REESE LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ; 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE 
 OF EXISTENCE 
 
GUESSES AT 
 
 THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS ON KINDRED SUBJECTS 
 
 BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "CANADA AND THE CANADIAN QUESTION," "THE 
 
 UNITED STATES," "ESSAYS ON QUESTIONS 
 
 OF THE DAT," ETC., ETC. 
 
 NEW EDITION WITH ADDITIONS 
 
 gork 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
 1898 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1896, 
 BY MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped December, 1896. Reprinted March, 
 May, 1897; July, 1898. 
 
 7 $-& 3 6" 
 
 tforfaoob 
 
 J. 8. Gushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
 Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 OF the papers in this volume three have 
 appeared before ; two in the North American 
 Review, one in the Forum, to the editors of 
 which, respectively, the writer's thanks are 
 due for their courtesy in permitting the repub- 
 lication. The writer has also once or twice 
 drawn on previous papers of his own. 
 
 For such of the essays as have appeared in 
 print some inquiries have been made. Those 
 who desire to read them again are probably 
 of the same mind as the writer, and with him 
 believe that there is no longer any use in 
 clinging to the untenable or in shutting our 
 eyes to that which cannot be honestly denied. 
 The educated world, and to a great extent the 
 uneducated world also, has got beyond the 
 point at which frank dealing with a tradi- 
 tional creed can be regarded as a wanton dis- 
 turbance of faith. 
 
 v 
 
Mi PREFACE 
 
 Liberal theologians have at least half re- 
 signed the belief in miracles, rationalizing 
 wherever they can and minimizing where that 
 process fails. Liberal theologians, and even 
 theologians by no means ranked as liberal, if 
 they are learned and open-minded, have given 
 up the authenticity and authority of Genesis. 
 With these they must apparently give up the 
 Fall, the Redemption, and the Incarnation. 
 After this, little is left of the ecclesiastical 
 creeds for criticism to destroy. 
 
 If there is anything which, amidst all these 
 doubts and perplexities, our nature tells us, it 
 is that our salvation must lie in our uncom- 
 promising allegiance to the truth. It is hoped 
 that nothing in these pages will be found fairly 
 open to the charge of irreverence or of want of 
 tenderness in dealing with the creed which is 
 still that of men who are the salt of the earth. 
 
 If much is, for the present, lost, let us re- 
 member that there is also much from which by 
 the abandonment of dogmatic tradition we are 
 relieved. If, on the one hand, the old argu- 
 ments for theism and immortality have failed 
 us, and the face of the Father in heaven is for 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 the moment veiled, on the other hand we are 
 set free from the belief that all who go not in 
 by the strait gate, that is, the greater part of 
 mankind, are lost for ever ; from belief in the 
 God of Dante, with his everlasting torture- 
 house ; from belief in the God of Predestina- 
 tion, who arbitrarily rejects half his creatures 
 and dooms them to eternal fire. That which 
 in a good sermon has most practical effect will 
 probably survive its ecclesiastical or theological 
 form. 
 
 The spirit in which these pages are penned is 
 not that of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports 
 despair of spiritual truth, but that of free and 
 hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is neces- 
 sary to clear by removing the wreck of that 
 upon which we can found our faith no more. 
 
 To resign untenable arguments for a belief 
 is not to resign the belief, while a belief bound 
 up with untenable arguments will share their 
 fate. 
 
 Where the conclusions are, or seem to be, 
 negative, no one will rejoice more than the 
 writer to see the more welcome view reasserted 
 and fresh evidence of its truth supplied. 
 
Vlll PREFACE 
 
 If, as our hearts tell us, there is a Supreme 
 Being, he cares for us ; he knows our perplex- 
 ities ; he has his plan. If we seek truth, he 
 will enable us in due time to find it. Whether 
 we find it cannot matter to him; it may con- 
 ceivably matter to him whether we seek it. 
 
 The reader will look for no attempt to dis- 
 cuss recondite questions, documentary or his- 
 torical. Nothing is attempted here beyond the 
 presentation of a plain case for a practical pur- 
 pose to the ordinary reader. 
 
 It may be thought presumptuous in a layman 
 to write on these subjects, though his interest 
 in them is as great as that of the clergy. 
 Would that the clergy could write with per- 
 fect freedom. 
 
 TORONTO, January, 1897. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE . . 1 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT . . 47 
 
 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 97 
 
 THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY . 135 
 
 MORALITY AND THEISM 189 
 
 ONE WORD MORE 245 
 
 ix 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF 
 EXISTENCE 
 

GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF 
 EXISTENCE 
 
 NEVEK before has the intellect of man been 
 brought so directly face to face with the mys- 
 tery of existence as it is now. Some veil of 
 religious tradition has always been interposed. 
 At the beginning of this century most minds 
 still rested in the Mosaic cosmogony and the 
 Noachic deluge. Greek speculation was free, 
 and its freedom makes it an object of extreme 
 interest to us at the present time. But it was 
 not intensely serious ; it was rather the intel- 
 lectual amusement of a summer day in Academe 
 beneath the whispering plane. 
 
 No one who reads and thinks freely can 
 doubt that the cosmogonical and historical 
 foundations of traditional belief have been 
 sapped by science and criticism. When the 
 crust shall fall in appears to be a question of 
 time, and the moment can hardly fail to be one 
 3 
 
4 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 of peril ; not least in the United States, where 
 education is general and opinion spreads rapidly 
 over a level field, with no barriers to arrest its 
 sweep. 
 
 Ominous symptoms already appear. Almost 
 all the churches are troubled with heterodoxy 
 and are trying clergymen for heresy. Quite as 
 significant seems the growing tendency of the 
 pulpit to concern itself less with religious 
 dogma and more with the estate of man in 
 his present world. It is needless to say what 
 voices of unbelief outside the churches are heard 
 and how high are the intellectual quarters 
 from which they come. Christian ethics still 
 in part retain their hold. So does the Church 
 as a social centre and a reputed safeguard of 
 social order. But faith in .the dogmatic creed 
 and the history is waxing faint. Ritualism 
 itself seems to betray the need of a new stimu- 
 lus and to be in some measure an aesthetic sub- 
 stitute for spiritual religion. 
 
 Dogmatic religion may be said to have re- 
 ceived a fatal wound three centuries ago, when 
 the Ptolemaic system was succeeded by the 
 Copernican, and the real relation of the earth 
 
GUESSES AT THE MIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 5 
 
 to the universe was disclosed. Dogmatic reli- 
 gion is geocentric. It assumes that our earth is 
 the centre of the universe, the primary object 
 of divine care, and the grand theatre of divine 
 administration. The tendency was carried to 
 the height of travesty when an insanely ultra- 
 montane party at Rome meditated, as, if we 
 may believe Dr. Pusey, it did, the declaration 
 of a hypostatic union of the Pope and the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
 The effect of the blow dealt by Copernicus 
 was long suspended, but it is fully felt now 
 that the kingdom of science is come, and the 
 bearings of scientific discovery are generally 
 known. When daylight gives place to star- 
 light we are transported from the earth to the 
 universe, and to the thoughts which the con- 
 templation of the universe begets. " What is 
 man, that Thou art mindful of him ? " is the 
 question that then arises in our minds. Is it 
 possible that so much importance as the creeds 
 imply can attach to this tiny planet and to the 
 little drama of humanity ? We might be half 
 inclined to think that man has taken himself 
 too seriously and that in the humorous part of 
 
6 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 our nature, overlooked by philosophy, is to be 
 found the key to his mystery. The feeling is 
 enhanced when we consider that we have no 
 reason for believing that the evidence of our 
 senses is exhaustive, however much Science, 
 with her telescopes, microscopes, and spectro- 
 scopes, may extend their range. We cannot 
 tell that we are not like the sightless denizens of 
 the Mammoth Cave, unconsciously living in the 
 midst of wonders and glories beyond our ken. 
 
