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. 
 
 It remains to say a word or two upon the inspiration of 
 the New Testament in its literary aspect. This (apart from 
 the words of Christ) consists of a simple record of events, 
 and of moral and theological teaching founded upon them, 
 mainly by one man, Saul of Tarsus. The first three Gos- 
 pels are remarkable for being the result of general, rather 
 than of individual, inspiration. The mind of the whole 
 Church seems to have formed the Synoptic Gospels as we 
 have them by an unconscious process of selection and ar- 
 rangement. And all the New Testament scriptures are 
 certainly alike in this, that they claim no power to 
 reveal or declare truths beyond the natural intelligence 
 of man. They do not give us to understand that they 
 were miraculously preserved from error in details ; and 
 St Luke, in particular, gives us a most natural matter-of- 
 fact account of the origin of his book. Neither do they 
 claim superhuman knowledge in matters of opinion. Once 
 more we must observe, that given the facts and the inspira- 
 tion follows. There is nothing that could not be said, and 
 would not naturally be said, by the men being what they 
 were concerning events being as they were believed to be. 
 All that is vital in Christian theology might almost be written 
 
320 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 now, if we preserve the historical basis of the life of Christ 
 as recorded in the four Gospels. But, once more taking an 
 instance, let us glance at St Paul's writings. Granted a man 
 of his nation, education, traditionary opinions, wonderful 
 conversion, distinctive belief as to what Christ had done, 
 and there is not a word in his letters and speeches which is 
 not in the highest degree natural, and divine just because 
 natural. He writes in total unconsciousness of supernatural 
 aid, though never ceasing to attribute all he said to the 
 Spirit of God. His mind grows in the apprehension of 
 spiritual, verities in exact agreement with the successive 
 experiences of his life. He falls into a most natural mis- 
 apprehension about the second coming of Christ, and shakes 
 himself free from it by degrees. He attempts no unapproach- 
 able subject of human thought, but is obliged to leave the 
 doctrine of Predestination as he found it a mystery. He 
 has no special revelation upon the subject of immortality 
 beyond the argument to be drawn- from the resurrection 
 of Christ, which he exhibits in strict logical form ; for the 
 rest he falls back on natural analogies, and upon arguments 
 common to all who have ever thought upon the subject. He 
 submits his statements to the test of reason, desires to be 
 judged in what he says, declines to be " lord over their 
 faith, " argues at great length where mere dogmatic asser- 
 tion would have sufficed. In short, he claims the authority 
 of a divinely-commissioned apostle, not of a supernaturally- 
 inspired oracle ; and in his reasonableness, freedom, reliance 
 upon facts, and conception of morality as the ultimate aim 
 of religion, is akin to all the healthiest instincts of human 
 nature. Some day modern scientific thought will wake up 
 to see what it owes to St Paul. 
 
 It is time to conclude, and yet I must be permitted a few 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 321 
 
 words more, if it be only to indicate how this theory of the 
 naturalness of Jewish and Scriptural inspiration enables us 
 to account for the difficulties or peculiarities we find in the 
 history or the book respectively. Thus we see why the 
 Jewswere so exclusively a religious people, and wereenabled 
 to produce, according to the flesh, the one entirely and 
 exclusively religious man whom the world has seen. It 
 was because the events in which they believed exercised a 
 controlling influence that intensified their thoughts in this 
 one direction. The same consideration enables us to see 
 why the Jewish religion has shown the greatest power of 
 self-propagation ; the facts gave it a missionary power akin 
 to that of positive science in these days. Again, we see 
 why it was at once retrospective, intermittent, and pro- 
 gressive. It was the former, because the mind of the people 
 recurred to revelations of old made once for all and incap- 
 able of destruction. If the promise of God to Abraham was 
 true 2000 years, say, before Christ, it is true 2000 years 
 after. It was the second, intermittent, because these revela- 
 tions appeared at long intervals, and rekindled the flames 
 of enthusiasm and the light of inspiration. And it was the 
 last, progressive, because the same God was from time to 
 time making fuller declarations of Himself, to mould their 
 character and guide their conduct. Hence it comes that 
 from the time of Abraham to the present day, Christianity 
 has, at all its great crises, created fresh points of departure 
 by going back to unfulfilled ideas, to revelations the mean- 
 ing of which had not been fully realised till time and ex- 
 perience made them manifest. Thus Moses strives to make 
 the people realise the Abrahamic covenant, but " adds the 
 
 law." Samuel clings to the old theocracy, but anoints a 
 
 X 
 
322 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 human king. Isaiah turns back to the glories of the reign 
 of David only to predict a more glorious Lord. Our Lord 
 fulfils the law ancl the prophets, and in so doing creates a 
 moral and spiritual and universal religion. St Paul claims 
 the Messiah for the Jews, but makes Christianity the re- 
 ligion of the Gentiles. Augustine derives his doctrines from 
 St Paul, and yet is the chief creator of mediaeval theology. 
 Luther is inspired by Augustine, but is also the founder of 
 Protestantism. And, finally, the new reformation will go 
 back to Luther for his method, his free spirit, his undaunted 
 disdain of authority, and yet will replace Protestantism by 
 the union of religion and science. 
 
 But that which above everything else must recommend 
 this theory to the minds of thinking persons is the fact, that 
 it enables us to understand, and therefore to defend, the 
 character and conduct of the heroes of Hebrew history. 
 Anything, of course, that makes human life more natural 
 and possible, makes the accounts which contain it easier 
 of acceptation. At the bottom of modern unbelief in the 
 historical truthfulness of the Bible lies the idea that theo- 
 logians have been bent on turning some of the greatest 
 men that ever lived into prodigies instead of human beings. 
 But once accept the belief that they were men " like our- 
 selves," who were compelled to reason out a line of con- 
 duct and a theory of duty from the contemplation of the 
 events that made up their national or individual history, 
 and which they accepted as coming from God, and in an 
 instant all Voltairian shafts of ridicule at their mistakes and 
 vices vanish into darkness. We can understand why deeds 
 and thoughts ascribed in their minds to the inspiration* of 
 God might be very defective if tried by the standard of 
 
The Inspiration of the Bible. 323 
 
 later morality. Religion is seen to be compatible with 
 failures in faith,. such as those of Abraham, Moses, and 
 Peter ; with fierce and even treacherous actions, such as 
 those of Joshua, Samuel, and Jael; with a certain unscru- 
 pulous tone of character (a common temptation of men who 
 feel intensely that God is on their side), such as we see in 
 Jacob, David, and faintly, perhaps, even in St Paul. Relig- 
 ious inspiration can, in short, only develop itself according to 
 the morality of the times and the character of the individuals 
 to whom it comes ; and religion, like every other faculty, 
 may ally itself with much of human weakness, imperfec- 
 tion, and even wickedness. It was, for instance, a religious 
 motive, pure and simple, that inspired Jael to kill Sisera, 
 and Deborah and Barak to sing her praises. And if these 
 words of praise were infused by direct action of God, then 
 is God the author of imperfection, which God forbid. At 
 the same time, I think it right to protest against the mere 
 sentimentality which shudders at deeds of this description 
 as outrageous breaches of ideal morality. I do not doubt 
 that, as science familiarises men's minds more and more 
 with the idea of the beneficent ruthlessness with which the 
 laws of nature do their work, we shall be more inclined to 
 see, first, that a certain ruthlessness of feeling naturally 
 accompanies an intense faith in what was then, in Jewish 
 belief, the one true religion ; secondly, that this feeling has 
 a definite part to play in the development of the race. A 
 religion that in its earlier stages presents the picture of 
 Joshua exterminating the Canaanites, or Samuel hewing 
 Agag to pieces before the Lord, cannot fairly be discredited 
 if these are shown to be parts of a natural development 
 that ended in Jesus Christ. 
 
324 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 I conclude with one other remark upon the natural affinity 
 between the spirit of science and the spirit of religion. It 
 is characteristic of all epochs of religious revival that men 
 discern the overwhelming power of God so absolutely that 
 all laws, events, words, and works are thought of as coming 
 from Him. The free agency of man is not necessarily denied, 
 but it is seen that this is not the thing to be insisted on ; 
 indeed, theological systems which display anxiety to secure 
 the doctrine of man's free-will, have always been, regarded 
 from the religious point of view, impotent and superficial. 
 They have been useful rather as checks and safeguards, and 
 yet even so have been apt to create those human devices, 
 whereby men, in the exercise of their freedom, seek to come 
 to terms with God. Now, as the next religious movement 
 (whatever it may be) will certainly derive its motive-power 
 from the spirit of science, it is interesting to point out that 
 the whole tendency of positive thought is to create 
 precisely that atmosphere of iron necessity and un- 
 changeable law, which, when translated into the language 
 of religion, will seem to men to mean the all-encompassing 
 will of God, " in whom we live, and move, and have our be- 
 ing." And the new reformation will be fairly started as a 
 revival of religion among the people by the man or men 
 who, filled with the inspiration of the presence of God in 
 nature and history, and fired by the passionate enthusiasm 
 of redeeming men from evil through suffering, submission, 
 and obedience, shall make God's overruling power the main- 
 spring of man's free action, and shall be able to reutter the 
 splendid paradox of St Paul, " Work out, therefore, your 
 own salvation with fear and trembling ; for it is God which 
 worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure." 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST AND 
 MODERN THOUGHT. 
 
 IT may be desirable to state at the outset in what sense 
 I use the words "modern thought," which I have 
 placed at the head of this essay, the more so as they are 
 synonymous with the word that has occurred so frequently, 
 science. I mean, then, the tendency or determination to 
 accept nothing as true except what is derived by strict 
 process of reasoning from facts that can be proved to exist. 
 Science, therefore, in the sense in which I have used it, 
 does not mean merely the investigation of natural or 
 material phenomena, but the application of the positive 
 method to all branches of human knowledge. And I 
 assume that all facts can be verified or ascertained by 
 sensible or indirect perception ; one fact alone excepted, 
 which forms the basis of all knowledge, is apprehended 
 immediately, and is beyond the reach of scientific analysis. 
 I mean, of course, the consciousness of one's self as a think- 
 ing, personal being. 
 
 Now there can be no question about which Christian 
 people are so naturally and strongly interested as to know 
 what they ought to think concerning the nature and person 
 of Him whom we call our Lord Jesus Christ. The facts 
 
326 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 upon which our opinion must be founded are fortunately 
 well known. They are comprised in a perfectly consistent 
 history of His life and actions, as to which no real doubt can 
 be entertained concerning the meaning and intention of the 
 writers. The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, 
 which are called supernatural, are just as distinctly realised 
 and as plainly narrated as His death and burial. Mythical 
 they may be, mystical they cannot be. It is open to any 
 one to argue that these facts are due to later legendary 
 accretions ; it is not open to any unprejudiced mind to say 
 that the writers meant to describe, or thought they were 
 describing, something else than plain historical facts. The 
 innate realism of the Jewish character triumphs over all 
 suspicions of this kind, and compels every candid inquirer 
 to confess that the Jews had at least an unusual, and upon 
 one view very inconvenient, faculty for clothing fiction in 
 the language of fact. 
 
 I wish, however, to observe once more, that having regard 
 to the present state .of the Christian Church, moral, theo- 
 logical, and ecclesiastical, and on the other hand to the 
 daily increasing pressure of the idea of unchangeable all- 
 enfolding law, we are not entitled to be surprised if a 
 growing number of minds take refuge in the mythical theory 
 of the origin of the Christian religion. Once more I must 
 repeat that it is by moral considerations alone that the 
 minds of men will be directed towards one of two possible 
 conclusions. Only I hope that whoever arrives at the 
 mythical conclusion will not tamper with the further con- 
 clusions that flow naturally from it. If a homely proverb 
 may be excused in so serious a matter, we cannot eat our 
 loaf and have it. We cannot retain Christianity and destroy 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 327 
 
 Christ : the faith that founds itself upon the purely human 
 name of Jesus has another, and that an ominous, meaning 
 in our minds. Let us honestly and avowedly cease to sub- 
 scribe ourselves, who live in the nineteenth century, by the 
 name of one who died 1800 years ago ; indeed the very 
 words " nineteenth century "are absurd. Let us not pretend 
 to speak of Christian art, civilisation, morality, legislation, 
 in honour of a man whose true history is wrapped up in 
 the obscurity of legendary fables. Let us not found a 
 religion upon the misreported or badly remembered sayings 
 attributed to one whose words as they stand are few, are 
 ex hypothesi full of error about himself, and probably 
 represent the mind of the original man about as closely as 
 the . present cathedral at York represents the original 
 church, vestiges of which are still seen at the foundation 
 of the present building. It is one of the blessings attached 
 to courageous thinking, that it puts alternatives clearly 
 before the minds of ordinary persons who would like to 
 spend their lives in saying that they believe one thing, and 
 acting as though they believed the contrary. To M. Comte 
 belongs the credit of having fairly faced the facts of the 
 case, and forced unwilling people to do the same. And M. 
 Renan, so far as he is critical and historical, has carried on 
 his countryman's work ; so far as he is sentimental and 
 religious, has done his best to overthrow it. 
 
 I do not mean it to be inferred that every event connected 
 with the life of Christ is of necessity to be accepted as 
 historically true. By the theory of inspiration maintained 
 in this volume we are relieved from any such obligation. 
 Doubtful circumstances may have crept in, and are to be 
 detected by the methods of historical criticism, without at 
 
328 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 all assuming that the supernatural cannot, as such, take 
 place. The coming of the Magi, the description of diabo- 
 lical possession, and the rising of many bodies of saints at 
 the Crucifixion may be adduced as instances that seem to 
 baffle reasonable explanation. For myself I can honestly 
 say that my own belief in the great events and general 
 tenor of His life would be greatly supported were a line 
 to be drawn between such narratives and the plain matter- 
 of-fact testimony to events of divine worth, intense moral 
 significance, and deep religious importance. If mythical 
 additions or the influence of Jewish modes of thought can 
 be traced in a few unimportant instances, such as the above, 
 all the more credit would then become due to the narratives 
 in which these could not be found. Here, as ever, reason- 
 ableness is the best intellectual, and candour the best moral, 
 support of truth. 
 
 Be this as it may, we are entitled to assume, until the 
 weight of evidence has proved the contrary, that the facts 
 of Christ's life happened as they are recorded. Among 
 these facts I do not include, as bearing upon our present 
 subject, the words that were spoken. Nothing can show 
 more clearly the baneful effects of attaching authori- 
 tative declarations to every word of Scripture than the 
 controversy concerning the nature of Christ. His own 
 words would indeed be relevant facts ; but, as might 
 have been expected, they disclose very little about His 
 essential being, and are capable of very varying explana- 
 tions. Language such as " My Father and I are one," is 
 paralleled by " My Father is greater than I." And apart 
 from His words, the controversy has been made to turn 
 upon chance expressions, rhetorical outbursts, the MS. 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 329 
 
 omission or insertion of a single stroke in a single letter, a 
 disputed reading, a doubtful punctuation. The evidence 
 is overwhelming to show that the apostles were compelled 
 to think out their conclusions as to their Master's person 
 from the facts of His life and character, or rather it would 
 be more true to say that they did not feel the necessity of 
 arriving at strict definitions at all. The words " Son of 
 God " expressed all that they required. When every fibre 
 was thrilling from their personal contact with the divine 
 life, they did not seek to analyse its composition or define 
 its nature. And if a question like this is to be decided by 
 minute investigation of phrases scattered here and there in 
 unconscious simplicity, then I feel sure that the divinity of 
 Christ will never remain, and could never have become, the 
 creed of Christendom. Happily, however, there is no need 
 to be restrained within such limits. We have the facts 
 before us as the apostles had. They have a meaning for 
 us if we scrutinise them patiently. They, and they alone, 
 can decide the question. As Christ Himself said in answer 
 to some doubting questioners, so may we say now, "Go, show 
 the world again those things which ye do hear and see." 
 
 This much, moreover, I must beg leave to add. How- 
 ever repugnant the application of scientific method to 
 religious matters may seem to some, it is high time that 
 not only the method but something of the spirit of science 
 were breathed into this controversy. What one hears all 
 around, mainly from the lips of accredited defenders of the 
 faith, is simply shocking to reverent minds. The person 
 of Christ is made the battle-field whereon some of the worst 
 of human passions hatred, contempt, schism, vituperation, 
 calumny are allowed to display themselves. His divinity 
 
33O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 must be " defended " as one would defend the honour of an 
 absent friend by challenging his assailant to fight a duel. 
 The Church is to stand or fall with the creed which deals 
 out everlasting perdition to those who do not indeed deny 
 the doctrine, but who do not profess to understand the 
 abstruse phraseology in which it is conveyed. The ark of 
 the covenant is indeed being carried into the camp with 
 great shouting, while humble Christians begin to weep and 
 say, " The glory of Israel has departed, for the ark of the 
 Lord is taken." 
 