 Nor has the natural theology of the old 
 school suffered from free criticism much less 
 than revelation. Optimism of the orthodox 
 kind seems no longer possible. Christianity 
 itself, indeed, is not optimistic. It represents 
 the earth as cursed for man's sake, ascribing 
 the curse to primeval sin, and the prevalence 
 of evil in the moral world as not only great but 
 permanent, since those who enter the gate of 
 eternal death are many, while those who enter 
 the gate of eternal life are few. Natural theol- 
 ogy of the optimistic school and popular reli- 
 gion have thus been at variance with each 
 other. The old argument from design is now 
 met with the answer that we have nothing 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 7 
 
 with which to compare this world, and there- 
 fore cannot tell whether it was possible for 
 it to be other than it is. Mingled with the 
 signs of order, science discloses apparent signs 
 of disorder, miscarriage, failure, wreck, and 
 waste. Our satellite, so far as we can see, 
 is either a miscarriage or a wreck. Natural 
 selection by a struggle for existence, protracted 
 through countless ages, with the painful ex- 
 tinction of the weaker members of the race, 
 and even of whole races, is hardly the course 
 which benevolence, such as we conceive it, 
 combined with omnipotence, would be ex- 
 pected to take. If in the case of men suffer- 
 ing is discipline, though this can hardly be 
 said when infants die or myriads are indis- 
 criminately swept off by plague, in the case 
 of animals, which are incapable of discipline 
 and have no future life, it can be nothing 
 but suffering ; and it often amounts to tor- 
 ture. The evil passions of men, with all the 
 miseries and horrors which they have pro- 
 duced, are a part of human nature, which 
 itself is a part of creation. Through the 
 better parts of human nature and what there 
 
8 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 is of order, beneficence, majesty, tenderness, 
 and beauty in the universe, a spirit is felt 
 appealing to ours, and a promise seems to be 
 conveyed. But if omnipotence and benevo- 
 lence are to meet, it must apparently be at a 
 point at present beyond our ken. These are 
 the perplexities which obtrude themselves on 
 a scientific age. 
 
 What is man ? Whence comes he ? Whither 
 goes he? In the hands of what power is 
 he? What are the character and designs of 
 that power? These are questions which, now 
 directly presented to us, are of such over- 
 whelming magnitude that we almost wonder 
 at the zeal and heat which other questions, 
 such as party politics, continue to excite. 
 The interest felt in them, however, is daily 
 deepening, and an attentive audience is assured 
 to any one who comes forward with a solution, 
 however crude, of the mystery of existence. 
 Attentive audiences have gathered round Mr. 
 Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Balfour, each 
 of whom has a theory to propound. Mr. 
 Kidd's work has had special vogue, and the 
 compliments which its author pays to Pro- 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 9 
 
 fessor Weismann have been reciprocated by 
 that luminary of science. 
 
 Mr. Drummond undertakes to reconcile, and 
 more than reconcile, our natural theology and 
 our moral instincts to the law of evolution. 
 His title, The Ascent of Man, is not new ; 
 probably it has been used by more than one 
 writer before ; nor is he the first to point 
 out that the humble origin of the human 
 species, instead of dejecting, ought to encour- 
 age us, since the being who has risen from 
 an ape to Socrates and Newton may hope to 
 rise still higher in the future, if not by 
 further physical development, which physi- 
 ology seems to bar by pronouncing the brain 
 unsusceptible of further organic improvement, 
 yet by intellectual and moral effort. Mr. 
 Drummond treats his subject with great brill- 
 iancy of style and adorns it with very in- 
 teresting illustrations. Not less firmly than 
 Voltaire's optimist persuaded himself that 
 this was the best of all possible worlds, he 
 has persuaded himself that evolution was the 
 only right method of creation. He ulti- 
 mately identifies it with love. The cruelties 
 
10 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 incidental to it he palliates with a compla- 
 cency which sometimes provokes a smile. All 
 of them seem to him comparatively of little 
 account, inasmuch as the struggle for exist- 
 ence was to lead up to the struggle for the 
 existence of others, in other words, to the 
 production of maternity and paternity, with 
 the altruism, as he terms it, or, as we have 
 hitherto termed it, the affection, attendant 
 on those relations. To reconcile us to the 
 sufferings of the vanquished in the struggle 
 he dilates on "the keenness of its energies, 
 the splendour of its stimulus, its bracing effect 
 on character, its wholesome lessons through- 
 out the whole range of character." "With- 
 out the vigorous weeding of the imperfect," 
 he says, "the progress of the world would 
 not have been possible." Pleasant reading 
 this for " the imperfect " ! 
 
 " If fit and unfit indiscriminately had been allowed to 
 live and reproduce their kind, every improvement which 
 any individual might acquire would be degraded to the 
 common level in the course of a few generations. Prog- 
 ress can only start by one or two individuals shooting 
 ahead of their species; and their life-gain can only be 
 conserved by their being shut off from their species 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 11 
 
 or by their species being shut off from them. Unless 
 shut off from their species their acquisition will either 
 be neutralized in the course of time by the swamping 
 effect of inter-breeding with the common herd, or so 
 diluted as to involve no real advance. The only chance 
 for evolution, then, is either to carry off these improved 
 editions into 'physiological isolation,' or to remove the 
 unimproved editions by wholesale death. The first of 
 these two alternatives is only occasionally possible ; the 
 second always. Hence the death of the unevolved, or 
 of the un adapted in reference to some new and higher 
 relation with environment, is essential to the perpetua- 
 tion of a useful variation." 
 
 This reasoning, with much more to the 
 same effect, is plainly a limitation of omnip- 
 otence. It supposes that the ruling power 
 of the universe could attain the end only at 
 the expense of wholesale carnage and suffer- 
 ing, facts which cannot be glozed over, and 
 which, as the weakness was not the fault 
 of the weak, but of their Maker, are in 
 apparently irreconcilable conflict with our 
 human notions of benevolence and justice. 
 
 This, however, is not all. We might, com- 
 paratively speaking, be reconciled to Mr. Drum- 
 mond's plan of creation if all the carnage and 
 suffering could be shown to be necessary or 
 
12 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 even conducive to the great end of giving birth 
 to humanity and love. But Mr. Drummond 
 himself has to admit that natural selection by 
 no means invariably works in the direction of 
 progress ; that in the case of parasites its result 
 has been almost utter degradation. The phe- 
 nomena of parasites and entozoa, with the need- 
 less torments which they inflict, appear irrecon- 
 cilable with any optimistic theory of the direc- 
 tion of suffering and destruction to a paramount 
 and compensating end. Not only so, but all the 
 extinct races except those which are in the line 
 leading up to man and may be numbered among 
 his progenitors, must apparently, upon Mr. 
 Drummond's hypothesis, have suffered and 
 perished in vain. That "a price, a price in 
 pain, and assuredly sometimes a very terrible 
 price," has been paid for the evolution of the 
 world, after all is said, Mr. Drummond admits 
 to be certain. But he holds it indisputable 
 that even at the highest estimate the thing 
 bought with that price was none too dear, inas- 
 much as it was nothing less than the present 
 progress of the world. So he thinks we " may 
 safely leave Nature to look after her own ethic." 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 13 
 
 Probably we might if all the pain was part of 
 the price. But we are distinctly told that it 
 was not ; so that there is much of it in which, 
 with our present lights or any that Mr. Drum- 
 mond is able to afford us, men can hardly help 
 thinking that they see the ruthless operation of 
 blind chance. Nature, being a mere abstraction, 
 has no ethic to look after ; nor has Evolution, 
 which is not a power, but a method, though it 
 is personified, we might almost say deified, by 
 its exponent. But if there is not some higher 
 authority which looks after ethic, what becomes 
 of the ethic of man? The most inhuman of 
 vivisectors, if he could show that his practice 
 really led, or was at all likely to lead, to know- 
 ledge, would have a better plea than, in the 
 case of suffering and destruction which have 
 led to nothing, the philosophy of evolution can 
 by itself put in for the Author of our being. 
 
 Mr. Drummond's treatise, like those of other 
 evolutionists, at least of the optimistic school, 
 assumes the paramount value of the type, and 
 the rightfulness of sacrificing individuals with- 
 out limit to its perfection and preservation. 
 But this assumption surely requires to be made 
 
14 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 good, both to our intellects and to our hearts. 
 The ultimate perfection and preservation of 
 the type cannot, so far as we see, indemnify 
 the individuals who have perished miserably in 
 the preliminary stages. Far from having an 
 individual interest in the evolution of the type, 
 the sufferers of the ages before Darwin had not 
 even the clear idea of a type for their consola- 
 tion. Besides, what is the probable destiny of the 
 type itself ? Science appears to tell us pretty 
 confidently that the days of our planet, how- 
 ever many they may be, are numbered, and that 
 it is doomed at last to fall back into primeval 
 chaos, with all the types which it may contain. 
 Evolutionists, in their enthusiasm for the 
 species, are apt to bestow little thought on the 
 sentient members of which it consists. "Man " 
 is a mere generalization. This they forget, 
 and speak as if all men personally shared the 
 crown of the final heirs of human civilization. 
 The following passage is an instance : 
 
 "Science is charged, be it once more recalled, with 
 numbering Man among the beasts, and levelling his body 
 with the dust. But he who reads for himself the history 
 of creation as it is written by the hand of Evolution will 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 15 
 
 be overwhelmed by the glory and honour heaped upon this 
 creature. To be a Man, and to have no conceivable suc- 
 cessor ; to be the fruit and crown of the long-past eter- 
 nity, and the highest possible fruit and crown ; to be the 
 last victor among the decimated phalanxes of earlier ex- 
 istences, and to be nevermore defeated ; to be the best 
 that Nature in her strength and opulence can produce ; 
 to be the first of the new order of beings who, by their 
 dominion over the lower world and their equipment for 
 a higher, reveal that they are made in the Image of God 
 to be this is to be elevated to a rank in Nature more 
 exalted than any philosophy or any poetry or any theol- 
 ogy has ever given to man. Man was always told that 
 his place was high ; the reason for it he never knew till 
 now ; he never knew that his title deeds were the very 
 laws of Nature, that he alone was the Alpha and Omega 
 of Creation, the beginning and the end of Matter, the 
 final goal of Life." 
 