 In order to show by an example what is the legitimate 
 effect of the scientific spirit upon theological controversies, 
 as well as to carry my argument a step further, I go on 
 to indicate the reason why different opinions concerning 
 the nature of Christ must of necessity arise, and why the 
 Catholic doctrine was sure, the conditions being what they 
 were, to prevail. Nothing so takes the venom out of con- 
 troversies as to show that opinions are natural growths, and 
 not, as men like to believe, the deliberate choice of a per- 
 verse and perverting mind. 
 
 What we find, then, is this, that Christians, while pro- 
 fessing to accept the same facts and acknowledge the 
 authority of the same books, have, notwithstanding, held the 
 most diverse views as to His essential nature. Some have 
 gone so far as to sink the human personality in the divine, and 
 have invented fables to support a belief which the historical 
 facts in no way warranted. Others, again, have denied 
 that Christ could, in any true sense of the word, be called 
 God, and have thought of Him as man, affirming that only 
 as perfect man, the realisation of humanity, could He be 
 realised in thought or regarded in history. Now this 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 33 1 
 
 difference of opinion results from the contrast or collision 
 of two thoughts which has appeared more than once in 
 these essays. On the one hand, men demand that human 
 life amongst the Jews should be rendered possible, human 
 nature respected, human experience taken into account ; 
 on the other hand, they have demanded with even greater 
 determination that the distinct and distinctive operations 
 of God towards man shall be preserved. These two 
 tendencies come to a head in the life of Christ. Every- 
 thing that is precious to humanity perishes if we regard 
 Him simply as God. Everything that is precious in the 
 personal love of God for man perishes if we regard Him 
 simply as created man. The difficulty meets us the 
 moment we begin to consider the wordings of His self- 
 consciousness, His motives, conduct, and teaching; and it 
 is one that can be got rid of only by a kind of moral 
 appreciation of the facts, and not by any dogmatic 
 formulae. 
 
 It is not, however, astonishing that the opinions of those 
 who leant more exclusively upon His divine nature should 
 have prevailed ; because, as the very office and rationale of 
 religion is to maintain the belief in God's personal dealings 
 with mankind, the divinity of Christ was seen to be essential 
 if this belief was to be retained. But, as might have been 
 expected from the infirmities of the human mind, every other 
 consideration was so entirely sacrificed to this predominant 
 necessity, that human nature, possibilities of life, common- 
 sense, and moral example have run no small risk of being 
 destroyed. Here is an instance. We frequently hear it 
 stated, at least I myself have often heard and seen it, 
 that as God Christ did something, while as man He did 
 
332 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 something else. No doubt this is the language of men of 
 ordinary intelligence, whose duty as preachers compels 
 them to turn abstract dogmas, the phraseology of which 
 they adopt without grasping the purely abstract meaning, 
 into practical thought and common language. I should 
 imagine that such an expression can hardly be within the 
 limits of technical orthodoxy (not that I am a judge of 
 such matters) ; but it is certainly in very common use, and 
 as certainly reduces the life of Christ to a moral and 
 spiritual dualism, as inconceivable as the fancies of pagan- 
 ism itself. Against this tendency, therefore, the other 
 school of thought has uttered an unceasing protest; and 
 it is well for religion that this protest has been made in 
 her name, and by Christian thinkers. Of late years, indeed, 
 the ideas represented by the more humanitarian school 
 have been planted in the very tissue of popular religion, 
 though the old beliefs as to the nature of Christ remain, 
 so far as religion is concerned, the same. The general 
 aspect, however, of this controversy in modern times may 
 be best surveyed by associating it with the name of one of 
 the foremost champions of the rights and needs of human 
 nature, the great and illustrious name of Channing. 
 
 There is hardly anything more striking in the history of 
 modern theology than the fact that Unitarianism, as held and 
 taught by Channing, has exercised comparatively so little 
 direct effect upon the world, and seems to be likely to 
 exercise less rather than more. His opinions on morality, 
 his view of human nature, his interpretation of Scripture, 
 his conception of God and of Christ, are, when tried by the 
 touchstone of modern thought, far away superior to any- 
 thing that can be found in theological writings during his 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 333 
 
 time, and seem to forestall much that has been said of late 
 years against the commonly accepted theology. And yet, 
 though successful in argument and devoted in life, he has 
 not founded any great school of thought, or left behind 
 him successors to carry forward to future generations the 
 legacy of wisdom and piety which he bequeathed to man- 
 kind. Unitarianism, as Channing taught it, is not a 
 progressive creed : even in America itself it would appear 
 that Theodore Parker is superseding him as a leader of 
 religious thought. Channing believed, as we know, in the 
 supernatural facts of Christ's life ; and, so far from stumbling 
 at miracles, hailed them as valuable, and indeed as essential 
 parts of religious truth. He was willing to call Christ the 
 Son of God, though objecting to call Him God the Son; 
 and while exposing with singular power, ingenuity, and 
 temper the inconsistencies of popular theology, bent his 
 whole genius to the task of finding for Unitarianism a firm 
 standing-ground and a definite work. But in spite of all 
 this, the tide of thought seems to have swept past him ; and 
 that which is most effective and powerful in Unitarian 
 theology is now in the hands of those who, by rejecting 
 the supernatural, are much more removed from the Unita- 
 rianism of Channing than he was from Trinitarianism itself. 
 Modern orthodoxy makes, of course, short work of this 
 remarkable fact. The spirit which causes the Pope to see 
 in liberal Catholicism his most hated enemies, finds many 
 representatives elsewhere. One of the most honoured of 
 modern English teachers speaks of Channing with a sigh 
 as being outside the Christian Church, while to the mass 
 of religious writers it is a matter for rejoicing that the 
 more orthodox form of Unitarianism seems to be vanishing 
 
334 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 from the world. It is as though, when an invading enemy 
 was upon English soil, the standing army should in a tran- 
 sport of professional fury fall upon the militia and 
 volunteers, and having destroyed them, or driven them to 
 take shelter within the enemy's lines, should then proceed, 
 proud of their victory, to confront the foe alone and 
 unaided. The time may come but too soon when the 
 doctrine and spirit of Channing will be sought for in vain 
 as a mediator, an interpreter, and a rationalising influence ; 
 and when men who, like him, have the spirit to refuse their 
 assent to dogmatic authority while founding their faith 
 firmly upon revealed facts, will be desired as the last hope 
 and best defence of a tottering creed. 
 
 If, then, this description of the case, as regards the 
 influence of Channing, be true, what is the cause of it ? 
 Why have his writings been so effective against Calvinism, 
 so ineffective against Trinitarianism ? The question must 
 surely occur to those who read that splendid array of logic, 
 illustration, eloquence, and devotion, " How is it that I am 
 not a Unitarian, and why has not this form of Unitarianism 
 become predominant ? " And yet there is no real temptation 
 to accept his creed ; so that upon further analysis the ques- 
 tion resolves itself into this, " There must be a good reason 
 for this state of things, let me discover it." This question 
 I propose to answer by an appeal, not to primitive antiquity, 
 but to modern thought. 
 
 In this discussion two things will be assumed. First, no 
 question will be raised as to the historical events of Christ's 
 life, which Channing, no less than his most orthodox 
 opponents, fully accepted. Second, no question will be 
 raised as to the moral attributes of God or His relations 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 335 
 
 towards mankind. With Channing we take for granted that 
 these attributes are the same in kind as we find in ourselves, 
 and are absolutely and not relatively true ; and further, 
 that God stands to all men in the relation of a Father. 
 But the question, whether it is more consonant with fact 
 and reason to speak of Christ as divine or as entirely 
 human, must be decided by considerations that have to do 
 with the essential nature of God and the modes of His ex- 
 istence. And thus another controversy which has appeared 
 throughout these essays once more comes before us, and 
 will require fuller consideration than we have yet given 
 it. 
 
 From almost the dawn of thought men have occupied 
 themselves in the attempt to frame mental conceptions of 
 the unknown God, to whose existence the very conditions 
 of human thought and human nature bear testimony. 
 They framed a number of expressions such as Absolute, 
 Omnipotence, Perfection, Infinite, Eternal to describe the 
 conceptions to which they thought they had attained. One 
 nation, however, there was that never embarked on this 
 hazardous undertaking, and that nation was the Jews. 
 They assumed the existence of God because they believed 
 that He had made Himself known to their fathers in 
 actions of mercy, justice, and redemption. Their ideas of 
 God were not metaphysical that is, derived from the 
 laborious investigation of their own minds ; but historical 
 that is, based upon a series of events which, if true, revealed 
 to them His character and purposes. The problems which 
 exercised the minds of Gentile philosophers were never so 
 much as presented to the Jewish people till the captivity. 
 The moral difficulties, indeed, which are inherent in the 
 
336 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 relations between God and man, find ample expression, 
 especially in the book of Job ; but such a question as 
 " Canst thou by searching find out God ? " applies to His 
 operations in nature and His dealings with man, and does 
 not touch the essential modes of His existence. The 
 people who believed in the God of Abraham and Moses, and 
 whose very national existence was due to His special 
 providence, revealed in events of the highest moral signi- 
 ficance, could not and did not concern themselves with 
 speculations which are to other men not merely inevitable 
 but of surpassing interest. The fact and the cause of it are 
 both abundantly evident. 
 
 Between the captivity and the coming of Christ there 
 are, indeed, traces of the growth of the doctrine which 
 culminated in St John's description of Christ as the Word. 
 This is well known, and I need not enlarge upon it further 
 than to remark that it was essentially historical and not 
 metaphysical. Wisdom, already personified in the Book of 
 Proverbs, becomes in later apocryphal books more and more 
 separated from God himself. It was poured upon His 
 works, was created from the beginning, is the splendour of 
 the eternal light, is, so think some authorities, regarded 
 dogmatically as a different Person. This is in full accord 
 with the spirit of Jewish thought and finds its fulfilment in 
 the New Testament : it is merely the play of the intellect 
 upon facts in a more abstract and subtle fashion than was 
 possible in earlier days. But, side by side with this, the 
 Jewish mind became largely imbued with foreign elements, 
 and I am tempted to think that the growing predominance 
 of metaphysical speculations had done its part in withdraw- 
 ing the idea of a living personal God from the heart of the 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 337 
 
 people, and had created that atmosphere of worldliness 
 tempered by superstition which Christ found at His coming. 
 At any rate this is true, that He remained faithful to all the 
 best traditions of His people. No metaphysical notions 
 are permitted to darken the perfect moral splendour of His 
 picture of God as the Father, as perfect love, justice, and 
 goodness. His one authoritative declaration about the 
 nature of God is, as we have seen, that He is a Personal 
 Being God is a Spirit ; and when He is asked, in the very 
 spirit of intellectual curiosity, " Show us the Father," His 
 answer, " Have I been so long with you, and hast thou not 
 known me, Philip ? " is conclusive evidence that, in His 
 opinion, the only knowledge of God possible to man must 
 be derived from a moral manifestation of the divine Person- 
 ality in history. 
 
 The apostles carried on the same idea. In one of the 
 latest of St Paul's epistles, written in the fulness of experi- 
 ence, and with that sense of the limitation of human facul- 
 ties which is only realised in old age, he speaks thus 
 (i Tim. vi. 16), "Who only hath immortality, dwelling in 
 the light which no man can approach unto ; whom no man 
 hath seen, nor can see." Let us note how exactly this 
 conclusion represents the truth which is veiled in the narra- 
 tive of the communion of Moses with God in Exodus xxxiii. 
 12-23. " Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man 
 see my face and live," might be quite accurately expressed 
 in the phraseology of modern thought thus, " No man can 
 form positive conceptions of the nature of God without 
 transcending the conditions of human thought." But 
 though His glory might not be seen, yet He says, " I will 
 make all my goodness to pass before thee, and I will pro- 
 
338 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 claim the name of the Lord before thee, and will be gracious 
 unto whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on 
 whom I will show mercy." That is to say, we have here 
 that idea of the manifestation of the character of the 
 unknown God by deeds of mercy in history which St John, 
 the last of Jewish theologians, summed up in his doctrine 
 of the Word that was made flesh. A light had been shin- 
 ing all along in the hearts of men which had at last become 
 man that the glory of God might be revealed as full of 
 grace and truth. This, too, is the invariable view of his 
 epistles in which God is described exclusively as a moral 
 Being revealed in the works which He had done. " God is 
 light." " God is love." "Hereby we perceive the love of God, 
 because He laid down His life for us." " And we know that 
 the Son of God is come and hath given us an understand- 
 ing that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him 
 that is true, even in His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the 
 true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves 
 from idols." 
 
 When next the curtain of history opens wide upon the 
 Christian Church, it discloses her in the act of setting up 
 some of the idols against which St John had warned his 
 readers, and which still retain a place in the mind of 
 Christianity, waiting till some modern Hezekiah shall 
 break them in pieces, calling them, as befits words spoken 
 without charity, " sounding brass." For in some sort the 
 worst of all idols are the idols formed by the mind. The 
 mere image of wood and stone carries its own ultimate 
 confutation written upon its passive face and helpless limbs. 
 But the images evolved from the mind, the abstractions, 
 not of thought, but of the negation of thinking, appeal to 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 339 
 
 the minds of even wise men, and hedge themselves in with 
 a kind of divinity that belongs to the intangible, the 
 mysterious, and the unintelligible. Catholic theology from 
 the date, say, of the Nicene Council is mainly the result of 
 Greek philosophy exercising itself upon Hebrew facts. If 
 ever there was an idol in the world it is the word O/JLOVOVO-IOV 
 in the Nicene Creed. If, indeed, it be granted that the 
 question of the essential relations between the Father and 
 the Son must by the necessity of the case have been raised, 
 then this word may be accepted as conveying a relative 
 truth to the minds of men at that time : that it conveys 
 any positive truth to us now, the very conditions of human 
 thought compel us to deny. It is a confession of ignorance 
 in terms that have been consecrated, as it were, by long 
 historical usage, and as such I accept it. Indeed we 
 may discern the will of God in it exactly as we may dis- 
 cern the same will in the brazen serpent which Moses was 
 commissioned to place before the eyes of the people, and 
 Hezekiah was equally commissioned in the fulness of time 
 to break in pieces. Of all vain things in the world, 
 lamentations over the course of history, and of history that 
 has lasted over 1500 years, are the most useless; and 
 speculations as to what would have happened if some 
 crisis or other had turned out differently, the most futile 
 and misleading. 
 
 But none the less is it incumbent upon us to insist that 
 the intrusion of abstract speculations into theology, after 
 running its course of 1000 years for good and for evil, 
 ended in the withdrawal first of God and then of Christ as 
 moral and spiritual Powers from the hearts of men and 
 from the life of humanity. Coincident with the decay of 
 
34-O Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 metaphysical speculation came the Reformation with its 
 appeal to morality, and its resolute attempt to enshrine 
 the Saviour as personal King of man. Between the last of 
 the Schoolmen and the first of the Cartesians lies the period 
 during which religion became once more a pressing reality, 
 an intense moral power, a teacher and leader of men. 
 Men brought into contact with forgotten facts of humanity 
 and history were too much in earnest about the character 
 of a living God to discuss the nature of the absolute or the 
 infinite they had lost their taste for inquiry into things 
 that could only be expressed by the use of abstract 
 adjectives. But by the nature of the case the escape was 
 transitory and imperfect, and the old slavery recommenced 
 from the time that Descartes announced that he had a clear 
 mental conception of God, and that this conception was the 
 one substantial proof of His existence. The founder of all 
 true modern psychology is also the founder of false modern 
 ontology the time had not yet come when the two could 
 be dissevered. And in the sphere of religion this teaching 
 prevailed, while beaten in every other field of knowledge. 
 The philosophers were determined to have a God whom 
 they could understand and reason about indeed this was 
 to most of them the main object of His existence. If they 
 could not discover Him for themselves, they would have none 
 of Him, and yet when discovered all interest in Him there 
 and then ceased. No doubt a strong protest was always 
 raised within the ranks of philosophy itself. Locke main- 
 tained that men could not know substance, Berkeley 
 confessed that he had no notion of spirit. But on the 
 whole the theologians went against them, and through 
 them the popular belief in the minds of men remained, that 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought, 341 
 
 the words which described the being of God conveyed a 
 definite meaning to their understanding, and expressed 
 truths vital to the existence of religion itself. 
 