 To be the last victor among the decimated 
 phalanxes of earlier existences, and to be 
 nevermore defeated, is, to say the least, a dif- 
 ferent sort of satisfaction from the glorious 
 triumph of love in which the process of Evolu- 
 tion, according to Mr. Drumrnond, ends, and 
 in virtue of which he proclaims that Evolu- 
 tion is nothing but the Involution of love, the 
 revelation of Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Life 
 returning to itself. It even reminds us a little 
 
16 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 of the unamiable belief that in the next world 
 the sight of the wicked in torment will be a 
 part of the enjoyment of the righteous. Per- 
 haps there is also a touch of lingering geocen- 
 tricism in this rapturous exaltation of Man. 
 Evolution can give us no assurance that there 
 are not in other planets creatures no less 
 superior to man than he is to the lower tribes 
 upon this earth. 
 
 The crown of evolution in Mr. Drummond's 
 system is the evolution of a mother, accom- 
 panied by that of a father, which, however, 
 appears to be inferior in degree. The chapters 
 on this subject are more than philosophy ; they 
 are poetry, soaring almost into rhapsody. 
 "The goal," Mr. Drummond says, "of the 
 whole plant and animal kingdoms seems to 
 have been the creation of a family which the 
 very naturalist has to call mammals." The 
 following passage is the climax : 
 
 "But by far the most vital point remains. For we 
 have next to observe how this bears directly on the theme 
 we set out to explore the Evolution of Love. The pas- 
 sage from mere Otherism, in the physiological sense, to 
 Altruism, in the moral sense, occurs in connection with 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 17 
 
 the due performance of her natural task by her to whom 
 the Struggle for the Life of Others is assigned. That 
 task, translated into one great word, is Maternity 
 which is nothing but the Struggle for the Life of Others 
 transfigured to the moral sphere. Focussed in a single 
 human being, this function, as we rise in history, slowly 
 begins to be accompanied by those heaven-born psychical 
 states which transform the femaleness of the older order 
 into the Motherhood of the new. When one follows 
 Maternity out of the depths of lower Nature, and beholds 
 it ripening in quality as it reaches the human sphere, its 
 character, and the character of the processes by which it 
 is evolved, appear in their full divinity. For of what is 
 maternity the mother? Of children? No; for these are 
 the mere vehicle of its spiritual manifestation. Of affec- 
 tion between female and male ? No ; for that, contrary 
 to accepted beliefs, has little to do in the first instance 
 with sex-relations. Of what then? Of Love itself, of 
 Love as Love, of Love as Life, of Love as Humanity, of 
 Love as the pure and undefiled fountain of all that is 
 eternal in the world. In the long stillness which follows 
 the crisis of Maternity, witnessed only by the new and 
 helpless life which is at once the last expression of the 
 older function and the unconscious vehicle of the new, 
 Humanity is born." 
 
 The father seems to be here shut out from 
 the apotheosis ; though why, except from a sort 
 of philosophic gallantry, it is difficult to dis- 
 cern. The man who toils from morning till 
 
18 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 night to support wife and child surely has not 
 less to do with it than the woman who feeds 
 the child from her breast. 
 
 Somewhat paradoxical as it may seem, Mr. 
 Drummond maintains that love did not come 
 from lovers. It was not they that bestowed 
 this gift upon the world. It was the first 
 child, "till whose appearance man's affection 
 was non-existent, woman's was frozen ; and 
 man did not love the woman, and woman did 
 not love the man." Apparently, then, in a 
 childless couple there can be no love. Here, 
 according to Mr. Drummond, is the birth of 
 Altruism, for which all creation has travailed 
 from the beginning of time. This appears to 
 him a satisfactory solution of the problem of 
 existence. Yet the races which have been sac- 
 rificed to the production of altruism, if they 
 were critical and could find a voice, might ask 
 if there was anything totally unselfish in the 
 indulgence of the sexual passion, which after 
 all plays its part in the matter, and of which 
 the birth of a child is the unavoidable, not 
 perhaps always the welcome, consequence. To 
 the mother the child is necessary for a time 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 19 
 
 in order to relieve her of a physical secretion, 
 while it repays her care by its endearments, 
 the enjoyment of which is altruistic only on 
 the irrational hypothesis that affection and 
 domesticity are not parts of self. To both 
 parents, in the primitive state at all events, 
 children are necessary as the support and pro- 
 tection of old age. Beautiful and touching 
 parental affection is ; pure altruism it is not. 
 Very admirable, as a part of man's estate, it 
 is ; but we can hardly accept its appearance 
 as a sufficient justification of all that has been 
 suffered in the process of evolution or as a 
 solution of the mystery of existence. It is 
 curious that Mr. Drummond should place the 
 happiest scene of female development and all 
 that depends on it in the country where 
 divorces are most common and the increase of 
 their number is most rapid. He may have 
 noted, too, that in that same country and 
 among the most highly civilized races families 
 are proportionately small and fewer women 
 become mothers. 
 
 Then, put the mammalia as high as we will 
 in the scale of being, they are mortal. Evo- 
 
20 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 lution tells us complacently that death is 
 necessary to the progress of the species. It 
 may be so ; but what is that to the individ- 
 ual ? The more intense and exalted affection, 
 whether conjugal or parental, is, the more 
 heartrending is the thought of the parting 
 which any day and any one of a thousand 
 accidents may bring, while it is sure to come 
 after a few years. Pleasure and happiness 
 are different things. Pleasure may be en- 
 joyed for the moment without any thought 
 of the future. The condemned criminal may 
 enjoy it, and, it seems, does not uncommonly 
 enjoy it in eating his last meal. But happi- 
 ness appears to be hardly possible without a 
 sense of security, much less with annihilation 
 always in sight. The oracle to which we 
 are listening has told us nothing about a life 
 beyond the present. It is needless to say 
 how much the character of that question has 
 been altered since the corporeal origin and 
 relations of our mental faculties, and of what 
 theology calls the soul, have been apparently 
 disclosed by science. . The thought of con- 
 scious existence without end is one which 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 21 
 
 makes the mind, as it were, ache, and under 
 which imagination reels { yet the thought of 
 annihilation is not welcome, nor have we up 
 to this time distinctly faced it. If ever it 
 should be distinctly faced by us, its influence 
 on life and action can hardly fail to be felt. 
 Is the evolutionary optimist himself content 
 to believe that nothing will survive the wreck, 
 inevitable, if science is to be trusted, of this 
 world ? 
 
 To say that a particular solution of a diffi- 
 culty is incomplete is not to say that the 
 difficulty is insoluble or even to pronounce 
 the particular solution worthless. Mr. Drum- 
 mond's solution may be incomplete, and yet 
 it may have value. The only moral excel- 
 lence of which we have any experience or 
 can form a distinct idea, is that produced by 
 moral effort. If we try to form an idea of 
 moral excellence unproduced by effort, the 
 only result is seraphic insipidity. This may 
 seem to afford a glimpse of possible recon- 
 ciliation between evolution and our moral 
 instincts. If upward struggle towards perfec- 
 tion, rather than perfection created by fiat, 
 
22 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 is the law of the universe, we may see in it, 
 at all events, something analogous to the law 
 of our moral nature. 
 
 Mr. Kidd's theory is that man owes his 
 progress to his having acted against his 
 reason in obedience to a supernatural and 
 extra-rational sanction of action which is 
 identified with religion. The interest of the 
 individual and that of society, Mr. Kidd 
 holds to be radically opposed to each other. 
 Reason bids the individual prefer his own 
 interest. The supernatural and extra-rational 
 sanction bids him prefer the interest of so- 
 ciety, which is assumed to be paramount, and 
 thus civilization advances. The practical con- 
 clusion is that the churches are the greatest 
 instruments of human progress. 
 