 Here, then, we have the explanation of the phenomenon 
 (at all times interesting), why the man who had the best of 
 the argument got the worst of the battle. Channing and 
 his opponents both accepted as their major premise the 
 belief that they could form a real conception of the nature 
 of God by what is very improperly called natural religion. 
 From this premise Channing arguing rightly came of 
 necessity to a wrong conclusion, while his opponents 
 arguing wrongly chanced upon a right one ; or rather were 
 saved from error by their adherence to the traditionary 
 faith no less than to that fundamental idea of religion 
 which consists in the belief that God communicates 
 with man. The faith proved much stronger than its 
 defenders, the idea did not perish in their embrace. No 
 one, I think, who reads Channing's arguments, can gainsay 
 their truth, if the premise be granted as it was. From 
 God, thus believed to be known, he was compelled to say 
 that Christ was separate, and that if reason were allowed to 
 judge His person, life, and words, then He was not of the 
 " same substance " as the eternal God. Moreover, he was 
 greatly aided by his exposure of the perverted morality 
 of Calvinistic theology, which, in order to prove our Lord's 
 divinity, had resorted to such propositions as this, that sin 
 being infinite requires infinite suffering as an atonement. 
 (This use of the word " infinite " is an excellent illustration 
 of the fundamental error.) In short, if the choice lay 
 between the reasoning of Channing and that of his 
 opponents, between his views of Christ's character and 
 
342 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 person, and those of modern defenders of His divinity, I 
 see no escape from the conclusion to which Channing 
 came ; except, indeed, by blind submission to some 
 authority selected to suit our own opinions. 
 
 But what if the premise be false ? The dawning con- 
 viction in the minds of metaphysicians that their proposi- 
 tions were unthinkable, which was expressed with so much 
 vigour by Sir W. Hamilton, was coincident with the 
 advent of positive philosophy, as the ultimate outcome of 
 scientific thought. All knowledge was seen to be derived 
 from facts by process of reason ; nothing else deserved the 
 name. We can have no true conception of the unknown God, 
 nor can we affix positive ideas to the negative terms under 
 which we are compelled to speak of His essential nature. 
 God is that tendency or stream of things which we perceive, 
 but cannot understand. And thus the whole position is 
 reversed. Channing's argument ran thus : " I have a true 
 conception of the nature of God ; but (the facts being 
 granted) Christ was distinctly separable from the person- 
 ality of God, and inferior to Him, therefore He must be 
 described as a different Being, nor must we be allowed to 
 escape from the conclusions of reason by taking refuge in 
 verbal mystifications." But the reply is : " No one can 
 have so clear a conception of the nature of God as to be 
 enabled to found an argument upon it. We can, on the 
 other hand, form a clear and adequate notion of man ; but 
 (the facts being granted) Christ was distinguished from 
 man in origin, character, and destiny ; therefore it is right 
 to call Him divine, and impossible to separate Him from 
 God." Thus, then, the traditionary belief was seen to be 
 in harmony with the methods of modern reasoning, and so 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 343 
 
 far as the logical position is concerned, the decision goes 
 against the man whose honesty forbade him to reach true 
 conclusions by erroneous arguments. 
 
 But logic is not everything is indeed in religion very often 
 a very poor thing indeed. And to stop at this point would 
 be to lay ourselves open to a protest, that I for one feel to 
 be quite unanswerable if only from its mere indignant 
 authoritativeness. " This," it will be said, " is only the old 
 puzzle. Man's ignorance is made the basis of belief and 
 the reason for his submission to any dogma that promises 
 to enlighten him. He is reduced to bewilderment after a 
 fashion well known in dogmatic quarters by a series of 
 intellectual dilemmas, from which his tormentor at last 
 prescribes a way of escape, that, whatever else it may do, 
 results in the ecclesiastical aggrandisement of some one. 
 Besides, facts are fruitful, fertilising, suggestive, yet here 
 they are used for the bare purpose of driving an opponent 
 into a logical trap. The doctrine of the unknowable may 
 prove Channing to be wrong ; but it does not prove any one 
 else to be right in any satisfactory, edifying, saving sense." 
 With the tone of all this I thoroughly concur, nor would 
 this essay have been written if the negative conclusion, 
 above arrived at, were all that is to be desired or hoped 
 for. Absolutely true, and absolutely essential, I believe it 
 to be, but only by way of preparation for something more 
 real and more useful. What this is I now proceed to 
 inquire. 
 
 I. It is evident that although men can form no positive 
 conception of the Unconditioned (I use this word as being 
 the most general, and as the only one which does not 
 beg some question or other), yet they have no difficulty in 
 
344 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 imagining beings, agencies, actions, and manifestations of 
 power, which are superior to natural or human conditions. 
 Cases in point are fairy tales, story-books, religious myths, 
 and that disagreeable class of literature in which men seek 
 to ventilate their opinions under the fiction of future times, 
 strange places, or marvellous agencies. I have, for instance, 
 no difficulty in imagining a being who, for all I know, came 
 into existence one moment and the next ceased to be by 
 his own volition ; who could, by the same volition, overrule 
 all natural laws ; who could so far transcend the conditions 
 of space and time, as to be able to place me in a moment 
 in the planet Jupiter, or tell me what would happen a 
 hundred years hence. The Unconditioned is unthinkable, 
 but the Unconditioned, manifested within my experience as 
 superior to the conditions which my experience imposes, 
 is not unthinkable, and therefore not impossible : for what- 
 soever may be conceived in the mind, may happen in fact. 
 The most outrageous miracle is not impossible per se, 
 though it is incapable of verification to minds that have 
 learnt from experience the truth and order of things. In 
 all this I mean no more than what I understand Professor 
 Tyndall to have meant by his assertion, that alteration of 
 physical laws in answer to prayer is not per se impossible, 
 though not even an attempt has been, or can be made, to 
 verify it. 
 
 2. The belief that some such manifestation of the 
 Unconditioned has taken place, is common to every system 
 of religion, and forms, therefore, the one distinctive religious 
 element in human nature. Such manifestation may be 
 made so men have believed either to the senses or the 
 intellect ; perhaps the word " presentation " might express 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 345 
 
 my meaning better. Here, however, we get upon hotly 
 contested ground, and are exposed to strong antagonisms. 
 To take the most representative of these, Mr Herbert 
 Spencer maintains that the element underlying all reli- 
 gions is the recognition that the unknowable exists. This, 
 to speak with the candour which is the surest token of 
 respect, is a demonstrable error. The word religion is in 
 fact tacitly defined at the outset, so as to mean this and 
 nothing more. But the recognition of the existence of the 
 unknowable, though common to all religious systems, does 
 not differentiate religion itself from other things in which 
 the same recognition is equally apparent. It belongs to 
 man, not because he is religious, but because he is human. 
 Science, philosophy, common-sense, even art, with wistful 
 gaze towards unattainable beauty, proclaim the same ; the 
 first more distinctly than the rest. One need not, therefore, 
 be religious in any possible sense which that word can bear 
 to know that there is the unknowable. 
 
 No doubt and from this the mistake has arisen the 
 relations of religion to the unknown are entirely different 
 from those of science. The latter accepts the fact, and then 
 ceases to be interested in it. But every system of religion 
 has this groundwork of belief in common that, as I have 
 said, the Unconditioned has come within human experience 
 in such a way as to show that it is not limited by those 
 conditions which experience imposes upon man and nature. 
 I am very well aware of the difficulty of finding words to 
 express this truth accurately. It is comparatively easy to 
 state adequately an abstract generalisation, but to make a 
 statement which shall express the truth about a vast num- 
 ber of concrete facts, taxes the resources of language much 
 
346 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 more severely. Still I think the meaning of this remark 
 is plain enough plain and true. Take, for instance, two 
 widely different systems of religion. The savage believes 
 that his idol can grant his prayers by methods above the 
 power and perception of man. The Pantheist believes that 
 God is immanent in the universe by modes of existence 
 which transcend knowledge. Take immortality. The Red 
 Indian believes that Paradise in the shape of a happy 
 hunting-ground will fall to his personal share after death. 
 The -Buddhist hopes or hoped for a personal annihilation 
 after death, concerning which, nevertheless, thought refuses 
 to think. And all the array of religious systems that lies 
 between these two poles agrees in believing that the Un- 
 known God has had, is having, or will have, direct relations 
 with mankind, and has existed and operated within human 
 experience by transcendental unconditioned modes of being 
 and doing. Limitations in such manifestation no doubt 
 there are, but they are imposed by the conditions which 
 belong to the human faculties, and not to the Being who 
 is declared in and by the manifestation itself to be superior 
 to any conceivable limitations whatsoever. 
 
 3. This element, then, that is common to all religions, 
 rescues religion itself from the mere passive helplessness 
 which is the only intelligible result of a bare recognition of 
 the existence of the unknowable ; and to the science of 
 religion belongs the work of comparing the various facts or 
 modes in which men have believed that the Unconditioned 
 has been manifested to experience. Such comparison is 
 foreign to the purposes of this essay ; it is enough to re- 
 mark that if any religion be true in a sense in which others 
 are not, then by common confession Christianity must be 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 347 
 
 that one. But assuming, as I have done throughout, the 
 truth of the facts, we proceed naturally to inquire, 
 Do they give, when examined, a worthy, reasonable, and 
 morally useful idea of the manifestations of the Uncondi- 
 tioned ? And with special reference to the subject of this 
 essay, Do they entitle us to speak of Christ as divine, 
 for the simple reason that His life and person enable us to 
 attain a positive, though partial, conception of those nega- 
 tive ideas of God, which the mind of man has been con- 
 strained to form ? Let us try, if not to answer this, to 
 offer suggestions which may set people thinking in this 
 direction. They shall be very brief, as become sugges- 
 tions. 
 
 The Christian religion asserts, that in their inmost essen- 
 tial nature God and man are the same. " Man made in 
 the image of God " is the root of all Scriptural teaching, 
 just as the Personality of God is its crown. " God is a 
 Spirit." To be conscious of self as a Personal Being is the 
 ultimate definition of man and of God ; it is the point 
 where the divine and human become coincident. Modes of 
 existence, conditions of action, relations of mind and mat- 
 ter all these may be different, without so much as touch- 
 ing the essential identity of nature. Hence there is no 
 difficulty in conceiving that the divine and human may co- 
 exist in One Person. To this truth the best instincts of 
 Paganism bore emphatic witness. 
 
 It is always a strong presumption in favour of any 
 doctrine, if it enables us to interpret hard sayings that have 
 hitherto defied explanation. A case in point is afforded by 
 some very remarkable words of our Lord's in answer to the 
 Jewish accusation of blasphemy, "Thou, being a man,makest 
 
348 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 thyself God." He answers, " Is it not written in your law, 
 I said, Ye are gods ? If he called them gods unto whom 
 the word of God came (and the scripture cannot be broken), 
 say ye of Him whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent 
 into the world, Thou blasphemest, because I said I am 
 the Son of God." No commentary that I have yet seen has 
 done justice to the force of this deep saying ; none, indeed, 
 has succeeded in rescuing the argument from a certain ap- 
 pearance of being a play upon words; but read in the light 
 of the truth above stated it becomes clear enough. An 
 instinct had taught the Psalmist that they must be in some 
 sense gods with whom God could hold spiritual communion, 
 " to whom His word came ; " possibility of personal inter- 
 course implies some community or likeness of nature. 
 Hence it was no blasphemy to assert that as God had sent 
 men into the world by what we call natural laws, so had He 
 sent His Son by special " sanctifi cation." If the fact of this 
 sending be true, there is no difficulty in the inference, and 
 no blasphemy in the statement that Christ was God. But 
 it must be observed how definitely He adheres to that form 
 of words in which alone these truths can be expressed within 
 the limit of human thought He is the Son of God. We 
 are thus, moreover, enabled to see that the solemn assertion, 
 " the Scripture cannot be broken," implies that there is a 
 real substantial meaning in these lofty prophetic phrases 
 which is not to be dismissed, more commentatorum, as an 
 illustration or an argument from the less to the greater or 
 by similar unsatisfactory devices. 
 
 Jesus Christ, then, is One Person, and so saying we ex- 
 press our simplest conception of God and man. But the 
 question now arises, " Was the Personality manifested as 
 
'The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 349 
 
 both human and divine ? " So far as the first is concerned, 
 it would not, I suppose, be denied that Christ was subject 
 to all the relations and displayed all the qualities that make 
 up our definition of the essential nature of man. So far as 
 the second is concerned, we are now to inquire whether He 
 displayed that independence of human or natural conditions 
 under which the mind of man has always thought of God. 
 If He did, then ideas of God, hitherto merely negative and 
 unthinkable, become positive and cognisable. 
 
 Let us take five of these ideas and set against them five 
 facts of His life. The ideas are these: The absolute or 
 independence of causation ; perfection or independence of 
 evil ; omnipotence or independence of law ; the infinite or 
 independence of space ; the eternal or independence of 
 time. The facts are these : His Incarnation, Death, 
 Resurrection, Ascension, and Mission of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 i. The Incarnation presupposes prior existence. By 
 this assertion we are by no means driven to take part in 
 the unscientific subtleties of Arian speculations. To the 
 dogma, " There was a time when the Son of God was not," 
 we oppose, not another dogma, but the truth that all such 
 propositions, as lying beyond experience, are unthinkable. 
 But prior existence, an existence lying outside creation as 
 we know it, a coming into the world by an exercise of self- 
 determination, \sfor z^the same as divine self-existence. It 
 gives a positive conception to our negative idea conveyed 
 in the word absolute, because it is not related to any cause 
 with which we are or can be acquainted. 
 
 Again, the Incarnation asserts that likeness of nature 
 between God and man which we are thus enabled to express 
 in the language of facts. God and man are spiritual beings in 
 
350 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 the sense in which that word has been defined above. But 
 spirit or self-conscious thought is allied in man to a number 
 of conditions and limitations which he inherits as man, and 
 which make him what he knows himself to be a being 
 conscious of the divine and yet an animal. Christ, on the 
 other hand, is represented to us as pure spirit, joined to a 
 sinless body. He was like God, because His Spirit wrought 
 perfectly and without hindrance the things which He set 
 Himself to do i.e., a life of absolute duty in fashion as a 
 man. Spirit absolutely able to accomplish what is best 
 as it pleases this is God. Spirit striving to accomplish 
 what is best through the medium of an imperfect (because 
 perishable) bodily organisation this is man. Spirit 
 succeeding in accomplishing what is best through a perfect 
 (because incorruptible) bodily organisation this is God 
 and man, one Person, Jesus Christ. 
 
 Thus the Incarnation is seen to lie at the root of all 
 rational conceptions of the life and character of Christ, if, 
 that is, we accept as true such facts as His sinlessness or His 
 Resurrection. To believe that Christ was sinless, and yet 
 in His origin purely human, is to believe not in a miracle, 
 but in a monstrous prodigy it is to believe that God will 
 break His own laws, do violence to the reason which He has 
 implanted in man, and become the author of irremediable 
 confusion. The sinlessness of Christ being granted, or the 
 Resurrection accepted, then the mind of man demands to 
 know the cause that has set aside the laws of causation as he 
 knows them. To this reasonable demand the Incarnation 
 affords an adequate reply. 
 
 2. We are thus enabled to advance a step further and 
 obtain some positive idea of that moral perfection which we 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 351 
 
 associate with God. Being in His origin free from the 
 " environment " which is the natural condition of every man 
 by virtue of his birth, He was able to overcome the evil 
 that belongs to man's environment as constituting the ex- 
 perience of individuals. The follies of theology must not 
 blind us to the real distinction there is between the evil that 
 we inherit and the evil that we accumulate. Now, the life 
 of Christ was an exhibition of moral perfection. His spirit 
 conceived rightly of duty, willed perfectly to accomplish it, 
 and bound the body to its sway. This perfection was fully 
 displayed by His death, in which we see the crowning power 
 of goodness the self-sacrifice of God for man. This, in- 
 deed, is our highest conception of goodness the self-con- 
 scious personality discarding all personal considerations in 
 order to fulfil the will that is, to act up to the character 
 of God. 
 