 What does Mr. Kidd mean by reason ? He 
 appears to regard it as a special organ or 
 faculty, capable of being contradicted by 
 another faculty, as one sense sometimes for a 
 moment contradicts another sense, or as our 
 senses are corrected by our intelligence in 
 the case of the apparent motion of the sun. 
 But our reason comprises all the mental ante- 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 23 
 
 cedents of action. It is the man's intellectual 
 self. To be misled by it when weak or per- 
 verted is possible; to act consciously against 
 it is not. Simeon Stylites obeys it as well as 
 Sardanapalus or Jay Gould. He believes, how- 
 ever absurdly, that the Deity accepts the sacri- 
 fice of self-torture, and that it will be well for 
 the self-torturer in the sum of things. His 
 self-torture is therefore in accordance with 
 his individual reason, though it is far enough 
 from being in accordance with reason in the 
 abstract. A supernatural sanction, supposing 
 its reality to be proved, becomes a part of the 
 data on which reason acts, or rather it becomes, 
 for the occasion, the sole datum; and to obey 
 it, instead of being unreasonable, is the most 
 reasonable thing in the world. Misled by his 
 reason, we repeat, to any extent a man may be, 
 both in matters speculative and practical; but 
 he can no more think or act outside of his 
 reason, that is, the entirety of his impressions 
 and inducements, than he can jump out of his 
 skin. What Mr. Kidd seems at bottom to 
 mean is that we may and do, with the best 
 results, prefer social to individual, and moral to 
 
24 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 material, objects. But this is a totally different 
 thing from acting against reason, and while it 
 requires a certain elevation of character, it 
 requires no extra-rational motive. 
 
 Mr. Kidd speaks of "reason" and the ca- 
 pacity for acting with his fellows in society as 
 " two new forces which made their advent with 
 man." He cannot mean, what his words might 
 be taken to imply, that the rudiments of reason 
 are not discernible in brutes, or that sociability 
 does not prevail in the herd, the swarm, and 
 the hive. To the herd, the swarm, and the 
 hive sacrifices of the individual animal or insect 
 are made like those of the individual man to 
 his community. Is there supernatural or extra- 
 rational sanction in the case of the deer, the 
 ant, or the bee ? 
 
 Altruism, acting against reason with a super- 
 natural and extra-rational sanction, is, accord- 
 ing to Mr. Kidd, the motive power of progress. 
 But this altruism of which we hear so much, 
 what is it ? Man is not only a self -regardant, 
 but a sympathetic, domestic, and social being. 
 He is so by nature, just as he is a biped or a 
 mammal. How he became so the physiologist 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 25 
 
 and psychologist must be left to explain. But 
 a sympathetic, domestic, and social being he is, 
 and in gratifying his sympathetic, domestic, or 
 social propensities, he is no more altruistic, if 
 altruism means disregard of self, than he is 
 when he gratifies his desire of food or motion. 
 Self is not disregarded, because self is sympa- 
 thetic, domestic, and social. The man of feel- 
 ing identifies himself with his kind; the father 
 with his children ; the patriot with his state ; 
 and they all look in various forms for a return 
 of their affection or devotion. The man in 
 each of the cases goes out of his narrower self, 
 but he does not go out of self. Show us the 
 altruist who gives up his dinner to benefit the 
 inhabitants of the planet Mars, and we will 
 admit the existence of altruism in the sense in 
 which the term seems to be used by Mr. Kidd 
 and some other philosophers of to-day. 
 
 Reason, as defined by Mr. Kidd, appears to 
 be a faculty which tells us what is desirable, 
 but does not tell us what is possible. "The 
 lower classes of our population," he says, " have 
 no sanction from reason for maintaining exist- 
 ing conditions." "They should in self-interest 
 
26 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 put an immediate end to existing social condi- 
 tions." Why, so they would if they had the 
 power, supposing their condition and the causes 
 of it to be what Mr. Kidd represents. It is 
 not altruism that prevents them, but necessity; 
 the same necessity which constrains people of 
 all classes to submit to evils of various kinds, 
 submission to which, if unnecessary, would be 
 idiotic. That poverty and calamity have been 
 endured more patiently in the hope of a com- 
 pensation hereafter is true, but makes no differ- 
 ence as to the reasonableness of the endurance. 
 From a comparison of the two sentences just 
 quoted, it would appear that Mr. Kidd identi- 
 fies reason with self-interest, and, therefore, with 
 something antagonistic to society. Whereas, in 
 a sociable being, conformity to the laws of society 
 is reason. "The interests of the social organism 
 and of the individual," says Mr. Kidd, "are and 
 must remain antagonistic." Why so in the case 
 of a man any more than in that of a bee ? 
 
 What is the " supernatural and extra-rational 
 sanction " in virtue of which man acts against 
 the dictates of his reason, and by so acting 
 makes progress ? Religion. What is religion ? 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 27 
 
 "A religion is a form of belief providing an ultra- 
 rational sanction for that large class of conduct in 
 the individual where his interests and the interests of 
 the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the 
 former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the 
 general interests of the evolution which the race is 
 undergoing." 
 
 Here is a definition of religion without men- 
 tion of God. The supernatural sanction is re- 
 ligion, and religion is a supernatural sanction. 
 This surely does not give us much new light. 
 But we are further told that " there can never 
 be such a thing as a rational religion." Super- 
 stition, such as the worship of Moloch, that of 
 Apis, that of the Gods of Mexico, or mediaeval 
 religion in its debased form, is not rational, 
 nor will our calling it supernatural or extra- 
 rational make it an influence above nature and 
 reason, or prove it to have been the motive 
 power of progress, which, on the contrary, it 
 has retarded and sometimes, as in the case of 
 Egypt, killed outright. But religions which 
 in their day have been instruments of progress, 
 and among which may perhaps be numbered, 
 at a grade lower than Christianity, Moham- 
 medanism and Buddhism, have owed their 
 
28 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 character to their rational adaptation to human 
 nature and their consecration of rational effort. 
 They are counterparts, not of the polytheistic 
 state religion of Greece, but of the Socratic 
 philosophy, which had a divinity of its own, 
 the impersonation of its morality, and paid 
 homage to the state polytheism only by sacri- 
 ficing a cock to ^Esculapius. Christianity, as 
 it came from the lips of Jesus of Nazareth, 
 was, like the philosophy of Socrates, unliturgi- 
 cal and unsacerdotal ; its liturgy was one sim- 
 ple prayer. " Supernatural " is a convenient 
 word, but it by implication begs the question, 
 and when applied to superstitions is most fal- 
 lacious. " Infranatural," or something imply- 
 ing degradation and grossness, not elevation 
 above the world of sense, would be the right 
 expression. Christian ethics, as distinguished 
 from dogma, are not supernatural ; they are 
 drawn from, and adapted to, human nature. 
 
 It is disappointing to find that a theorist 
 who makes everything depend on the in- 
 fluence of religion should not have attempted 
 to ascertain precisely what religion is and what 
 is its origin, or to distinguish from each other 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 29 
 
 the widely diverse phenomena which bear the 
 name. His sanction itself calls for a sanction 
 and calls in vain. 
 
 When a hypothesis will not bear inspection 
 in itself, time is wasted in applying it, or test- 
 ing its applications, to history. But Mr. Kidd 
 says of the first fourteen centuries after Christ : 
 
 " So far, fourteen centuries of the history of our civiliza- 
 tion had been devoted to the growth and development of 
 a stupendous system of other-worldliness. The conflict 
 against reason had been successful to a degree never be- 
 fore equalled in the history of the world. The super- 
 rational sanction of conduct had attained a strength and 
 universality unknown in the Roman and Greek civiliza- 
 tions. The State was a divine institution. The ruler 
 held his place by divine right, and every political office 
 and all subsidiary power issued from him in virtue of the 
 same authority. Every consideration of the present was 
 over-shadowed in men's minds by conceptions of a future 
 life, and the whole social and political system and the in- 
 dividual lives of men had become profoundly tinged with 
 the prevailing ideas." 
 
 Of all the actions by which mediaeval 
 civilization was moulded and advanced, what 
 percentage does Mr. Kidd suppose to have 
 been performed under religious influence or 
 from a spiritual motive ? How many feudal 
 
30 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 kings and lords how many, even, of the 
 ecclesiastical statesmen of the Middle Ages 
 does he suppose to have been carrying on a 
 conflict with reason for objects other than 
 worldly and under the inspiration of divine 
 right? How much resemblance to the 
 character of the Author of Christianity 
 would he have found among the rulers and 
 the active spirits of the community or even 
 of the Church ? How much among the occu- 
 pants of the Papal throne itself? 
 