 Nevertheless, I am constrained to add that the essential 
 nature of perfect goodness seems to me to be as much 
 beyond our knowledge as self-existence or the infinite. 
 The death of Christ appears to me just as essentially 
 miraculous as His resurrection, because perfect goodness is 
 beyond our experience as much as immortality or omni- 
 potence. Every separate trait in His character we may 
 imagine ; its love, purity, justice, and sincerity, are all such 
 as we know them in ourselves, they fire our souls with un- 
 extinguishable sympathy and adoration. But the character 
 itself, the harmonious combination in a divine unity of those 
 attributes which we are compelled to regard as separate, must 
 transcend the power of thought, and thus His character, 
 no less than His personality or His deeds, is seen to be 
 essentially divine. It is that which we desire to approach 
 
352 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 unto ; the spirit of which may enter into us and draw us up 
 through countless ages to itself, while yet the imperfect 
 the spirit that has once sinned never becomes perfect, as, 
 indeed, we do not understand how it could without the loss 
 of historical self-consciousness. So, then, our idea of per- 
 fection is also seen to be negative, to consist, that is, in the 
 absence of the conditions of evil. And Christ Himself ex- 
 pressly claimed to manifest to man's experience and judg- 
 ment that independence of evil which we attribute to God. 
 For when He desired to give proof drawn from His own 
 character of the fact that He had "proceeded forth and 
 come from God," He does not positively assert his own per- 
 fection, but asks negatively, " Which of you convinceth me 
 of sin ?" To sum up, then : our conception of God is that of 
 freedom from evil, our experience of man testifies to His 
 imperfection ; therefore is Christ, " who did no sin/' divine. 
 I digress at this point for a moment in order to deal with 
 a difficult question. It has been asked, In what way speci- 
 fically does the character of Christ differ from that of other 
 men, so as to make it that spiritual influence which it has 
 undoubtedly become ? Very curious answers, indeed, have 
 been returned by representatives of various schools of 
 thought. We can hardly attribute it to mere intellectual 
 perfection, when we remember that upon almost all the 
 chief objects of human thought He remained entirely silent. 
 Moral perfection, in the sense of negative sinlessness, is not 
 enough to satisfy man's cravings for perfection, or to account 
 for His all-absorbing influence upon humanity. My own 
 impression is, that the peculiarity and significance of His 
 character may be explained as consisting in the fact that, 
 as the Jews among nations, so He among men was religious 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 353 
 
 to the exclusion of all other motives, faculties, or sources of 
 inspiration. In Him the religious faculty swallowed up 
 every other mental power. He was possessed by the divine 
 to a degree that no other man has ever yet approached, 
 and yet religion was in Him absolutely subservient to, or 
 rather identical with, the interests of morality and humanity. 
 Thus duty to Caesar was part of duty to God. Flowers 
 of the field bore testimony to His gracious care. The 
 stones of the temple suggested the coming divine judgment 
 upon the Jews. Natural objects, social relations, were 
 parables of divine government. Social life did but present 
 opportunities for declaring His Father's will. Every sense, 
 every faculty, every thought, every wish, was, so the history 
 tells us, absorbed in His religious feelings towards God. 
 It was not because He thought wisely or truly of philo- 
 sophy, art, politics, or literature, but because He did not 
 think of them at all apart from God, that His character has 
 been stamped as unique in history, and has been for eighteen 
 centuries, and seems destined to remain for ever, the one 
 religious force by which humanity is impelled. It need 
 not be added that this peculiarity accords well with the 
 belief that He was conscious of a special relation towards 
 God different from that of other men. 
 
 3. Divine perfection necessitates divine omnipotence and 
 also explains it. We may define it again negatively 
 as the spirit working out its will without hindrance from 
 bodily organisation or material surroundings. And this is 
 just the idea presented to us by the miracles of Christ. In 
 His conflict with evil, in His redeeming labours, in the 
 accomplishment of the purpose that lay before Him, nothing 
 prevented Him from doing what He pleased. " No man 
 took His life from Him " against His will. The exact point 
 
354 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 is brought out in His answer to the father of the demoniac 
 boy, whose words, " if thou canst do anything," appeared to 
 throw a doubt upon His power to help. His answer 
 amounts to this, " The question is, Canst thou believe ? 
 there is no question as to my power. All things are pos- 
 sible to him that believes, but faithlessness in thee may pre- 
 vent the cure, not because my power is limited, but because 
 its exercise would then cease to be morally beneficial " 
 (St Mark vi. 5). The other side of His omnipotence is 
 brought out in His assertion, that if they could by so much 
 as a grain of faith appropriate the mind and will of God, no 
 material obstacles could prejudice their work ; the mountain 
 would at their command be removed and cast into the sea. 
 Here, again, though the mere form of words sounds hyper- 
 bolical, a simple and intelligible thought is expressed in them. 
 But, on the other hand, His omnipotence did not interfere 
 with the conditions of His human nature. He might be 
 hungry, thirsty, tired, and mistaken * for instance, in the 
 fig-tree. But these limitations, again, did not prevent, but 
 rather co-operated with the work He had to do. He had 
 what may be called a human omnipotence, displaying 
 itself, that is, under human conditions, in an absolute power 
 to do own His special work in His own way, without 
 restraint or interruption. And thus the Resurrection comes 
 in to crown His life and works. He conquered death by 
 
 * It may be well to notice here the reasonable objection, that if Christ was 
 omniscient, He must have been so unlike mankind as to make His life unnatural 
 and His character useless as an example. The answer is, that judging from 
 the history, His knowledge was limited by the usual conditions of human 
 experience, of which, however, His own special birth formed part. The only 
 exceptions seem to be the two or three occasions on which He was elevated to 
 superhuman knowledge in order to carry on His beneficent work towards in- 
 dividuals for instance, the woman of Samaria. And if the question be asked, 
 Must He not, as divine, have known all things? I answer these weari- 
 some puzzles by another just as irrational, Being divine, cannot He be all things, 
 and therefore limited in point of knowledge by voluntary self-surrender ? 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 355 
 
 dying. No conception that we can form of omnipotent 
 power is higher or more complete than of One who triumphed 
 over His own death. And this He expressly claimed for 
 Himself : " I have power to lay my life down and power to 
 take it again." Here, therefore, we have once more one of 
 our negative ideas of God brought within historical experi- 
 ence, and right reason teaches us that He who could die 
 and rise again is divine. 
 
 4. When we speak of God as an Infinite Being, the only 
 conception (once more negative) that we can attach to such a 
 statement seems to be that His spiritual influence is not 
 limited by any conditions of place. He can and does exert 
 His power everywhere at the same time. Now during the 
 life of Christ no such superiority to the ordinary conditions 
 of space is to be discovered. By this I mean that He could 
 only hold communication with other persons by (so to 
 speak) local intercourse. He was obliged to see and hear 
 and ask questions. But the series of appearances after 
 His resurrection present Him to us as placed in immediate 
 communication with His disciples by means quite inde- 
 pendent of the laws which govern the communications of 
 man with man. Space no longer exists for Him as able to 
 control His movements. The Ascension is the crown of 
 these appearances; and whether we attach the idea of 
 Infinity especially to this event or not, this at least is certain, 
 that all Christians are able to believe that Christ in actual 
 personality, as He lived on earth, is with them, may be 
 spoken to in prayer and worshipped in praise. True 
 Christian feeling will, I think, rather impel us to pray to 
 God in, as it were, the presence of Christ, feeling His pro- 
 tecting, mediating power. Certainly any petitions which 
 separate Christ from the Father are false and pernicious. 
 
356 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 On the other hand, to believe that we may draw near to the 
 Infinite Son of God, just as friends, disciples, mourners, and 
 sufferers drew near to Him during His finite life on earth, 
 is of the very essence of the Christian religion, and enables 
 us to realise His promise, " Lo, I am with you always, even 
 unto the end of the world." 
 
 5. Space and time are so closely allied to each other as 
 modes of consciousness, that it is only by a somewhat 
 artificial arrangement that we can so far separate them as 
 to attach the idea of eternity especially to the coming of 
 the Holy Ghost. Still there is a real meaning in the union 
 of the idea and the fact. No merely human spirit can as a 
 mere matter of fact exert its power over other spirits except 
 for a limited time after death. In any case it cannot be 
 transmitted as a personal influence beyond the number of 
 those to whom the person when alive was known. No 
 matter how strongly a person may have impressed others 
 during his life, a few fading memories are all that remain 
 after death. With Christ the reverse is true. His spiritual 
 influence upon earth was transient and, judged by results, 
 unsuccessful. This He recognised in words, such as, " It is 
 expedient that I go away," or, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw 
 all men unto me." Being then lifted up, the power of His 
 Spirit becomes universal, eternal, missionary. It descends 
 from man to man through man. The Spirit that came at 
 Pentecost has in most simple, literal fact " taken of" 
 Christ's life and character, and revealed it to generation 
 after generation. Like some mighty river, the Spirit gains 
 volume and strength the further it flows from its source, not 
 disdaining the various rivulets that run into it from count- 
 less fountains, as it passes on its way to God bearing up 
 the prayers and strivings and excellences of mankind. 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 357 
 
 Whatever else be doubtful, the personal power of Christ 
 over the souls of men through sixty generations is a plain 
 matter of undoubted fact that claims to be called divine, if 
 to anything whatever that name may be applied by the 
 sons of men. 
 
 This brings my argument to a close. In it two con- 
 clusions have been, so I maintain, satisfactorily proved. 
 First, that granting the facts, the Christian instinct which 
 speaks of Christ as divine is reasonable and true. Second, 
 that the negative ideas under which men have been con- 
 strained to think of God have been realised within human 
 experience, so far as that experience can render possible, 
 in the life of Christ; or, to put it once more simply thus, 
 God has been revealed in time in such a manner as to be 
 seen to be superior to the conditions of time. In what way 
 a confused mass of legends could be fused, by men ignorant 
 alike of philosophy and history, into that harmonious 
 revelation which is seen to meet and satisfy the deepest 
 speculations of human thought, I must leave to be explained 
 by those who ascribe the origin of Christianity to mythical 
 sources. Those, again, who prefer to found their faith upon 
 the real or the supposed testimony of their own self- 
 consciousness, rather than upon facts that can be verified, 
 must be permitted (they will assuredly do it, with or with- 
 out permission) to ransack their minds, and urge the 
 flagging powers of thought (as a rider urges his reluctant 
 horse over the edge of a precipice) beyond the border of 
 the thinkable, in order to reach that which lies close at 
 their feet waiting to be taken up, examined, and made 
 useful. It is indeed the old, old story. The d priori road 
 to knowledge must be tried and found impassable before 
 men will consent to travel bv the humble but sure road 
 
35 8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 that God has appointed. It is as though one should try 
 to cross the Atlantic by flying. Religion is the last 
 region of knowledge from which this fallacy will be dis- 
 lodged, and men will still continue to create a God out of 
 their own imaginations, and then, and only then, consent 
 to recognise Him in the facts by which He has been 
 revealed. Desperate contentions there will be as to whether 
 the absolute, the infinite, the perfect, are thinkable terms, 
 contentions that might be settled in an instant if any one 
 could succeed in giving a definition of them so clear, 
 adequate, and reasonable, that no one could refuse to accept 
 it. How surprising that the " primary original intuitions " 
 should be precisely those about which men agree the least ! 
 Meanwhile, instead of torturing our but too generous minds 
 in the hopeless attempt to discover the object of thought 
 in the thinking subject, let us reflect whether we cannot 
 believe upon reasonable evidence, appealing to all our 
 deepest moral cravings, that for us the Absolute was born at 
 Bethlehem, the Perfect died on Calvary, the Omnipotent 
 rose at Easter, the Infinite ascended from Bethany, and 
 the Eternal came down at Pentecost* 
 
 Let me be permitted one word more. It will be asked 
 with some curiosity, What effect has the positive method of 
 treating religion upon the possibility or usefulness of creeds ? 
 Some will ask it who believe that religion is useless 
 without dogmatic formularies ; others, who have taught 
 themselves to feel that the bare idea of dogma is shocking 
 
 * The difference between the various conclusions that can be derived from the 
 premise " the Finite cannot comprehend the Infinite " may be stated thus : 
 
 Therefore, says Mr Mansel, it is our duty to believe in God as a Person. 
 
 Therefore, says Mr Herbert Spencer, it is our duty to believe in nothing 
 that we cannot verify or understand. 
 
 Therefore, say I, it is our duty to examine without prejudice any facts which 
 purport to reveal the Infinite to our understandings. 
 
The Divinity of Christ and Modern Thought. 359 
 
 to their religious susceptibilities. Science, I apprehend, 
 will agree with both of these, and with neither. A creed 
 it will regard simply as a proposition, resulting from think- 
 ing about facts, that can, like any other proposition, be 
 submitted to man's judgment and acceptance ; and it will 
 add, that to summarise conclusions under convenient 
 formularies is as reasonable in religion as in science. It is 
 wrong to seek to enforce a creed upon others by show of 
 dogmatic authority; it is wise to have a creed of one's own, 
 by which our religious beliefs may be formulated for the 
 practical purposes of life. 
 
 What, then, ought such a creed to be ? First, it should be 
 historical, not metaphysical that is, it should speak of God 
 as He has been revealed in the facts of nature and history 
 together. But, secondly, it should be moral and not 
 historical that is, it should not merely recapitulate facts, 
 but condense from them the true spiritual relations and 
 moral purposes of God towards mankind. By such a creed 
 as this I have myself almost unconsciously lived, and now 
 with equal unconsciousness I find that I have proved it to 
 myself by inductive reasoning. I may be pardoned, there- 
 fore, for closing this attempt to reconcile religion and science 
 in the words of the creed which expresses my inmost con- 
 victions about God. It is (with a verbal alteration) the 
 creed which the Church of England taught me and com- 
 missioned me to teach others. 
 
 I have learnt, then, to believe in God 
 
 The Father, who made me and all the world. 
 
 The Son, who redeemed me and all mankind. 
 
 The Holy Ghost, who sanctifies me and all the people 
 of God. Amen. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE WORKING 
 CLASSES.* 
 
 Tbv iraT^pa. Kal Stj/juovpybv irdvrwv otid' evpeiv pdSiov, oijQ* evpbvra els i 
 elireiv d<?(pa\5' "A 6 Tj/Afrepos X/otords Sia rrjs eavrov dvvdfj,ea)$ t-Trpa%e. 2w/cpdrei 
 [itv yap of/dels Trel(r6r) virtp TOVTOV TOV S6yfj.aTOs dTro6vrjo'Keu>' X/3tcTT<p 5e, rtp 
 Kal virb 2w/c/)drous airb _/j.tpovs yvwffdfrri . . . ov <j>i\6<ro(pot ov5 ^1X6X0701 IJ.QVOV 
 tirelffByo-av dXXot Kal x ei P OT ^X. vai Ka ^ TavTe\ws ISi&rai, Kal 56^s Kal (frbfiov Kal 
 Qavarov Kara(f)povrj(ravTS. 'ETretSyj S^a/xi's tern TOV dpprjTov iraTpbs Kal ofyl 
 avOpwrelov \6yov /caTaovceu??. 
 
 JUSTIN MARTYR, Apolog. \\. cap. x. (ad fin.) 
 
 A LTHOUGH the words The Church and the Work- 
 *J^ ing Classes " stand at the head of this essay, yet I 
 have no intention of separating either the interests or the 
 existence of the Church of England from the sum total of 
 English Christianity, of which she may, for our present 
 purpose, stand as the representative. There are indeed, as 
 will be seen, special causes for the failure of the Establish- 
 ment to attract the working classes, but on the whole that 
 failure is not more conspicuous or more lamentable than 
 that of other communities ; while, in all probability, it is 
 due essentially to the same deep-lying causes. The con- 
 fession of a common failure may possibly do something to 
 reunite the various branches of the Christian Church in 
 England, if not (although in the remote future even this 
 
 * This essay is reprinted in order to show that there is a practical need for 
 the reform of theology by scientific method. It was written in 1868. 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 361 
 
 may be hoped for) in one outward organisation, at least in 
 the bonds of mutual sympathy and honourable rivalry. 
 At any rate this confession is better than those exaggerated 
 claims of success, which, while they scarcely serve the pur- 
 pose of putting even a decent gloss upon failure and disaster, 
 are nevertheless very sufficient to show the denominational 
 jealousy and sectarian bitterness, which at once supply the 
 motive and frustrate the designs of much of the religious 
 working of English Christianity. We may, I think, safely 
 prophesy that no party in England is likely to be led very 
 far away by the intoxication of a real, or even of a fancied, 
 success. 
 
 Now of the importance of this subject there cannot be a 
 question. Properly speaking, indeed, it comprises all other 
 questions that are now agitating the English Church, just 
 as really as all political questions a year ago (in 1867) had 
 resolved themselves into this, " How and to what extent 
 shall the working classes be admitted to a share of political 
 power ? " The alienation of those classes from the Church 
 of England is the one paramount fact that suggests, or 
 rather compels, the need of a reform, and the one absorbing 
 motive which should direct and control that reform, ought 
 to be the desire to bring them back again. Only let it be 
 distinctly understood that far more is at stake than the 
 interests of one National Church. Upon the influence 
 which Christianity is to exercise upon the democracy 
 depends its future existence, at any rate for a century 
 to come, as the ruling religious power of the civilised 
 world. It is the fashion to say that Christianity is upon 
 its trial ; and sometimes a more perfect morality, again a 
 scientific discovery, then an enlarged philosophy, are the 
 
362 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 instruments which, in the minds alike of friends and foes, 
 are to accomplish the overthrow. Those who believe in 
 the historical truth of the Christian revelation can afford to 
 treat these prophecies with very scant respect, and to rest 
 content with the assurance that all that is essential in 
 Christian teaching will be but more completely proved to 
 be true by the progress of knowledge, and that all that is 
 good in Christian practice will but improve with the im- 
 provement of the world, and recommend itself more 
 effectually to the conscience of mankind. But the con- 
 tinued alienation of the working classes would stretch the 
 stoutest faith to its utmost tension. If Christianity becomes 
 the religion of a caste, or of a race, or continues to be the 
 religion of a civilisation instead of becoming the religion 
 of human nature, it ceases to have any claim upon the 
 undivided allegiance of the world. And if the democracy, 
 including, as it will do, thousands of men of a pure though 
 possibly imperfect morality, undoubted earnestness, con- 
 siderable ability, and possessed of a large share of political 
 power, rejects the claims of revelation, and leaves it with 
 contemptuous indifference to the upper and middle classes, 
 then we may be very sure that much more than Established 
 Churches will perish in the confusion. 
 
 There is, in fact, a sense in which it is as true that the 
 dispute between the advocates and the assailants of the 
 Christian religion will have to be settled ultimately by the 
 democracy, as it is that the dispute between Conservatism 
 and Liberalism is being referred to the same tribunal : for 
 if Christianity is, in any real effective sense of the word, 
 true, it must be capable of being shown to be true to 
 educated and intelligent men as a class. I say, in any real 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 363 
 
 effective sense of the word, because there is, of course, 
 another view exactly the opposite of this, which underlies 
 alike the Catholic and the Protestant theory of religion (or 
 to speak more accurately, the Catholic practice and the 
 popular Protestant theory), and which is responsible for 
 much of Christian failure and unpopularity. It would not, 
 of course, shock the faith of those who believe that the 
 Christian religion is a scheme for saving a few souls out of 
 a perishing world, if they were told that the scheme would 
 fail, on the whole, to reach the working classes. " So much 
 the worse for them," would be the very intelligible and 
 logical reply. But fortunately for the interests of Chris- 
 tendom there has never wanted a healthier and nobler 
 feeling, though, in all candour, it must be confessed that in 
 this, as in so many other instances, the preservation of the 
 truth has been due to the, perhaps, extreme opinions of com- 
 munities, or of men, lying outside the recognised boundaries 
 of the Catholic Church. And to that large and increasing 
 number who are beginning to regard Christianity as God's 
 method of regenerating humanity, and in the literal sense 
 of the word " saving the world," such an announcement 
 would be the deathblow of faith, energy, and hope. We 
 at any rate cannot afford to attach the notion of a " very 
 small remnant " to the work of a religion, which we believe 
 to be, as St Paul believed it to be, the religion of the " last 
 days," the ultimate revelation to be developed in history 
 of God to man. Faith in human progress is as necessary 
 to the Liberal in religion as to the Liberal in politics, and 
 the hope of a more universal, effective, and pure religion is 
 to him exactly what the hope of a better government or of 
 social improvement is to the other. And, therefore, both 
 
364 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 alike make their appeal to that vast and unknown force, 
 that democracy of which we in England have only this last 
 year become practically conscious, but which, we dimly 
 see, holds within its grasp the destinies of the future, 
 whether in the domain of politics or of religion. Our 
 business is to absorb that mass into the still larger entity 
 which we call the national life ; and the Church of England, 
 if she have the faintest conception of her position and 
 responsibility, must set herself to accomplish in religion 
 that which statesmanship has to effect in other depart- 
 ments of thought and action. It need hardly be observed 
 that the influence is not one-sided, but that the Church 
 and State in their turn must hope to be largely influenced 
 for good by their contact with the Demos. 
 
 Now this being so, it plainly becomes of the utmost 
 importance to know what are the prevailing sentiments of 
 the working classes on the subject of religion. Rhetori- 
 cally they may be summed up in one word indifference. 
 It is my object to indicate, as briefly as may be, the extent 
 and causes of this indifference, yet so as to suggest the 
 grounds for a better hope, and also the general direction in 
 which practical reforms should tend. The influences for 
 good, which in its turn the democracy will exercise upon 
 religion, will, I hope, come out incidentally ; but it does 
 not form so distinct a part of my purpose to discuss them. 
 I shall endeavour therefore to establish or comment on 
 these four propositions : 
 
 I. That the idea of an Established Church is essentially 
 a democratic one ; and yet that the working classes have 
 no affection for the Established Church of England. 
 
 II. That attendance at public worship is essentially a 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 365 
 
 part of democratic religion, and yet that the working 
 classes, as a rule, attended nowhere. 
 
 III. That the clergy and the democracy are naturally 
 friends and allies, and yet that there is no friendship or 
 alliance between the Anglican clergy and the working 
 classes. 
 
 IV. That the Christian revelation is one eminently suited 
 to a democracy, and yet that the working classes are 
 indifferent to its claims upon them. 
 
 I. In a speech delivered last session in the House of 
 Lords, the Duke of Argyll is reported to have expressed 
 his belief that Voluntary Churches would be the religious 
 communities of the future. Now this seems to me a 
 curious instance of the way in which mere local or national 
 considerations can prejudice the intellect of very able men. 
 Familiar with the past history of the English, and still more 
 of the Scotch Establishment, and fully sensible that their 
 present position with respect to other Christian communities 
 is rapidly becoming untenable, the Duke leaps at abound 
 to this very wide and sweeping generalisation. No doubt 
 the past religious history of the two countries presents to 
 us the prospect of the gradual invasion of the establishment 
 principle by the denominational ; but this resulting, as it 
 does, from causes and from the existence of communities 
 as old as the establishments themselves, forms but a very 
 slender induction from which to prophesy the religious 
 future of the world. Of course one man is as good a pro- 
 phet as another until the event ; still if we emancipate 
 ourselves for a single moment from the mere passions and 
 prejudices which encumber the question in countries like 
 England or Scotland, and regard rather what may be called 
 
366 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 its political philosophy, we shall find reason to believe that 
 not only is the idea of an endowed Church suitable to a 
 democracy, but that it is the only method in which a 
 democratic religion can develop itself. Let us consider for 
 a moment the invariable relations of the demos to the 
 commonwealth at large. The demos consists, broadly 
 speaking, of those who, being obliged to maintain existence 
 by hard bodily labour, are thereby excluded from any very 
 large participation in the luxuries, the pleasures, and the 
 blessings of culture and civilisation. Hence the constant 
 and legitimate tendency of the democracy is to insist that 
 this natural inequality shall be as far as possible redressed 
 by spending large sums of money from the national income 
 upon objects calculated to benefit the people ; and the 
 whole problem of practical statesmanship centres now in 
 the difficulty of harmonising this tendency with the general 
 interests of the nation at large. There are, however, 
 certain cases in which the benefit to the whole common- 
 wealth is so manifest that the claims of the demos are 
 frankly conceded. Many instances might be quoted, but 
 the typical one is of course national education ; while on 
 the other hand such Bills as that for improving the dwellings 
 of artisans raise the whole problem in its most embarrassing 
 and difficult aspect* Now let us imagine, for the moment, 
 that the demos becomes as interested in religion as it now 
 is in education ; let us suppose no very incredible supposi- 
 tion that the working classes are as anxious to be 
 provided with the means of religious worship as the middle 
 
 * I am not sure now that there is any real difficulty in it. An expenditure 
 of millions in buying up wretched dwellings would probably repay itself econo- 
 mically as well as morally. But this requires faith. 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 367 
 
 classes are at present. Of course if they remain indifferent, 
 cadit qucestio ; but then, as I have said, far more than the 
 principle of endowments would fall also. Now religious 
 institutions to be made at all capable of doing their work 
 are very expensive things, as Dissenters, and Churchmen as 
 well, have discovered ere this. Churches cost more than 
 schools, clergymen than schoolmasters. Is not the con- 
 clusion therefore inevitable that this is precisely one of 
 those common benefits which the State will be expected to 
 provide in order to redress as far as possible the inequalities 
 of life ? Would it not be urged with irresistible force that 
 the religion of the people is as necessary as their education, 
 and that religion, conducing as ex hypothesi it does to 
 general prosperity and good government, falls exactly 
 within the limits of those things which in a well-ordered 
 State are provided in part by the common fund ? I pas^ 
 over the distinction sometimes drawn between establishment 
 and endowment, merely remarking that in the case of any 
 very powerful and united Church the latter necessitates the 
 former, in the sense at any rate in which establishment 
 means the ultimate control by the nation of the Church it 
 subsidises, or for whose revenue it acts as trustee. Of 
 course I am aware that the United States may be quoted 
 against me ; but apart from the absurdity of quoting the 
 example of a country peculiar alike in its economic con- 
 dition, and in its, at best, but brief historical experience, it 
 is enough to say that the American demos is neither very 
 poor, nor, as yet, eminently religious. A far more real 
 illustration of what is in fact an elementary truth in the 
 politics of democracies, may be found in the practice of the 
 Athenians with regard to the Theoric Fund. The Theatre, 
 
368 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 intimately bound up as it was with religious thoughts, 
 together with public festivals and games, was to the people 
 of Athens much what I am assuming religious institutions 
 will be to the demos of the future ; these were at any rate 
 the shape in which their protest against the hardships of 
 life and their craving after rest and recreation were em- 
 bodied. And we know, of course, that in that wonderful 
 and typical Periclean democracy, the Theoric Fund pro- 
 vided, at the common expense, for the entertainment of the 
 poor citizens, and was regarded as one out of many legiti- 
 mate ways of remedying the inequalities of the social state. 
 And its further history, while it shows, no doubt, how the 
 sentiment upon which it rested might become perverted and 
 abused, is a signal proof of the extremely jealous care with 
 which democracies regard that portion of the common fund 
 set apart for the common use and benefit. That the middle 
 classes would now submit to almost any privation * sooner 
 than tamper with funds which (whether in the Established 
 Church or in the Dissenting communities) had been set 
 apart for religious purposes, may, I think, be taken for 
 granted ; but it gives us a very faint idea, indeed, of the 
 horror and indignation with which such a scheme would be 
 received by the working classes if once they were interested 
 in the wellbeing of the national religion. 
 
 It is perhaps necessary to go a step further than this, and 
 to assert that not only is an Established Church eminently 
 suited to a democracy, but also that in it alone the people 
 can exercise that controlling and regulative power which 
 
 * With our present experience this statement sounds absurd enough. But 
 I have never been able to estimate the length to which religious animosity 
 will go. It was not, however, religious animosity but political justice that 
 overthrew the Irish Established Church. 
 
The Church and the Working Classes, 369 
 
 belongs to them. The fatal defect of Voluntary Churches 
 is that they become to use an old-fashioned word timo- 
 cratic. Two men who subscribe 100 a-year can control 
 the government of a Church consisting of three hundred 
 men who subscribe >\ apiece. In every voluntary 
 association those who find the money must ultimately be 
 the governors, because they can in the last resort withdraw 
 the support by which the association is maintained. This 
 explains one of the worst features in modern dissent the 
 tendency to do homage to a class of rich men by whom 
 necessary funds are supplied. That this evil is not worse 
 than it is, is due to the self-restraint and sincere love of 
 liberty which has hitherto characterised this class as a 
 whole, but it is at best an ugly feature, and full of danger 
 in time to come. Now, when the funds of a Church are 
 derived from endowments or from the public purse, then 
 every man has a right to a voice in the management of the 
 Church, not in proportion to the amount of his individual 
 taxation, but by virtue of the zeal, the knowledge, and the 
 ability which he can bring to bear upon the subject. This 
 is the very essence of democracy. And growing out of this 
 there arises a realisation of the Christian, as connected with 
 the Democratic, idea, in more ways than I can stop to point 
 out. The liberty of the teacher, the equality of the taught, 
 the democratic idea of union in one body instead of division 
 into warring sects, all these are characteristic of an 
 Endowed Church, and are still in some considerable degree 
 preserved for the world in the Church of England. When, 
 for instance, Mr Goldwin Smith affirms that he respects the 
 Church of England but detests the Establishment, it may 
 with some reason be replied that the very things on account 
 
 2 A 
 
370 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 of which his respect is paid are precisely those which are 
 due to her position as an Establishment. 
 
 The second part of our proposition, that the working 
 classes have no affection for the Established Church, 
 requires but little proof, though, on the other hand, we 
 must beware of exaggeration. It seems to me, as far as I 
 can gather from the general attitude of the men, and still 
 more from the studiously moderate and tentative tone which 
 Mr Bright uses when speaking on this question, that they 
 have a lingering respect for the Establishment, and an 
 instinct that, whatever it may have come to be, it is still in its 
 essence a popular institution. The Conservative section of 
 the working classes, on the other hand, make the main- 
 tenance of the union between Church and State a prominent 
 part of their political programme. Of course, in those too 
 many cases in which the claims of the Established Church 
 are on one side, and the interests of liberty on the other, 
 working men may readily be inflamed into antagonism, or 
 even induced to take the side of the Voluntary Churches 
 in the quarrel ; but then they do not speak with quite the 
 same contempt of the Church of England as they do of 
 other English Churches. Nor, to the best of my know- 
 ledge, has the Reform League ever hinted at a crusade 
 against the endowments of the Church. Still an alienation 
 amounting almost to positive dislike is a palpable fact ; and 
 the reasons for this it is our business to discuss and to 
 point out under their respective heads. At present they 
 may be summed up in two main facts. First, the policy 
 of the Church itself has been such as to turn her into a 
 denomination. She has not thoroughly realised her duties, 
 not so much to members of other communities, as to the 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 371 
 
 same persons regarded simply as citizens of the State with 
 which she is connected. The proposal to exclude Dissenters 
 who do not pay voluntary church-rates from the vestry (so 
 far as concerns ecclesiastical matters), the refusal to under- 
 take to educate children* unless they will learn all the 
 formularies prescribed by the Church, the jealousy of the 
 State tribunals, the eagerness to support the Voluntary 
 principle in the colonies, and the general attitude main- 
 tained towards other English branches of the Church 
 universal the attitude of an irritated rival rather than of 
 a friendly elder sister are painful evidences of this spirit 
 of denominationalism, against which the very notion of a 
 National Church is a perpetual protest. And, again, the 
 Church has become to coin a word intensely middle- 
 classy. The democracy has stood aloof from her, just as 
 they have done from the army, the internal politics, and 
 the foreign policy of the kingdom. The clergy on their 
 part have got to take the upper-class view of things, and, 
 not without sturdy resistance, have allowed the Church 
 to become a Conservative catchword. Politically and 
 economically they have been against the working classes, 
 / and without, to their honour, engaging actively against 
 them, have let it become known that their sympathies, 
 their interests, their predilections, were (naturally enough, 
 perhaps) on the other side. In fact the Church may be 
 said to have taken up, as regards the working classes, the 
 position not of rational justice, but of complacent bene- 
 volence. The middle class, on the other hand, has 
 dominated since the Reform Bill in the Church, exactly 
 
 * I did not foresee how speedily the Church would be converted by stern 
 necessity to acquiesce in a universal conscience clause. 
 
372 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 as it has in the country, and has impressed its own ideas 
 upon her worship, her constitution, and whatever reforms 
 have been accomplished. This will appear more clearly as 
 we proceed, but I adduce two facts in illustration of it now, 
 because their full force and meaning is not always rightly 
 comprehended. 
 