 Other critics have pointed out that Mr. 
 Kidd, to say the least, overstates his case in 
 saying that Christianity was directly opposed 
 by all the intellectual forces of the time. So 
 close was the affinity of Roman Stoicism to 
 it that one eminent French writer has under- 
 taken to demonstrate the influence of Chris- 
 tianity on the writings of the Roman Stoics. 
 It had intellectual champions as soon as it 
 had intellectual assailants, and their arguments 
 were addressed to reason. The pessimistic 
 melancholy of a falling empire and the revolt 
 from a decrepit polytheism were also intel- 
 lectual or partly intellectual forces on its side. 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 31 
 
 In the recent concessions of political power 
 by the upper classes to the masses, Mr. Kidd 
 finds an example of altruism prevailing over 
 reason. That something has in the course 
 of this revolution occasionally prevailed over 
 reason might be very plausibly maintained. 
 Whether it was anything supernatural or ex- 
 tra-rational seems very doubtful. In Great 
 Britain, for instance, the extension of the 
 franchise in 1832 was the result of a conflict 
 between classes and parties carried on in a 
 spirit as far as possible from altruistic and 
 pushed to the very verge of civil war. After- 
 wards, the Whig leader, finding himself politi- 
 cally becalmed, brought in a new Reform Bill 
 to raise the wind, and was outbid by Derby 
 and Disraeli, whose avowed object was to 
 "dish the Whigs." Of altruistic self-sacrifice 
 it would be difficult in the whole process to 
 find much trace. 
 
 If this branch of the inquiry were to be 
 pursued, it might be worth while for Mr. Kidd 
 to consider the case of Japan, the progress of 
 which of late has been so marvellously rapid. 
 It appears that in Japan, while the lower 
 
32 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 classes have a superstition at once very gross 
 and very feeble, the upper classes, by whom 
 the movement has been initiated and carried 
 forward, have no genuine religion, but at most 
 official forms, such as could not sustain action 
 against self-interest. 
 
 The cause of human progress has been the 
 desire of man to improve his condition, ever 
 mounting as, with the success of his efforts, 
 fresh possibilities of improvement were brought 
 within his view. It is in this respect he spe- 
 cially differs from the brutes. Mechanical evo- 
 lution and selection by mere struggle for exist- 
 ence apply to man in his rudimentary state or 
 in his character as an animal. Of humanity, 
 desire of improvement is the motive power. 
 There is no need, therefore, of importing the 
 language, fast becoming a jargon, of evolution 
 into our general treatment of history. Bees, 
 ants, and beavers are marvels of nature in 
 their way. But they show no desire for im- 
 provement, and make no effort to improve. 
 Man alone aspires. The aspiration is weak in 
 the lower races of men, strong in the higher. 
 Of its existence and of the different degrees 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 33 
 
 in which it exists, science may be able to give 
 an account. But it certainly is not the off- 
 spring of unreason, nor can it be aided in any 
 way by superstition or by any rejection of truth. 
 
 A work on the foundations of religious be- 
 lief by the leader of a party in the British 
 House of Commons, who is by some marked 
 out as a future Prime Minister, shows, like 
 the theological and cosmogonical essays of 
 Mr. Gladstone, the increasing interest felt 
 about these problems, not only by divines and 
 philosophers, but by men of the world. In 
 Mr. Balfour's case the union of speculation 
 with politics is the more striking, inasmuch 
 as his work is one of abstruse philosophy. It 
 is by metaphysical arguments that he under- 
 takes to overthrow systems opposed to reli- 
 gion, and to rebuild the dilapidated edifice on 
 new and surer foundations. He is thus tread- 
 ing in the steps of Coleridge, the great reli- 
 gious philosopher of the English Church. It 
 is to a limited circle of readers that he appeals. 
 Ordinary minds find metaphysics "out of 
 their welkin," to use the words of the Clown 
 
34 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 in Twelfth Night. They venerate from afar a 
 study which has engaged and still engages the 
 attention of powerful intellects. But they are 
 themselves lost in the region in which "tran- 
 scendental solipsism " has its home. They 
 are unable to see at what definitive conclu- 
 sions, still more, at what practical conclusions, 
 such as might influence conduct, philosophy 
 has arrived. Metaphysic seems to them to be 
 in a perpetual state of flux. "The theories 
 of the great metaphysicians of the past," Mr. 
 Balf our says, " are no concern of ours." They 
 would surely concern us, however, if, like suc- 
 cessive schools of science, they had made some 
 real discoveries and left something substantial 
 behind them. But as Mr. Balfour plaintively 
 tells us, the system of Plato, notwithstanding 
 the beauty of its literary vesture, has no effect- 
 ual vitality ; our debts to Aristotle, though 
 immense, "do not include a tenable theory 
 of the universe " ; in the Stoic metaphysics 
 "nobody takes any interest." The Neo-Pla- 
 tonists were mystics, and in mysticism Mr. 
 Balfour recognizes an undying element of hu- 
 man thought, but "nobody is concerned about 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 35 
 
 their hierarchy of beings connecting through 
 infinite gradations the Absolute at one end 
 of the scale with matter at the other." The 
 metaphysics of Descartes "are not more liv- 
 ing than his physics " ; neither " his two sub- 
 stances, nor the single substance of Spinoza, 
 nor the innumerable substances of Leibnitz 
 satisfy the searcher after truth." Had these 
 several systems been investigations of matters 
 in which real discovery was possible, each of 
 them surely would have discovered something, 
 and a certain interest in each of them would 
 remain. But they have flitted like a series 
 of dreams, or a succession of kaleidoscopic 
 variations. Mr. Balfour doubts "whether any 
 metaphysical philosopher before Kant can be 
 said to have made contributions to this sub- 
 ject [a theory of nature] which at the present 
 day need to be taken into serious account," 
 and he presently proceeds to indicate that 
 "Kant's doctrines, even as modified by his 
 successors, do not provide a sound basis for an 
 epistemology of nature." Mr. Balfour seems 
 even to think that philosophy is in some de- 
 gree a matter of national temperament. He 
 
36 GUESSES AT THE KIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 says that the philosophy of Kant and other 
 German philosophers will never be thoroughly 
 received so as to form standards of reference 
 in any English-speaking community "until 
 the ideas of these speculative giants are thor- 
 oughly re-thought by Englishmen and repro- 
 duced in a shape which ordinary Englishmen 
 will consent to assimilate." "Under ordinary 
 conditions," he says, "philosophy cannot, like 
 science, become international." This seems 
 as much as saying that philosophy is still not 
 a department of science, or a real investiga- 
 tion resulting in truths evident to all the 
 world alike, but a mode of looking at things 
 which may vary with national peculiarities 
 of mind and character. 
 
 Locke, as Mr. Balf our reminds us, toward 
 the end of his great work assures his readers 
 that he " suspects that natural philosophy is 
 not capable of being made science," and 
 serenely draws from his admissions the moral 
 that " as we are so little fitted to frame theo- 
 ries about this present world we had better 
 devote our energies to preparing for the next." 
 Perhaps we might amend the suggestion by 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 37 
 
 saying that most of us had better devote our 
 energies to the search for attainable truth and 
 to the improvement of our character and es- 
 tate in this world as a preparation for the 
 world to come. A man so metaphysical in 
 his cast as Emerson is obliged to say that 
 we know nothing of nature or of ourselves, 
 and that man has not " taken one step towards 
 the solution of the problem of his destiny." 
 
 Before the relation of mind and body had 
 been proved, and while the mind was sup- 
 posed to have a divine origin of its own and 
 to be a sojourner in the body as a temporary 
 home or prison-house, it was perhaps easier to 
 believe, as did the mediaeval philosophers, that 
 in the mind there was a source of knowledge 
 about the universe apart from the perceptions 
 of sense, and that the world might be studied, 
 not by observation, but by introspection, and 
 even through the analysis of language as the 
 embodiment of ideas. Transcendental Solip- 
 sism and a world constructed out of catego- 
 ries, would, under those conditions, have their 
 day. Something of the mediaeval disposition 
 seems to lurk in the effort to demonstrate 
 
38 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 that the material world has no existence apart 
 from our perceptions. Be this true or not, it 
 can make little difference in our theological or 
 spiritual position. The fact must be the same 
 in the case of a dog as in the case of a man. 
 Most of us, therefore, will be content to 
 look on while Mr. Balfour's metaphysical 
 blade, flashing to the right and left, disposes 
 of " Naturalism " on the one hand and of 
 Transcendentalism on the other. We have 
 only to put in a gentle caveat against any 
 idea of driving the world back through gen- 
 eral scepticism to faith. Scepticism, not only 
 general, but universal, is more likely to be 
 the ultimate result, and any faith which is 
 not spontaneous, whether it be begotten of 
 ecclesiastical pressure or intellectual despair, 
 is, and in the end will show itself to be, 
 merely veiled unbelief. The catastrophe of 
 Dean Mansel, who, while he was trying in 
 the interest of orthodoxy, to cut the ground 
 from under the feet of the Rationalist, him- 
 self inadvertently demonstrated the impossi- 
 bility of believing in God, was an awful 
 warning to the polemical tactician. 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 39 
 