 The middle-class theory of life is, that out of a number 
 of persons starting in rivalry and competition together, a 
 few should be specially successful, the most just enabled to 
 live, and a fair proportion fail so completely as to require 
 to be supported by charity say, in almshouses built by the 
 money and for the glorification of their successful brethren. 
 The working-class theory is, on the contrary, that every 
 man, whatever his industry or ability, should succeed or 
 fail alike. Now, without discussing the relative value of 
 these theories, which I have purposely stated in exaggerated 
 terms, it is very evident that this description of the middle- 
 class theory applies without any exaggeration at all to the 
 English Church. It is expressed, almost caricatured, in 
 the writings of Sydney Smith as the great principle upon 
 which the patronage of the Church should be distributed. 
 By it a few men succeed enormously in their profession, 
 which success, again, is administered by the hands and 
 shared by the prottges of the aristocracy. The mass are 
 barely enabled to live, while many remain "poor parsons," 
 suitable objects of pity and worthy recipients of old clothes. 
 This consideration explains at once the outspoken indigna- 
 tion of the working men at the poverty of the clergy and 
 the inequality of benefices. It is by no means a sentimental 
 or partisan complaint, but rather the existence of such 
 abuses is intolerable and inexplicable to an ordinary work- 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 373 
 
 ing man, who would starve for a month sooner than allow 
 an unfortunate brother to receive less wages than himself. 
 That the labourer is worthy of his hire, and is not to be 
 put off with old clothes, is a very great truth indeed with 
 him. And as he has not the faintest chance of making his 
 voice heard in the matter, he can, at least, utter a practical 
 protest against a religion of this kind, and refuse to darken 
 the doors of an institution that permits a state of things in 
 his view plainly immoral and unjust. 
 
 The second instance is connected with an abuse that, 
 perhaps as much as any other topic, excites the indignation 
 of working men I mean the sale of livings.* The ordinary 
 Englishman regards a living simply as a piece of property ; 
 and as property is the most sacred thing in the world, the 
 owner has clearly a right to do what he pleases with his 
 own. Need we wonder that the working classes protest 
 energetically against such a view of the matter ? Perhaps 
 there is hardly an instance in which the rights and duties 
 of property come into more direct collision than in the sale 
 of livings ; and when we have on the one hand the claims 
 of the owner sanctioned by law and custom, and on the 
 other an increasing protest upon moral and perfectly un- 
 selfish grounds from the heart of the democracy, we seem 
 to discern a source of unpopularity and weakness to the 
 Church of England, which hardly admits of a remedy at 
 present, and a difficulty which hardly anything short of a 
 revolution can remove. 
 
 Whether or no this revolution will come to pass, or what 
 form, supposing it to be inevitable, it will assume, is a 
 
 * Since the above was written not one single step has been taken to over- 
 throw this crying scandal. 
 
374 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 question upon which it is vain now to speculate. One of 
 two things appears ultimately certain : either the Church 
 must become really national that is, comprehensive or 
 else she must cease to be established. The former alter- 
 native, which is at least possible, would remove that aliena- 
 tion of the democracy of which we have been speaking. 
 Those who deprecate the latter as a real calamity both to 
 Church and State, may however acquiesce in, with a view 
 to make the best of, the inevitable, especially if vanquished 
 in fair fight by opponents who would have, as Noncon- 
 formists, real, though I for one believe thoroughly mistaken, 
 grounds of opposition and dislike. But it is difficult to 
 think with ordinary patience of that large and increasing 
 number within the Church who, in their childish impatience 
 of what they deem " bondage," are beginning to welcome 
 the idea of disestablishment. It is melancholy to think 
 that the ecclesiastical spirit, assuming the garb and speak- 
 ing in the name of religion, has made of all persons in 
 the world Churchmen disloyal to the Constitution, and 
 comparatively careless of the interests of their country. 
 Those who call themselves "good " Churchmen ought to be 
 above all things desirous that the Church should stand by 
 the State in all the troubles and dangers which are for ever 
 gathering about the path of a country like England, and 
 should thus be enabled to lend the full weight of her moral 
 and religious influence to the task of alleviating and re- 
 moving them. To cry out for a release just at this moment re- 
 sembles nothing so much as the conduct of a wife who, when 
 things began to look gloomy and threatening, should utter 
 whispers about obtaining a divorce, not forgetting to warn 
 her solicitor to look well to the terms of her settlements. 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 375 
 
 II. Attendance at public worship may surely be regarded 
 as a faithful index of the amount of interest felt towards 
 religion by any given class of men. In the case of individuals 
 it is of course conceivable that persons of a certain turn of 
 mind may be sincerely attached to the truths, as well as to 
 the morality, of the Christian religion without feeling 
 themselves able, or at any rate disposed, to attend services 
 (to them) encumbered by a sermon, or conducted in such a 
 manner as to violate their ideas of taste and order. But 
 when certain sentimentalists appear anxious to claim the 
 benefit of this exception for the working classes in a body, 
 and to assert that though they do not attend public worship, 
 their lives are nevertheless admirable examples of pure and 
 undefiled religion, one is bound to summon common-sense 
 into court to expose egregious nonsense. For it is very 
 obvious that to the great mass of mankind both the practice 
 of and the belief in religion require much external help in 
 the way of instruction, united prayer, and outward forms. 
 And if this be true anywhere, it must be true especially of 
 those whose lives are spent in hard work, exposed to many 
 coarse temptations, without much opportunity of obtaining 
 instruction for themselves. Working men, moreover, are 
 especially gregarious in their habits, and if they realise 
 religion at all, will certainly do so as members of a com- 
 munity, with its place of meeting, its outward observances, 
 its pledge of brotherly love and communion. But what is 
 of more importance still, it must be remembered that 
 religion has its devotional as well as its practical side, and 
 that the second v/ithout the first is but a maimed and im- 
 perfect representation of the Christian ideal. A man may 
 be a very good man, and yet be all the better for coming to 
 
376 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 say his prayers on Sunday with his neighbours and kins- 
 folk. And further, as working men with almost one con- 
 sent do not plead this excuse for themselves, but either 
 profess their indifference to religion altogether, or else far 
 more frequently acknowledge that they "do not go to 
 church as often as they might," it may be concluded that 
 this fallacy is effectually disposed of. If, then, outward 
 worship be practically a test of the interest that any given 
 class feels towards religion, how does the case stand with 
 the working classes ? I do not believe that the ordinary 
 account, which represents that it is as much the habit of 
 the working classes, with large exceptions, to stay away 
 from church, as it is the habit of the upper classes, with 
 the same exceptions, to attend, is at all exaggerated. I 
 speak from experience in London, which is perhaps in this 
 as in so many other respects below the level of provincial 
 towns ; but in the east of London the failure to attract the 
 men as a class is very marked is, I had almost said, 
 absolute. I have been assured by one of the most intelli- 
 gent and trustworthy men I ever had the fortune to meet, 
 that out of forty men who worked with him one would 
 certainly go to church, another would 'if he were asked, and 
 the remaining thirty-eight would not under any circum- 
 stances. And he added, what every one's experience will 
 verify, that this was a fair example of the general state of 
 things among artisans of the first class. Desperate 
 attempts are indeed made to evade the " logic of facts," 
 and success of a certain sort, among the emotional, the 
 feeble-minded, and the lovers of spectacles and novelties, 
 is adduced as a great result in " Christianising the masses." 
 There is probably more unconscious and perfectly honest 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 377 
 
 lying about the number of persons, and especially 
 of working men, composing a congregation, than about 
 anything else in the known world. And although the 
 churches in the east of London may present a more 
 deplorable spectacle than can be found elsewhere, yet it 
 must be remembered that they are badily attended simply 
 because the population is almost entirely composed of those 
 classes who in the " best-worked " country parishes are 
 equally conspicuous by their absence. The perfectly 
 respectful, intelligent, and dexterous artisan, for whom the 
 authorities naturally send in times of emergency to do a 
 difficult job at the church, never enters it for any other 
 purpose. If, then, the failure be so palpable and some 
 failure all acknowledge what are the causes ? Now, the 
 causes lie far deeper than any mere defects in the mode 
 of conducting divine service, or any objections which 
 working men have, or fancy they have, to it. They are 
 connected with those relations of the demos to the Estab- 
 lishment, the clergy, and the Christian Revelation, of which 
 in the two latter instances we have yet to speak. Men 
 in earnest about religion, and on good terms with its 
 ministers, would not lightly be kept away from its ordin- 
 ances. Of course if a man be put upon his defence, and 
 peremptorily challenged to say why he does not come to 
 church, he will naturally catch at the first available weapon 
 of defence and lay the blame on something in the services 
 themselves, especially if it be something for which the 
 challenger is responsible. Two causes, however, there are 
 which are of some real importance in driving the working 
 classes away from the Church, and which I will mention as 
 furnishing notable illustrations of the besetting sins of the 
 
37 8 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 Established Church her tendency to make herself into a 
 denomination, and her disposition to place herself, bound 
 hand and foot, at the feet of the middle classes. 
 
 The first is connected with the always delicate subject of 
 the pecuniary arrangements of the Church her method, 
 that is, of raising money. A Church receives endowments 
 and a legal position upon the implied condition that she 
 is to do, so to speak, the religious, work of the country. 
 And if the revenues assigned to her be, after the most 
 judicious and equitable distribution (an experiment that 
 has not yet been tried in the English Church), inadequate 
 to the task, then she must rely upon the free liberality of 
 her members. This rule applies universally, and may be 
 illustrated by the history of the Crimean and American 
 civil wars, in both of which private liberality in various 
 indirect ways came to the assistance of the respective 
 Governments, even after large sums had been voted out of 
 the public purse. But the one thing which may not rightly 
 be done by a National Church any more than by an army, 
 by a clergyman any more than by a soldier, is to sell the 
 services for which he is otherwise paid. Yet this is precisely 
 what the Church of England does in two obvious instances 
 fees and pew-rents, which more than anything else vex 
 the soul and alienate the affections of the working man. 
 In a Church endowed for the express purpose of providing 
 for the religious wants of the community, the clergy have 
 got themselves put into the degrading position of making 
 a charge to the poor man.* From the cradle out of which 
 
 * I cannot resist quoting a story as illustrating the evil effects of this. One 
 woman was overheard by a district visitor remonstrating with another for 
 having had her banns put up away from her parish church. " For," said she, 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 379 
 
 he comes to be baptised, and very frequently to be charged 
 for it, to the grave in which he cannot be laid until the claims 
 of the parson, the clerk, the sexton, and the bellringer are duly 
 satisfied, he is pursued by vexatious exactions, which have 
 the additional demerit of being a sort of poll-tax levied on 
 rich and poor at the same rate. But even this is nothing 
 to the system of pew-rents, of which the only description 
 that I can find at all adequate is Mr Henley's famous 
 expression, " a device of Old Nick's to oppress the poor/' 
 and, it may be added, to destroy the nationality of the 
 English Church. If a working man ventures into most 
 district and many parish churches, he is thrust into " free 
 (and uncomfortable) seats " between, as the Saturday 
 Reviewon.ee. excellently phrased it, " two frowning phalanxes 
 of pews;" and heistold that in this so-called National Church 
 he has no right to any of the " good " seats unless he can 
 afford a certain number of guineas per annum, and so 
 become that mysterious being, the religious synonym for a 
 ten-pound householder, a seatholder. Can any one who 
 knows the character of the average working man wonder 
 that he secedes from a Church which possesses such vast 
 privileges, and assumes such a lofty air, and descends to 
 such mean devices as these ? It is to the eternal credit of 
 the High Church party (besides being a tower of strength), 
 and should be allowed by all liberally-minded persons to 
 counterbalance much extravagance of doctrine and ritual, 
 
 "you have had a good deal, Mrs So-and-so" (she was a widow), "out of the 
 parsons at that church, and I do think that when you can put a shilling or two 
 in their way you ought." 
 
 At the same time it is obvious that marriage fees for the performance of 
 what is an important legal as well as a religious ceremony stand upon a 
 different footing. 
 
380 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 that they have been the first to preach and to act up to 
 this truth. Indeed the High Church formula, which knows 
 no distinction in church except that of priest and people, 
 is perhaps the nearest practical approach in England to 
 democracy of a certain type, and if the name and thing 
 presbyter were substituted for the name and thing priest, 
 might exactly express the democratic theory of worship. 
 The question of appropriation without payment rests of 
 course upon a different footing, and might safely be left to 
 local feeling and convenience ; but the abolition, wherever 
 practicable, of pew-rents does imply of necessity the re- 
 establishment of the weekly offertory, which again is the 
 true expression of the democratic idea of almsgiving, and 
 is almost invariably popular with working men. Mean- 
 while it is, I think, possible to suggest a very easy palliation 
 for evils now become too inveterate to be wholly removed. 
 By an application of the same principle which compels the 
 running of parliamentary trains, let every church have at 
 least one free service if necessary, even after the first 
 evening service, and in lieu of the abortive afternoon one 
 and let all seats be let with the express condition that 
 the holders do not occupy them at that service. This 
 remedy is easy : I wish I could add that I felt sure it would 
 be very effectual to heal the breach which years of pew- 
 rents have caused and will perpetuate. 
 
 The second of the two causes for the alienation of the 
 demos from the services of the Church is to be found in 
 the manner in which the services are conducted. Probably 
 there is not in all Christendom a type of service so unde- 
 vout, so unintellectual, so unimpressive, and at the same 
 time so admirably suited to British Philistinism, as the 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 381 
 
 once popular, and still common, service of the English 
 Church. Wit has almost exhausted itself on the " parson 
 and clerk duet," the gallery singing, the beadle, and the 
 pew-opener, but they flourish yet. Here, again, much credit 
 is due to the High Church party for perceiving that the 
 English service was, to put it mildly, capable of improve- 
 ment. Much good, no doubt, has been effected by the 
 reforms they have instituted; but it is to be feared that the 
 remedy, so far as working men are concerned, is little better 
 than the disease. The capital mistake has been committed 
 of trying to allure them, like so many children, by a 
 gorgeous ritual, and of defending this course by appealing 
 to their love of processions, theatrical adornments, and so 
 forth. Whereas the answer, if one were given, would be 
 this, " We are not children at all, but very like grown-up 
 men and women in other ranks of life. Like them, we 
 have a fancy for pomp and show at our festivals, social 
 gatherings, and demonstrations. Like them also, the great 
 majority of us are accustomed to associate a reverence for 
 divine things with simplicity, with an absence of show, 
 elaborate detail, and fatiguing ceremonialism." Personally 
 I believe that the English Service, with a very few altera- 
 tions a little shortening* perhaps, or rather dividing, of the 
 services is capable of being made by far the most attractive 
 to intelligent artisans of any type of service that has been 
 yet invented. And it is certainly founded on a true demo- 
 cratic that is, congregational idea. From first to last the 
 Prayer-book hardly seems to recognise more than the 
 " minister " or " priest " who is to " say " the prayers, and 
 the "people" who are to "say" them with him. And it 
 
 * This has now been done. 
 
382 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 seems to me a matter of indifference from the democratic 
 point of view, whether a choir is put into a gallery at the 
 west end of the church to sing anthems over the heads of 
 the " audience," or railed off into a chancel at the east end 
 to sing introits and antiphons at strange and unwonted 
 places. The general principles upon which a service suit- 
 able for working men should be founded are briefly as 
 follows. Churches should be as beautiful as art and light 
 can make them, especially by calling in the aid, to an 
 extent hitherto undreamt of, of mural painting and sculp- 
 ture. All the arrangements for conducting the service 
 should be such as to give not effect but meaning to its 
 several portions. The aim should be to appeal far more 
 than has hitherto been done to the intelligence, as opposed 
 to the senses or the feelings. Nothing should be allowed, 
 so far as it can be prevented, to come in between the people 
 and the act of worship which they are assembled to perform. 
 Let the prayers be read (as a preference), the people 
 responding in their natural voices, with much singing of 
 hymns and chanting of psalms, and we may hope to have 
 a service in which plain simple folk can take their part and 
 exercise their rights, being protected from the vagaries of 
 extempore praying on the one hand, and the minutiae of 
 ceremonialism on the other. There are signs that the High 
 Church service is already departing from its original con- 
 gregational type. 
 
 III. The very fundamental idea of the ministry of the 
 gospel is, that they who compose its ranks are the friends 
 of those who may without offence be termed in this con- 
 nection the poor. Ministers of Christ are charged with 
 the duty of delivering a message intended to alleviate the 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 383 
 
 sufferings and sweeten the cup of life. They are supposed 
 to be specially connected with no single class, but to be a 
 witness of the unity of all classes, composers of differences, 
 arbiters between contending interests, advocates of the 
 weak and defenceless. And in this view of their duty and 
 position, by common consent, the clergy of the English 
 Church are not as a class found wanting. They raise and 
 administer vast sums in the relief of the sick and distressed. 
 They spend many hours in visiting and consoling the dying. 
 Their labours in the cause of education have been beyond 
 all praise. They often stand between the poor and the 
 tyranny of employers or of guardians. They embark in a 
 thousand schemes for the promotion of the welfare of the 
 working classes. And all this is, I think, fairly recognised 
 by the men themselves, who know that after all the average 
 parson has not a single selfish interest opposed to theirs, 
 that he has a sincere desire to benefit them according to 
 his lights, and that officially or personally he can do them 
 many a good turn. This general regard shows itself, for 
 instance, in the outward respect which, as a rule, is paid to 
 clergymen. Of course a man whose very presence is, or at 
 any rate is regarded, as a special notice to " be good," who 
 wears a distinctive dress, and uses, perhaps too freely, a 
 distinctive language, must expect to be treated behind his 
 back with that half-real, half-affected contempt, that partly 
 good-natured, partly sincere dislike, which is by no means 
 confined to one class, but which finds abundantly open 
 expression in the popular literature of the day. But other- 
 wise a clergyman, merely as such, may be in constant 
 intercourse with artisans and labourers without meeting 
 with a single uncivil look or word, except from " vile and 
 
384 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 churlish " persons, who are to be found in every class of 
 society. The same thing shows itself again in a very con- 
 siderable amount of real confidence. Working men entrust 
 the clergy with the education of their children, and with 
 the care of their money. It shows itself once more in the 
 readiness with which the services of the minister are 
 welcomed at the last hour. I have stood by the death-bed 
 of many a working man, and after the first suspicions were 
 removed, and perhaps the dislike to the popular religious- 
 ness overcome, I have met with nothing but openness, 
 cordiality, and affection. But here it stops. Beyond this 
 the clergy as a body have no living influence upon the 
 hearts and conduct of the artisan class. There is no mutual 
 sympathy, no intelligent acquaintance with each other's 
 views and wishes. The working man fights as shy of the 
 parson as he can, and is not to be persuaded into familiarity 
 or friendship. If on the one hand his dislike is mainly arti- 
 ficial, on the other his indifference is certainly unaffected. 
 
 Now the main cause of all this springs from the view 
 which the clergy, as a rule, take of the working class, and 
 of the line of conduct which that view prompts them to 
 adopt. Only, in all fairness it must be remembered that 
 the clergyman is not without excuse. For he sees unfor- 
 tunately only the worst side of this class. He is brought 
 into constant contact with wretched homes, beaten wives, 
 starving children whom no persuasion of his can get sent to 
 school. His acquaintance with the principles and tran- 
 sactions of trade unions is confined to his knowledge of 
 the many " clubs " which have broken up, cheating their 
 members, and leaving them to be maintained in age and 
 sickness by him, or to his practical experience of the misery 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 385 
 
 entailed by strikes. If he pleads the cause of some poor 
 fellow, a hundred tales of his idleness or dishonesty are 
 repeated by angry employers, or guardians smarting under 
 the odium of a heavy poor rate. No wonder that he begins 
 to take a view lamentably below the true one. To him 
 the working classes are always, in his technical language, 
 " the poor." They are objects of his benevolent activity. 
 It hardly enters into the mind of, at any rate, an old- 
 fashioned clergyman, that there are multitudes of artisans 
 living honourable and well-to-do lives, with very strong 
 views on things in general, and on the whole as unpromis- 
 ing objects for the exercise of the virtue of benevolence as 
 can well be imagined. And growing out of this, there arises 
 a fatal train of mistakes and perplexities in his plans for 
 bringing religion to bear upon the "masses" some of them 
 almost too ludicrous to be believed. Sometimes they are 
 patronised, with great protestations against patronage, as 
 4< my " working men. I remember hearing a dignitary of 
 the Church of England, when speaking of a Working Man's 
 Club, exclaim, in an outburst of triumphant Liberalism, "I 
 make them manage their own affairs." 
 
 Even upon points where there might be real popularity 
 and confidence gained, the clergy somehow or other get 
 wrong. Here are two instances. They would meet no 
 doubt with very considerable support and gratitude from 
 the working classes in their efforts to preserve Sunday as 
 a day of rest ; but the men see plainly enough that the 
 anxiety to discourage any lengthening of the hours of 
 labour is subordinated to the desire of imposing their own 
 views of " Sabbath-keeping " upon a class whose different 
 
 circumstances demand a very different treatment. In like 
 
 2 B 
 
386 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 manner all grace is taken from the boon of education, and 
 all gratitude from its recipients, by the ungracious and 
 arbitrary attitude assumed towards the parents ; and this 
 is all the more provoking, because the clergy in their public 
 policy contradict their private conduct and kindly toleration 
 of the beliefs of others. The parents cannot but see that 
 the education of their children is made the battle-field of 
 religious factions. On the one hand the clergy, as repre- 
 sented by their own society, insist upon retaining the right 
 to teach church doctrines, whether the parents like it or 
 not ; on the other, partisans equally resolute are determined 
 that no religion at any rate no doctrines shall be taught, 
 whether the parents wish it or no : while the simple alter- 
 native of offering religious teaching to those who will accept 
 it, and of securing to the parent some liberty of action 
 under the conscience clause, has but just contrived to secure 
 a hearing. Then, again, there is a fatal habit of regarding 
 mere external results instead of adhering to sound principles 
 of action. Young men, for instance, are gathered into 
 Christian Young Men's Associations, or Church of England 
 Institutes ; and when it is represented that clubs for the 
 purpose of instruction or society, if founded upon a religious 
 basis, would not be tolerated for an instant among the 
 upper classes, the answer is that they "do good." As 
 though anything could in the long run really do good that 
 was founded upon a mistaken system. What is seen is the 
 good done, or supposed to be done, to the few who belong 
 to them ; what is not seen, and is incapable of being 
 measured, is the general evil effect upon the religion of the 
 whole class. For every feeble-minded Christian young 
 man produced at these institutions ten sturdy and inde- 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 387 
 
 pendent minds, capable of leading the class to which they 
 belong, are alienated and repelled. Nor does the attempt 
 to win these men by purely secular means, such as clubs, 
 avail much better, for there is at present a lurking and not 
 altogether unfounded suspicion that the parson has some 
 ulterior views of his own, and means to make the club 
 a back entrance to the church. Still to this there are 
 numerous exceptions,* as I have the good fortune to know. 
 When once the men are convinced that the clergyman is 
 meeting them on their own ground, they will in their turn 
 meet him with a cordiality, a gratitude, and, in plain words, 
 a deference, which it is often hard to deserve. But then 
 this brings him very little nearer to what after all is his 
 one business the influencing them for good in religious 
 matters ; nor will this ever be accomplished, until we have 
 understood their position, and done justice to their opinions; 
 above all gained over their leaders, and approached them 
 through the men and the institutions they value and sup- 
 port. Time, and reform, and the union of classes, and a 
 better knowledge of each other, can alone remove the 
 obstacles which at present stand between the clergy and 
 the demos. Political economy, which in one of its aspects 
 might almost be called the science of Christian benevolence, 
 will do much towards helping the clergy in dealing with 
 the various social and economic difficulties and miseries 
 which are now left to the agency of a charity most well 
 meaning, devoted, and unsparing, but very frequently mis- 
 guided and ineffectual. 
 
 IV. But after all it is merely playing upon the surface of 
 a great subject to ascribe this alienation of the demos to 
 
 * Notably the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street. 
 
388 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 anything short of the theological forms under which Chris- 
 tian truth is presented to the people. It is religious 
 thought that is, the doctrines impressed upon the Church 
 by the few and accepted by the many that must be held 
 answerable for Christian success or failure in practice. 
 There is, let us observe, no natural infidelity among the 
 working classes. Some, of course, in their general revolt 
 against everything instituted or established in the country, 
 are as regards religion unbelievers. Many more, when 
 pressed for a reason why they decline the outward profes- 
 sion of a religion which their moral convictions assure them 
 to be true, take refuge in an insincere and pretended infi- 
 delity as the easiest and safest shelter. But the enormous 
 majority never really think about the matter at all, and are 
 inclined to accept as true the religious creed which they 
 have inherited or been taught, provided it does not interfere 
 with the daily course of their lives and conduct. That this 
 is a fair account of the " faith " of the working classes may, 
 I think, be proved by these facts among others : that they 
 manifest a decided preference for a religious education, and 
 that they sincerely respect a sincerely religious man. Nor 
 again can it be pretended that the Christian Revelation is 
 less suited to the demos than to any other class. It was 
 preached by a Poor Man of the outward rank of an artisan 
 whom the " common people heard gladly." It soon took 
 the form of a revolt none the less real because not politi- 
 cal against the * c powers that be," whether in Church or 
 State. It comes to cheer the burden of life to those upon 
 whom that burden presses most heavily. At this moment 
 it is the one motive power of all the many schemes for 
 alleviating human misery. It is anchored upon that essen- 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 389 
 
 tially democratic virtue, hopefulness ; and it claims to 
 establish, in its own way, that equality after which demo- 
 cracy has toiled, almost since the dawn of history with more 
 than Herculean labour, and less than Sisyphean success. 
 And lastly, it is presented for man's acceptance in a form 
 especially adapted to catch the attention and enlist the 
 sympathies of plain working people ; for it is not a creed, 
 nor a philosophy, nor a sentiment, nor a morality, but a 
 Person and a history which comprise all these, and yet 
 are different from, and greater than, all these. If, then, 
 the fault do not lie in the nature of the religion itself, or 
 in the incapacity of those to whom it is addressed, still less, 
 I confidently maintain, is it to be attributed to any want 
 of zeal or energy on the part of the clergy. No picture, 
 indeed, can be sadder than the one presented in the lives 
 of hundreds of hard-working, unsuccessful men ; unsuccess- 
 ful, that is, not as compared with others, but as compared 
 with what they feel ought to be accomplished. They spare 
 themselves no toil they try any and every experiment that 
 can be suggested. But so far as the Mite of the working 
 classes are concerned, they are like actors playing before a 
 listless audience, on the five-hundredth night of a drama 
 that has outlived its popularity. The old formulae have 
 lost their influence upon the hearts of men, and the clergy 
 find that nineteenth-century targets are not to be pierced 
 by sixteenth-century ordnance. They would sacrifice any- 
 thing if they could bring the personal living influence of 
 their Master to bear upon the myriads about them, to whom 
 in His name they are sent. And thus the waste of power 
 is enormous. Zeal that might convert a world achieves 
 next to nothing, because of the theological trammels by 
 
3QO Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 which it is fettered and misguided. Sooner or later men 
 must come to see this. Mere ecclesiastical arrangements, 
 or mistakes such as I have before alluded to, can never 
 account for an alienation so distressing. The Evangelical 
 party appear fully sensible of this, and can do nothing but 
 pray and hope for a revival of the old Evangelical earnest- 
 ness. Their rivals, while taunting them with an ungenerous 
 bitterness fatal to the very notion of religion, are engaged 
 in the futile task of putting the strong new wine of nine- 
 teenth century thought into bottles that were waxing old 
 more than four centuries ago, and have not improved since 
 that time. Though I cannot hope at the close of a single 
 essay to treat even superficially a subject which requires 
 and would justify a book in itself, yet I must at least 
 attempt to indicate some of the principal causes of this 
 theological failure. 
 
 I. The first that would instinctively suggest itself to any 
 inquirer is the existence of religious divisions and hatred. 
 This is perhaps rather a result than an instance of the 
 corruption of religious thought, but anyhow it stands first 
 in our melancholy list. " The Church of Rome is the slayer 
 of souls, the mother of perdition," exclaims the Protestant. 
 " Nulla sahis extra Ecclesiam" is the answering war-cry 
 thundered from the opposing barrier. In England the law- 
 courts and Parliament itself are vexed with the cries of con- 
 tending factions seeking to exclude each other from the 
 fold. At this moment a popular cry has been it must be 
 admitted not until after immense exertions raised to the 
 effect, that if we cannot silence or banish the doctrines and 
 the practices of a certain objectionable party, we ought at 
 least to take their vestments from them. And all this 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 391 
 
 miserable wrangling is carried on in full view of the work- 
 ing man to whom religion is to be taught. He, whose 
 circumstances and easy good-nature alike incline him to 
 accept the lazy creed of an Epicurean universalism, is to be 
 approached after this fashion. He may not have the gospel 
 preached to him without at the same time being solemnly 
 warned against some other preacher of the same gospel. 
 " Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing." 
 In vain do we seek to escape from the peremptory condi- 
 tion of success imposed by the Founder of Christianity 
 Himself : *' By this shall all men know that ye are my 
 disciples, if ye have love one to another ; " or again : " That 
 they also may be one in us : that the world may believe 
 that thou hast sent me." In vain do we sacrifice every- 
 thing, if we cherish our strife and hatred. In vain do we 
 make zeal do the work of charity. Contemporary religious 
 history is the record of the failure, and zeal does but slay 
 itself in the impossible attempt. Our religious teaching 
 wants the one thing that can recommend it to the demos, 
 because it wants the one thing that recommended it to the 
 world at first. And this one thing is not inward unity, 
 still less outward uniformity ; it is not even the cessation 
 of religious strife and jealousy. But the one imperative 
 reform required at our hands is this : that different com- 
 munities " all that in every place call upon the name of 
 Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours " should learn 
 to regard each other as but different regiments in the army 
 of the Church Militant : that whatever jealousies, or claims 
 to superiority, or imputations of failure, are consistent with 
 the unity of an army, should be subordinated to the feeling, 
 that all are under One Commander, and have one common 
 
392 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 enemy human ignorance and wickedness. Then the 
 poison would be taken out of our controversies, the danger 
 out of our divisions, and we could approach the working 
 classes without feeling that in the most important point of 
 all in Christianity we, its preachers, were inferior to those to 
 whom we preached. To the promotion of this idea every 
 Christian who calls himself a Liberal should direct his 
 energies, and that immediately. 
 
 2. Closely connected with the above, as cause and effect, 
 comes another failing in the theology of the day which it 
 is easier to realise than to describe. But it may be summed 
 up as a tendency to attach exaggerated importance to 
 minor doctrines and small points of difference. It is, so 
 to speak, a want of the sense of theological perspective. 
 So long as Christianity endures, we may be sure that the 
 historical events upon which it rests will be approached 
 differently by differently constituted minds, whether 
 national or individual, and will create various forms of 
 belief, and of practice also. Mere doctrinal unity is not 
 merely impossible, but contrary to the whole genius of 
 Christianity as a belief in an historical revelation. But the 
 reform which lies within our reach, and which the pressure 
 of democratic unbelief tends steadily to produce, takes the 
 direction of subordinating minor differences to larger points 
 of agreement say rather to a united belief in the histori- 
 cal truthfulness of the New Testament. No doctrines have 
 played a more important part in ecclesiastical history than 
 those concerning the nature of the Real Presence and of 
 Justification ; and yet, before another century has passed 
 away, we may hope that they, with many others, will cease 
 to be among the number of the things which vex the unity 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 393 
 
 of the Church. That, for instance, almost all Christians 
 keep the Lord's Supper by command and in memory of 
 One Master, and mainly in the way in which He pre- 
 scribed (many additions and one diminution notwith- 
 standing) ; that all regard it as a spiritual blessing to 
 the individual recipient, and as a pledge of brotherly love 
 and communion ; that all " worthy " partakers are as a 
 matter of fact morally affected and improved by it in much 
 the same way, and to much the same extent, will be found, 
 when confronted with general unbelief, to be facts of such 
 surprising and vital importance, that different opinions about 
 the mode of Christ's presence, or the working of the moral 
 influence, or the proper ritual observance, will seem com- 
 paratively insignificant. Most true it is that time was 
 when disagreement upon these points implied, or accom- 
 panied, opinions of religion and theories of human life and 
 nature, the importance of a right decision as to which 
 cannot be exaggerated. But it is necessary now that 
 Christian people should see that this has passed away. 
 The sea indeed tosses, but the gale has blown itself out. 
 Protestants may indeed affirm that Rome remains the same, 
 but it is equally true, and more to the purpose, that her 
 power of working injury is departing from her. The pro- 
 gress of liberty, of science, and of confidence in human 
 progress, is neutralising her influence. The moment that a 
 Church ceases to be able to coerce (I am very far from assert- 
 that this is yet as true of the Church of Rome as it ought 
 to be*), and is obliged to enter into free competition with 
 
 * It is true now of the Church of Rome since the fall of the temporal power. 
 It cannot be too much insisted upon that if persons accept the doctrines of that 
 Church no state interference can save them, or ought to try and save them, from 
 the consequences. They that would be free must themselves strike the blow. 
 