 Mr. Balfour gets on more practical ground 
 and comes more within the range of general 
 interest when he proceeds to set up authority 
 apart from reason as a foundation of theologi- 
 cal belief. Above reason authority must ap- 
 parently be if it is apart from it, for wherever 
 authority has established itself reason must 
 give way, while it has no means of constrain- 
 ing the submission of authority. No one could 
 be less inclined to presumptuous rationalism 
 than Butler, who, in his work, which though 
 in partial ruin is still great, with noble frank- 
 ness accepts reason as our only guide to truth. 
 In combating the objections against the evi- 
 dences of Christianity, Butler says that " he 
 expresses himself with caution lest he should 
 be mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed 
 the only faculty we have to judge concerning 
 anything, even revelation." What is defer- 
 ence to authority but the deference to su- 
 perior knowledge or wisdom which reason 
 pays, and which, if its grounds, intellectual 
 or moral, fail or become doubtful, reason will 
 withdraw? This is just as true with regard 
 to the authority of tradition as with regard 
 
40 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 to that of a living informant or adviser ; just 
 as true with regard to the authority of a 
 Church as with regard to that of an individ- 
 ual teacher or guide. Authority, Mr. Bal- 
 four says, as the term is used by him, " is in 
 all cases contrasted with reason and stands 
 for that group of non-rational causes, moral, 
 social, and educational, which produces its 
 results by psychic processes other than rea- 
 son." A writer may affix to a term any sense 
 he pleases for his personal convenience ; but 
 the reasoning of the psychic process of defer- 
 ence to authority, though undeveloped, and, 
 perhaps, till it is challenged, unconscious, 
 whether its cause be moral, social, or edu- 
 cational, is capable of being presented in a 
 rational form, and cannot, therefore, be rightly 
 called non-rational. There is, of course, a sort 
 of authority, so styled, which impresses itself 
 by means other than rational, such as religious 
 persecution, priestly thaumaturgy, spiritual ter- 
 rorism, or social tyranny. But in this Mr. 
 Balfour would not recognize a source of truth 
 or foundation of theological belief. A phi- 
 losopher who proposes to rebuild theology, 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 41 
 
 wholly or in part, on the basis of authority, 
 seems bound to provide us with some analy- 
 sis of authority itself, and some test by which 
 genuine authority may be distinguished from 
 ancient and venerable imposture. Papal in- 
 fallibility, which Mr. Balfour cites as an 
 instance, does undoubtedly postulate the sub- 
 mission of reason to authority ; but it proved 
 the necessity of that submission by the exter- 
 mination of the Albigenses and the holocausts 
 of the Inquisition. It is still ready, as its 
 Encyclical and Syllabus intimate, to sustain 
 the demonstration by the help of the secular 
 arm. 
 
 So in the case of habit. Our common actions 
 have no doubt become by use automatic, as our 
 common beliefs are accepted without investiga- 
 tion. But if they are challenged, reasons for 
 them can be given. A man eats without think- 
 ing, but if he is called upon, he can give a good 
 reason for taking food. A soldier obeys the 
 word of command mechanically, but if he were 
 called upon, he could give a good reason for his 
 obedience. 
 
 Mr. Balfour scarcely lets us see distinctly 
 
42 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 what is his view of belief in miracles, which 
 must play an important part in any reconstruc- 
 tion or review of the basis of theology; an all- 
 important part, indeed, if Paley was right in 
 saying, as he did in reply to Hume, that there 
 was no way other than miracle by which God 
 could be revealed. He seems inclined to repre- 
 sent the objections to them as philosophical 
 rather than historical, and such as a sounder 
 philosophy may dissipate, intimating that ra- 
 tionalists have approached the inquiry with a 
 predetermination u to force the testimony of 
 existing records into conformity with theories 
 on the truth or falsity of which it is for phi- 
 losophy not history to pronounce." This might 
 be said with some justice of Strauss's first Life 
 of Jesus, and perhaps of some other German 
 philosophies of the Gospel history. But the 
 current objections to miracles, with which a 
 theologian has to deal, are clearly of a historical 
 kind. A miracle is an argument addressed 
 through the sense to the understanding, which 
 pronounces that the thing done is supernatural 
 and proof of the intervention of a higher power. 
 It seems inconceivable, if the salvation of the 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 43 
 
 world were to depend on belief in miracles, 
 that Providence should have failed to provide 
 records for the assurance of those who were 
 not eye-witnesses equal in certainty to the evi- 
 dence afforded eye-witnesses by sense. Are 
 the records of the miracles which we possess 
 unquestionably authentic and contemporane- 
 ous ? Were the reporters beyond all suspicion, 
 not only of deceit, but of innocent self-delusion ? 
 Were they, looking to the circumstances of 
 their time and their education, likely to be duly 
 critical in their examination of the case ? Is 
 there anything in the internal character of the 
 miracles themselves, the demoniac miracles for 
 example, to move suspicion, it being impossible 
 to think that Providence would allow indispen- 
 sable evidences of vital truth to be stamped 
 with the marks of falsehood ? What is the 
 weight of the adverse evidence derived from 
 the silence of external history and the apparent 
 absence of the impression which might have 
 been expected to be made by prodigies such as 
 miraculous darkness and the rising of the dead 
 out of their graves ? These questions, daily 
 pressed upon us by scepticism, are strictly 
 
44 GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 historical, and will have to be treated by 
 restorers of theological belief on strictly histori- 
 cal grounds. 
 
 Mr. Balf our recognizes mysticism as an " un- 
 dying element in human thought." That it is 
 not yet dead is evident. Minds not a few have 
 taken refuge in various forms of it. But un- 
 dying it surely is not. The mystic, however 
 exalted, merely imposes on himself. He creates 
 by a subtle sophistication of his own mind the 
 cloudy object of his faith and worship. He has 
 himself written his Book of Mormon, and hid- 
 den it where he finds it. In that direction 
 there can be no hope of laying the foundation 
 of a new theological belief. 
 
 There can be no hope, apparently, of laying 
 new foundations for a rational theology in any 
 direction excepting that of the study of the 
 universe and of humanity as manifestations of 
 the supreme power in that spirit of thorough- 
 going intellectual honesty of which Huxley, 
 who has just been taken from us, is truly said 
 to have been an illustrious example. That we 
 are made and intended to pursue knowledge is 
 as certain as that we are made and intended to 
 
GUESSES AT THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENCE 45 
 
 strive for the improvement of our estate, and 
 we cannot tell how far or to what revelations 
 the pursuit may lead us. If Revelation is 
 lost, Manifestation remains, and great mani- 
 festations appear to be opening on our view. 
 Agnosticism is right, if it is a counsel of 
 honesty, but ought not to bo heard if: it is a 
 counsel of despair. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD 
 TESTAMENT 
 
 AT the English Church Congress held in 
 1895 at Norwich, Professor Bonney, Canon of 
 Manchester, made a bold and honourable at- 
 tempt to cast a millstone off the neck of Chris- 
 tianity by frankly renouncing belief in the 
 historical character of the earlier books of the 
 Bible. 
 
 " I cannot deny," he said, " that the increase 
 of scientific knowledge has deprived parts of 
 the earlier books of the Bible of the historical 
 value which was generally attributed to them 
 by our forefathers. The story of the creation 
 in Genesis, unless we play fast and loose either 
 with words or with science, cannot be brought 
 into harmony with what we have learned from 
 geology. Its ethnological statements are im- 
 perfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. The 
 stories of the flood and of the Tower of Babel 
 K 49 
 
50 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 are incredible in their present form. Some his- 
 torical element may underlie many of the tradi- 
 tions in the first eleven chapters of that book, 
 but this we cannot hope to recover." 
 
 With the historical character of the chapters 
 relating to the creation, Canon Bonney must 
 resign his belief in the Fall of Adam ; with his 
 belief in the Fall of Adam he must surrender 
 the doctrine of the Atonement, as connected 
 with that event, and thus relieve conscience of 
 the strain put upon it in struggling to recon- 
 cile vicarious punishment with our sense of 
 justice. He will also have to lay aside his 
 belief in the Serpent of the Temptation, and in 
 the primeval personality of Evil. 
 