394 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 other religious communities, her doctrines lose the only 
 power that Liberals need recognise as dangerous. And on 
 the other hand, it is not from Roman doctrines alone that 
 the present reaction is taking place, but from much of what 
 is called distinctively Protestant theology. The Thirty- 
 nine Articles fare in these days but little better than the 
 decrees of the Council of Trent. It is not that they are 
 untrue, but that they are obsolete. They cannot breathe 
 in the intellectual atmosphere which science creates. They, 
 and similar Protestant Confessions of Faith, belong to a 
 period of thought, a scheme of divinity, and a school of philo- 
 sophy, all of which are yielding to a new order of things, and 
 the removal of which has an intimate relation to democratic 
 progress. Therefore it is that religious truth presented 
 under these conditions wears a singularly unreal and unim- 
 pressive aspect to the working man, who has no sympathy, 
 and indeed no acquaintance, with the state of things from 
 which they come. A formulary like the Apostles' Creed 
 suits his comprehension, and meets his religious wants. 
 But disputes about the Real Presence hide away the thing 
 itself from the sight of men's eyes. Disputes about 
 justification by faith within the Church obscure divine 
 truth in the case of men who are endeavouring to justify 
 themselves by works without the Church upon a scale, and 
 with at least a temporary success, never before witnessed. 
 And so the effect of our religious teaching is, that we offer 
 to the man who lies plundered and dying upon the road, 
 not the wine and oil which are the healing balm of 
 humanity, but some patent medicine of our own, for which 
 we claim that it is the sole and universal remedy. This it 
 is which makes men feel that religion as presented to them 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 395 
 
 is so unreal, unpractical, inoperative, and unsuitable to 
 their lives and temptations. This is the secret of that pro- 
 test which they make in words so familiar to every minister 
 of religion " I have led a good life, and done no harm to 
 any one." In that perpetual controversy between the 
 clergyman and his poor parishioners, are we quite sure that 
 all the truth is on one side ? 
 
 3. Another source of theological weakness arises from 
 doctrines either false, or so perverted and " petrified" as to 
 become false to the people at large. I take first of all, 
 as profoundly repugnant to the moral convictions of the 
 demos, the doctrine of endless punishment as it is com- 
 monly held and taught. It is no part of the purpose of this 
 essay to discuss what is the truth of this or of any other 
 doctrine, merely as such, or indeed whether any view, of 
 whatever school of theology, which pretends to give an 
 exhaustive and satisfactory account of the moral conditions 
 of the future state, can have any pretensions to be styled 
 true. But I here record my emphatic testimony to the 
 fact that this doctrine is hated, and at the same time feared, 
 by the " common people " to an extent of which we have 
 little conception. The good-natured and amiable clergy- 
 man who preaches it from his pulpit, and tricks it out with 
 such rhetoric as his resources command, little knows what 
 harm he may be doing to some excitable and attentive 
 listener. The preacher himself holds it with a thousand 
 drawbacks and difficulties. He knows that he must take 
 into account the case of unbaptized children, of children 
 baptized but left in practical heathenism, of virtuous 
 heathen, and that (to him) hardest case of all, of men who 
 live in the practice of excellent morality without a belief 
 
39 6 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 in the Christian revelation. He knows, too, that there is at 
 least another aspect of the future life presented to us in the 
 New Testament. But his words fall in all their naked 
 simplicity perhaps upon the ears of men who are easily 
 moved by the pleadings of love ; but all whose notions of 
 manliness and dignity revolt at the thought of being coerced 
 by fear. Or more probably they fall upon the ears of some 
 one whom vice has converted into a coward. He goes 
 out a changed man, full of the terrors of the unknown 
 world. He believes himself to be in danger of hell-fire, and 
 as it is a most awful reality to him, he must needs warn his 
 fellow-workmen, with coarse importunity, of their common 
 danger, and preach to them the gospel of an almost uni- 
 versal damnation. These know their comrade but too well, 
 understand at once the paltry motive, the enfeebled morality, 
 the profound immorality, of the whole; and they know 
 that nine times out of ten he becomes within six months 
 as much a reprobate as ever. No wonder they hate the 
 religion of which they only see this parody ; and yet they 
 fear while they hate, because they are conscious that they 
 are living without God in the world. When persons talk 
 of the use of fear as an instrument of conviction, they 
 apparently forget that in the far more numerous cases 
 where fear does not convince it acts as one of the strongest 
 repelling forces that exist in human nature, and passes 
 invariably into an intensity of hatred and aversion. Cer- 
 tainly the defence of the doctrine of everlasting punishment 
 as a useful " economy " is the worst possible ground to take : 
 the individual is converted to a questionable religion, the 
 class is alienated from the highest and purest truths. I 
 know from experience that the instinctive dread of this 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 397 
 
 doctrine shuts the heart of many a dying and conscience- 
 stricken wretch against the gospel of love. Men must be 
 approached, not with a definite set of theological doctrines 
 upon such a vast and mysterious subject, but with (it is 
 difficult to find a suitable word) an idea, in which hope pre- 
 dominates and fear mingles, the fear of sinfulness working 
 out its own punishment in future ages, the hope of a work 
 to be continued, a life to be lived out, a character to be 
 developed, it may be a new chance to be allowed us, under 
 such conditions as shall be prescribed by the justice of God. 
 4. I pass on to notice two samples of the obstacles to the 
 spread of Christian truth arising respectively from the 
 intellectual and moral faithfulness of its advocates. Both 
 are so well known, and so frequently denounced, that I need 
 do no more than indicate the effect they produce on the 
 religious instinct of the demos. We know that the popular 
 sentiment of the Church, disguising a profound faithless- 
 ness under the garb of orthodoxy, has ever desired an out- 
 ward infallibility, by which it has sought to " conclude " all 
 theological progress. Instead of spreading out her sails to 
 meet, and escape by meeting, the approaching gale, the 
 ship of the Church, freighted with the precious cargo of 
 religious truth, has been anchored upon a lee shore by a 
 single cable the infallibility of Popes, or of Councils, or of 
 the Bible. In our own day and country we see the result 
 of this timid policy ; the doctrine of plenary inspiration 
 has broken like pack-thread before the rising gales of 
 scientific discovery and historical research, and in a moment 
 the good ship is tossing amid the breakers, " with much hurt 
 and damage not only of the lading and ship, but also of our 
 own lives." In plain words, the mass of mankind has been 
 
398 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 taught to believe that the Bible was not only incapable of 
 error, but was a sufficient guide in matters relating to 
 natural science ; and when first the real truth dawns upon 
 them, there is naturally a terrible revulsion. Men who 
 know at least as much geology as is contained in the pages of 
 Hugh Miller, or who have heard and taken note of the story 
 of Galileo contra Ecclesiam^ are enabled to hold and even 
 to preach this doctrine without much harm to themselves. 
 They are compelled to acknowledge difficulties, to recon- 
 cile varying truths, to make allowances, to fall back on 
 metaphor, or visions, or that last resource of theologians in 
 distress, the poetic genius of the Hebrew language. But 
 the men to whom this doctrine is preached have received 
 it in all simplicity of heart, and are incapable of under- 
 standing the refinements by which it is explained away. 
 To us it may seem astonishing that difficulties about the 
 scientific value of the book of Genesis should injure a 
 Christian's faith in the revelation contained in the New 
 Testament ; but an infidel street lecturer, as I myself know, 
 is perfectly aware that if he can start some such difficulty 
 by questions to us so absurd as " Who was the wife that 
 Cain married ? " he has seriously damaged the belief of his 
 bewildered hearers. Practically careless as they may be 
 about religion, they have nevertheless certain "idols," such 
 as the infallibility of the Bible or Sabbath-keeping, and if 
 these are broken, almost the last tie that binds them to 
 Christianity is broken also. And yet broken every idol in 
 the long run must be, because it is the creation of a timid 
 faithlessness, that regards merely visible consequences, takes 
 refuge in the letter rather than in the spirit, and believes in 
 the past without daring to hope for the future. 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 399 
 
 5. Closely allied with this is the moral defect to which I 
 have alluded. The one danger to which theology has always 
 been exposed, and to which it has not seldom succumbed, 
 is the temptation to divide religion from morality in the 
 supposed interests, and to meet the pressing wants, of the 
 former. At this very moment popular theories as to the 
 Atonement, the usual defence for the conduct and character 
 of the heroes of the Old Testament, much of the ordinary 
 views of religious graces and virtues, the hateful expres- 
 sion " mere morality," the unnatural and " inhuman" aspect 
 in which the history of religion in the Bible and in the 
 Church is presented to us, are painful evidences of what I 
 am asserting. " You seem to me," said a working man, " to 
 make God act like a very bad man." It is easy to say that 
 we can see at once the real disingenuousness of this remark, 
 and the obvious want of any searching interest in the subject 
 which it evinces. Still these are the men we have to deal 
 with, and this is what they think and say. And however 
 much the fault may be theirs, that does not take away our 
 responsibility. We assume towards them, as we are bound 
 to do, the position of teachers, and we preach to them a 
 religion which is the sternest rebuke of their lives and 
 beliefs. We must therefore be prepared to meet the jealous 
 scrutiny with which they will inevitably test our claims 
 upon their allegiance, and the fatal accuracy with which 
 they will fasten on the weak points in our teaching. And 
 because morality is common ground to us and them, there- 
 fore by such morality as they possess they will try the 
 religion which professes to be the expression of the divine 
 goodness. And thus, as ever, may we hope that the very 
 seriousness of the danger which menaces Christianity will 
 
400 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 prove its safeguard. For the alienation of the demos will 
 compel us to examine closely into the defective parts of 
 our system, in order that the people themselves may then 
 take their place in the Church, of which they have first of 
 all compelled the reformation. 
 
 The mention of the word reformation suggests one clos- 
 ing remark. It is sometimes applied with perfect propriety to 
 describe the religious change through which we are now pass- 
 ing. For there are two conditions necessary to a religious 
 reformation on a large scale : in the first place, a deep- 
 rooted alienation of the people, or of some powerful section 
 of the people, from the religion of the day, such as was 
 witnessed in the eras of Tetzel and Hoadley ; and, in the 
 second place, the rising of a new force from without 
 calculated powerfully to affect religious thought, such as 
 the revival of learning which preceded the Reformation, or 
 the triumph of civil and religious liberty which made the 
 Wesleyan movement possible. At this present moment 
 there is, as we have seen, a distinct alienation of the demos 
 from Christianity ; but as this does not now proceed, as it 
 did in the days of Luther and Wesley, from the popular 
 protest against moral corruption or practical infidelity 
 within the Church itself, we shall find that the new Reforma- 
 tion, though equally searching and thorough, will neverthe- 
 less assume a comparatively peaceful and gradual form.* 
 The second Reformation will be to the first much what 
 the Reform Bill of 1867 was to its predec ssor of 1832 
 
 * I am not sure of this now. At the close of the Franco-German war I 
 ventured to predict that the next war might possibly be a religious one, and 
 things have been tending in that direction ever since. Moreover, the morality 
 of the Churches may be as much below what is now possible for mankind as 
 it was before the Reformation. 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 40 1 
 
 Nevertheless, the " scientific mind," together with all the 
 other elements of progress, will kill many old dogmatic 
 formularies as effectually as the Hellenic view of life and 
 thought slew the mediaeval theology. The present 
 " Catholic " reaction in the Church of England will avail 
 ultimately to stem the current in England, just as much 
 and just as little as the Catholic revival, of which Ignatius 
 Loyola stands as the representative, did on the Continent. 
 Protestants and Catholics may indeed, and a sad sight it is 
 to see, continue their ancient controversies and try to breathe 
 life into worn-out disputes, but a power greater than both 
 is threatening to absorb them. When, for instance, 
 men of recognised ability and high official position 
 speak of the danger to which our " beloved Church" is 
 exposed from the doctrines or practices of the Ritualist 
 party, we seem to see that the instinct of statesmanship is 
 departed from the English Church. Israel and Judah 
 persist in fighting out their ancient border feuds, while the 
 armies of Assyria and Egypt are gathering upon the 
 frontiers. Let us hope that this somewhat ill-omened com- 
 parison may not be further illustrated by a Babylonish 
 captivity, as the last method of reuniting the Church and 
 taking away her idols. 
 
 We will however turn rather to the brighter side, and 
 proclaim that the religion of Christ is essential to the future 
 welfare of the democracy. I am as little disposed as any 
 man to regard with forebodings the great change of 
 1867, or to speak with anything but confidence of the 
 future. Nevertheless, no man, not absolutely a Liberal 
 fanatic, can disguise from himself that we are about to try 
 
 an experiment, new in the history of our country, new 
 
 2 C 
 
4O2 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 moreover in the history of the world. We are about to 
 intrust the destinies of this nation to a democracy com- 
 posed of " working men," as different as possible from the 
 Demos of Athens or the Plebs of Rome. Hard manual 
 labour, the ceaseless toil for daily bread, brings with it, 
 questionless, many restraining and ennobling influences, 
 but it brings with it also many palpable and most danger- 
 ous temptations. Men whose lot in life is so disposed have 
 but little time for self-education, for the exercise of quiet 
 thought, for elevating and purifying recreation. There is 
 an inevitable tendency to coarseness, to impatience of 
 spirit, to degrading amusements. All the ancient beauty 
 of thought and feeling that hallowed the commonest occu- 
 pation, that made princesses do the work of housemaids, 
 and swineherds act the part of gentlemen, has long ago 
 vanished ; and labour, while growing in worth, in power, 
 and in earnestness of purpose, has lost much of its ancient 
 grace in men's eyes, and something of its elevating and 
 beautifying association. And therefore God in His provi- 
 dence has given us the Christian religion, that a moral 
 influence more powerful than poetry, or art, or freedom 
 itself, may be brought to bear upon the " sons and 
 daughters of toil ;" may cheer and alleviate their lot, may 
 sanctify their daily work. These considerations will sug- 
 gest to us the direction in which the new Reformation 
 should be guided. By teaching religion as obedience to a 
 living Person whose work and character have been revealed 
 in history, we can appeal to the best instincts of the work- 
 ing man, his susceptibility of personal influence, his 
 enthusiastic loyalty towards those in whom he trusts, an 
 imagination easily interested, affections readily enlisted by 
 
The Church and the Working Classes. 403 
 
 the account of noble things well done and bravely suffered. 
 We must proclaim that Christ is Head and King not 
 merely of the Church, but of tne world ; that He has a 
 direct interest in scientific as in religious progress, in 
 civilisation as in evangelisation ; that, in a sense of which 
 a timid religiousness never dreamt, the kingdoms of this 
 world are become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ. 
 We must insist upon the truth that work is part of the reli- 
 gion which man owes to the King of men. We must hallow 
 the occupation of manual labour, just as the professions of 
 medicine or justice are hallowed, by a thousand Christian 
 associations. We must vindicate for mechanical toil the 
 same intimate connection with religious ideas that has ever 
 bound together religion and the calling of the shepherd or 
 the farmer ; and we must see in the factory, no less than in 
 the vineyard or the corn-field, a true picture of the eternal 
 relations between God and man. And we must look for- 
 ward, in however remote a future, to a state of things in 
 which it shall not seem unnatural or absurd to think of the 
 Church as having discovered America, or of the world as 
 having built Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Very vain and visionary as these dreams of the future 
 may appear to practical men, they are nevertheless akin to 
 the views that animate all the healthiest practical working 
 of the present day. Science, for instance, of whose arro- 
 gance divines speak so confidently, would be crushed by 
 the sense of its own ignorance in comparison with the 
 problems to be solved, if it were not sustained by the hope 
 of discovering the last secrets* of life and force. And 
 
 * So far as they can be discovered by human faculties. The limitation of 
 discovery in this life is an intimation of immortality. 
 
404 Reconciliation of Religion and Science. 
 
 exactly the same thing may be said of the spirit of the age 
 as seen in one who is in England its foremost represen- 
 tative. We can see that Mr Mill's sense of the folly and 
 weakness of human nature, his insight into human depravity 
 and wickedness, would afflict him with a mere blank despair 
 if he had not realised to himself a condition of society 
 towards which mankind is fitfully progressing ; and it is 
 precisely because of this that the philosopher of the nine- 
 teenth century can dedicate his time and thoughts to the 
 commonest practical questions, to the merest details of 
 legislation. Surely every consideration that Christian men 
 hold dear should impel us to the same practical work in the 
 same hopeful spirit. We are the " children of the prophets," 
 heirs of the boundless future in which their spirits dwelt, 
 of the gladdening and encouraging hopefulness by which 
 their hearts were consoled and animated. When all the 
 world is hoping, Christians must not dare not set the 
 example of despair. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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