 In Lux Mundi, a collection of essays edited 
 by the Reverend Principal of Pusey House, 
 and understood to emanate from the High 
 Church quarter, we find plain indications that 
 the unhistoric character, so frankly recognized 
 by the learned Canon in the opening chapters 
 of Genesis, is recognized in other parts of Old 
 Testament history by High Churchmen, who, 
 having studied recent criticism, feel like the 
 Canon, that there is a millstone to be cast off. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 51 
 
 One of these essayists admits that the "battle 
 of historical record cannot be fought on the 
 field of the Old Testament as it can on that of 
 the New " ; that " very little of the early 
 record can be securely traced to a period near 
 the events"; and that "the Church cannot 
 insist upon the historical character of the earli- 
 est records of the ancient church in detail as 
 she can on the historical character of the Gos- 
 pels or the Acts of the Apostles." The same 
 writer seems ready to entertain the view that 
 the "books of Chronicles represent a later 
 and less historical version of Israel's history 
 than that given in Samuel and Kings," and that 
 they " represent the version of that history which 
 had become current in the priestly schools." 
 " Conscious perversion " he will not acknow- 
 ledge, but in the theory of " unconscious idealiz- 
 ing" of history he is willing, apparently, to 
 acquiesce. Inspiration, he thinks, is consistent 
 with this sort of "idealizing," though it 
 excludes conscious deception or pious fraud. 
 Conscious deception or pious fraud no large- 
 minded and instructed critic of primeval records 
 would be inclined to charge. But "ideal" is 
 
52 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 apparently only another name for " mythical," 
 and it is difficult to see how myths can in any 
 sense be inspired, or why, if the records are in 
 any sense inspired, the Church should not be 
 able to insist on their historical character. " In 
 detail " is a saving expression ; but the details 
 make up the history, and if the truth of the 
 details cannot be guaranteed, what is our guar- 
 antee for the truth of the whole ? Human testi- 
 mony, no doubt, may sometimes fail in minor 
 particulars, while in the main account of the 
 matter it is true. But is it conceivable that 
 the Holy Spirit, in dictating the record of God's 
 dealings with mankind for our instruction in 
 the way of life, should simulate the defects of 
 human evidence ? 
 
 A veil which in all the orthodox Churches 
 hung before the eyes of free inquiry when 
 they were turned on the origin and estate of 
 man is removed by the Canon's renuncia- 
 tions. The present writer, as a student at 
 college, attended the lectures of Dr. Buck- 
 land, a pioneer in geology ; and he remem- 
 bers the desperate shifts to which the lecturer 
 was driven in his efforts to reconcile the facts 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 53 
 
 of his science with the Mosaic cosmogony, 
 the literal truth of which he did not venture 
 to impugn. By a " day " Dr. Buckland said, 
 Moses meant a geological period, though the 
 text says that each day was made up of a 
 morning and an evening, while the Deca- 
 logue fixes the sense by enjoining the observ- 
 ance of the seventh day as that on which 
 the Creator rested after the six days' labour 
 of creation. How the professor dealt with 
 fossil records of geological races and the 
 appearance of death in the world before the 
 fall of man, the writer does not now remem- 
 ber. It is not very long since a preacher 
 before an educated audience could meet the 
 objection to the Mosaic deluge arising from 
 the position of stones in the mountains of 
 Auvergne, which such a cataclysm must have 
 swept away, by the simple expedient of af- 
 firming that when the deluge was over, the 
 stones had been restored to their places by 
 miracle. Nay, were not Mr. Gladstone's great 
 intellectual powers the other day exerted to 
 prove that the Creator, in dictating to Moses 
 the account of the creation, had come won- 
 
54 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 derfully near the scientific truth and almost 
 anticipated the nebular hypothesis? 
 
 That the Bible does not teach science apol- 
 ogists are now ready to proclaim. But the 
 fact is that it does teach science, cosmo- 
 gonical science at least, and that its teach- 
 ings have been disproved. 
 
 From the conceptions of science, geocen- 
 tricism, derived from the Mosaic cosmogony, 
 may have been banished, but over those of 
 theology its cloud still heavily hangs. The 
 consecrated impression has survived the dis- 
 tinct belief, and faith shrinks from the theo- 
 logical revolution which the abandonment of 
 the impression would involve. 
 
 Faith takes refuge in the substitution of fig- 
 urative and symbolical for literal truth. This 
 is Origen over again with his system of alle- 
 gorical interpretation as a universal solvent of 
 moral difficulties in Scripture. The refuge is 
 surely little better than a subterfuge. The 
 writer of a primeval narrative, unconscious of 
 astronomy, geology, or physiology, believed in 
 the literal truth of his legend. He had no 
 idea of allegory or symbol. When he said 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 55 
 
 six days of creation, he meant days and not 
 seons. Paradise, the Trees of Life and Know- 
 ledge, the intercourse of God in human form 
 with men, the Fall, the longevity of the patri- 
 archs, the Noachic deluge, the miraculous ori- 
 gin of the rainbow, were to him literal facts. 
 If it was from the Holy Spirit that these 
 narratives emanated, how can the Holy Spirit 
 have failed to let mankind know that in real- 
 ity they were allegories ? How could it allow 
 them to be received as literal truths, to mis- 
 lead the world for ages, to bar the advance of 
 science, and, when science at last prevailed, to 
 discredit revelation by the exposure ? Besides, 
 to maintain the symbolical truths of Genesis, 
 is almost as hard as to maintain its literal 
 truth. What symbolical truth is there in the 
 order of creation now disproved by science, or 
 in the description of the cosmic system and 
 the relations of the sun and moon to our 
 planet? What symbolic truth is there in the 
 Fall of Man, and how does it designate the 
 rise of man from the brute, which science 
 shows him originally to have been, to the level 
 of civilized humanity? 
 
56 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 The history of every natio'n begins with 
 myth. A primeval tribe keeps no record, and 
 a nation in its maturity has no more recollec- 
 tion of what happened in its infancy than a 
 man of what happened to him in his cradle. 
 It is needless to say that the first book of 
 Livy is a tissue of fable, though the Romans 
 were great keepers of records and very matter- 
 of-fact as a people. When the age of reflec- 
 tion arrives and the nation begins to speculate 
 on its origin, it gives itself a mythical founder, 
 a Theseus, a Romulus, or an Abraham, and 
 ascribes to him its ancestral institutions or cus- 
 toms. In his history also are found the keys 
 to immemorial names and the origin of myste- 
 rious or venerated objects, the Ruminal Fig- 
 tree or the tomb of Abraham. It is a rule 
 of criticism that we cannot by any critical 
 alembic extract materials for history out of 
 fable. If the details of a story are fabulous, 
 so is the whole. If the details of Abraham's 
 story the appearances of the Deity to him, 
 so strangely anthropomorphic, the miraculous 
 birth of his son when his wife was ninety years 
 old, his adventures with Sarah in Egypt and 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 57 
 
 afterwards in Gerar, evidently two versions of 
 the same legend, the sacrifice of his son ar- 
 rested by the angel, with the episode of Lot, 
 the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, and 
 the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt 1 
 are plainly unhistorical, the whole story must 
 be relegated to the domain of tribal fancy. 
 We cannot make a real personage out of un- 
 realities or fix a place for him in unrecorded 
 time. 
 
 That the alleged record is of a date posterior 
 by many centuries to the events, and there- 
 fore no record at all, plainly appears from the 
 mention of Kings of Israel in Genesis (xxxvi. 
 31). No reason has been shown for suppos- 
 ing that the passage is an interpolation, while 
 the suggestion that it is prophetic is extrava- 
 gant. It stamps the date of the book, like 
 
 1 In the case of the metamorphosis of Lot's wife, we have 
 the origin of the legend still clearly before us in the pillars 
 or needles of salt, at Usdum, near the southwest corner of 
 the Dead Sea, which sometimes bear a resemblance to the 
 human form. The natural peculiarities of the Dead Sea 
 region are pretty evidently the source of this whole circle 
 of legend. See Andrew D. White's most interesting work, 
 The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Vol. 
 II., chap, xviii. 
 
58 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 the mention of the death of Moses in Deu- 
 teronomy, to get rid of which efforts equally 
 desperate are made. The words of Genesis 
 xii. 6, u the Canaanite was then in the land," 
 show that the book was written when the 
 Canaanite had long disappeared, and the words 
 of Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10, " there arose not a 
 prophet in Israel since like unto Moses," imply 
 that the book was written after the rise of a 
 line of other prophets. Moreover the writer 
 always speaks of Moses in the third person. 
 These things were noticed by critics long ago, 
 but the eyes of faith, in England and America 
 at least, have been shut. The canon of Sir 
 George Cornewall Lewis, limiting the trust- 
 worthiness of oral tradition to a single cen- 
 tury, may be too rigid ; but we certainly 
 cannot trust oral tradition for such a period 
 as that between the call of Abraham and the 
 Kings, especially when, the alleged events 
 being miraculous, an extraordinary amount of 
 evidence is necessary to justify belief. 
 
 The figure of the patriarch Abraham, a typi- 
 cal sheikh, as well as the father of Israel, is 
 exceptionally vivid, and his history is excep- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 59 
 
 tionally dramatic. It is needless to say that 
 the narrative contains episodes of striking 
 beauty, such as the meeting of the steward 
 with Rebekah, the scene of Hagar and her 
 child nearly perishing in the wilderness, and 
 the sacrifice of Isaac. But to regard Abra- 
 ham as a real founder, not only of a nation, 
 but of the Church, and as the chosen medium 
 of communication between God and man, 
 sound criticism will no longer allow us; and 
 sound criticism, like genuine science, is the 
 voice of the Spirit of Truth. A writer in 
 Lux Mundi, already quoted, avows his belief 
 that "the modern development of historical 
 criticism is reaching results as sure, where 
 it is fairly used, as scientific inquiry." He 
 significantly reminds churchmen of the warn- 
 ing conveyed by the name of Galileo. Why 
 should we any longer cling to that which, 
 whatever it may have been to the men of a 
 primeval tribe, is to us a low and narrow con- 
 ception of the Deity ? Why should we force 
 ourselves to believe that a Being who fills 
 eternity and infinity became the guest of a 
 Hebrew sheikh ; entered into a covenant with 
 
60 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 the sheikh's tribe, to the exclusion of the rest 
 of the human race ; and as the seal of the 
 covenant ordained the perpetuation of a bar- 
 barous tribal rite ? There have been bibli- 
 olaters so extreme as to wish even converted 
 Jews to continue the practice to which the 
 promise was mysteriously annexed. Tribalism 
 may attach inordinate value to genealogies 
 as well as to ancestral rites, but can we im- 
 agine the Author of the universe limiting his 
 providential regard and his communication of 
 vital truth to his creatures by tribal lines ? 
 Every tribe is the chosen people of its own 
 god ; enjoys a monopoly of his favour ; is up- 
 held by him against the interest of other na- 
 tions, and especially protected by him in war. 
 It is he who gives it victory, and if stones 
 fall or are hurled on the enemy retreating 
 through a rocky pass, it is he who casts them 
 down (Joshua x. 11). Christianity is the 
 denial of Jewish tribalism, proclaiming that 
 all nations have been made of one blood to 
 dwell together on the earth, and are sharers 
 alike in the care of Providence. Of the bad 
 effects of a conception of God drawn from the 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 61 
 
 imagination of Jewish tribalism, the least is 
 the waste of money and effort in desperate 
 attempts to convert the Jews. 
 
 Of the history of the other patriarchs the 
 texture is apparently the same as that of 
 the history of Abraham. They are mythical 
 fathers of a race, a character which extends 
 to Ishmael and Esau. In fact the chapters 
 relating to them are full of what, in an ordi- 
 nary case, would be called ethnological myth. 
 Of contemporary or anything like contem- 
 porary record, even supposing the Pentateuch 
 to have been written by Moses, there can be 
 no pretence. It is thus in the absence of 
 anything like evidence that we have been 
 called upon to accept such incidents as the 
 bodily wrestling of Jehovah with Jacob, and 
 the appearance to Jacob in a dream of an 
 angel who is the organ of a supernatural com- 
 munication about the speckles of the rams or 
 he-goats. Most picturesque and memorable, 
 no doubt, are the characters of Esau, the typi- 
 cal father of the hunter tribe, and of Jacob, 
 in whose unscrupulous and successful cunning 
 we have a picture such as the anti-Semite 
 
62 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 would now draw of his enemy, the financial 
 Jew. These chapters are full of legends con- 
 nected with fanciful interpretations of names, 
 such as Jehovah-Jireh (Genesis xxii. 14) ; 
 fanciful accounts of immemorial monuments, 
 such as Jacob's pillar ; or of tribal customs, 
 such as that of refraining from a particular 
 sinew because it had been touched and made 
 to shrink by Jehovah in wrestling with Jacob. 
 Extraordinary simplicity is surely displayed 
 by the commentators who appeal to the 
 custom as evidence of the historic event. 
 
 Much labour has been spent in efforts to 
 identify the Pharaoh of the Exodus and to fix 
 the date of that event and its connection 
 with Egyptian history. Still more labour has 
 been spent in tracing the route of the Israel- 
 ites through the wilderness and explaining 
 away the tremendous difficulties of the narra- 
 tive. What if the whole is mythical ? There 
 is a famine in Palestine. The patriarch sends 
 his ten sons, each with an ass and a sack, 
 across the desert to buy food in Egypt. Pro- 
 visions must have been furnished them for 
 their journey, and of what they bought they 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 63 
 
 must have consumed not a little on their 
 journey home. This seems improbable, nor 
 was it very likely that the ten should strike 
 the exact place where their brother Joseph 
 was in power. Of the poetic character of 
 the story of Joseph, with its miraculous 
 dreams and their interpretations, there surely 
 can be no doubt. Yet upon the story of 
 Joseph and his brethren the whole history of 
 the captivity in Egypt and the Exodus ap- 
 parently hangs. We might almost renounce 
 the task of analyzing the rest of the nar- 
 rative the attempt of the Egyptian rulers 
 to extirpate the Hebrews by the strange com- 
 mand to the midwives when they might have 
 taken a shorter and surer course ; the contest 
 in thaumaturgy between the magicians of 
 Jehovah and those of Egypt; the plagues 
 sent upon the helpless people of Egypt to 
 make their ruler do that which Omnipotence 
 might at once have done by its fiat ; the ex- 
 traordinary multiplication of the Hebrews, 
 whose adult males, in spite of the destruction 
 of their male children, amount to six hundred 
 thousand, a number which implies a total 
 
64 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 population of more than two millions ; their 
 sudden appearance as an armed host though 
 they had just been represented as the unresist- 
 ing bondsmen of the Egyptians ; their wander- 
 ings for forty years within the narrow limits 
 of the Sinaitic peninsula, where, though the 
 region is desert, they find food and water 
 not only for themselves but for their innu- 
 merable flocks and herds ; their construction 
 of a sumptuous tabernacle where materials 
 or artificers for it could not have been 
 found ; the plague of fiery serpents which 
 was sent among them and the brazen serpent 
 by looking on which they were healed ; the 
 miraculous destruction of the impious oppo- 
 nents of an exclusive priesthood ; the giants 
 of Canaan ; the victories gained over native 
 tribes by the direct interposition of Heaven ; 
 the strange episode of Balaam and his collo- 
 quy with his ass ; the stopping of the sun 
 and moon that Israel might have time for 
 the pursuit and slaughter of his enemies. 
 This last incident alone seems enough to 
 stamp the legendary character of the whole. 
 In vain we attempt to reduce the miracle, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 65 
 
 which would imply a disturbance of the 
 entire solar system, to a mere prolongation of 
 the daylight. The Old Testament is al- 
 together geocentric, and not merely in the 
 phenomenal sense. The sun and moon are 
 made "for lights in the firmament of the 
 heaven to give light on the earth," and with 
 them is coupled the creation of the stars. 
 The writer of the book of Joshua cites the 
 book of Jasher as evidence of the miracle. 
 Was the book of Jasher inspired? Could an 
 inspired writer need or rest on the evidence 
 of one who was uninspired? 
 
 Whether any sojourn of the Hebrews in 
 Egypt or any real connection with that coun- 
 try is denoted by the visit of Abraham to 
 Egypt and afterwards by the story of the 
 Exodus, it is for Egyptologists to determine. 
 Nothing certainly Egyptian seems to be 
 traceable in Hebrew beliefs or institutions. 
 Of the appearance of Hebrew forms on Egyp- 
 tian monuments, Egyptian conquest would 
 appear to give a sufficient explanation. The 
 history of the Exodus is connected with the 
 account of the institution of the Passover, 
 
66 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 and analogy may lead us to surmise that 
 national imagination has been busy in explain- 
 ing the origin of an immemorial rite. 
 
 As to the date and sources of the Penta- 
 teuch and the other historical books there is 
 a flux of learned hypothesis. But the ques- 
 tions of what documentary materials a book 
 was composed, and whether it was composed 
 in the reign of Josiah or at the time of the 
 captivity, do not concern us here. It is 
 enough that the book has no pretension to 
 authenticity or to a date within many cen- 
 turies of the events. Let it be observed that 
 the Church still tenders the Pentateuch to the 
 people as the books of Moses, though a 
 learned churchman will now hardly be found 
 to maintain that Moses was the writer. 
 
 We are, then, in no way bound to believe 
 that God so identified himself with a fa- 
 voured tribe as to license it to invade a num- 
 ber of other tribes which had done it no 
 wrong, to slaughter them and take possession 
 of their land. We are in no way bound to 
 believe that he, by the mouth of Moses, re- 
 buked his chosen people for saving alive the 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 67 
 
 women and children of the Midianites and 
 bade them kill every male among the little 
 ones and every woman that had known man 
 (Numbers xxxi. 17) ; or that he commanded 
 them to slay, not only man, woman, and 
 child, but the dumb animals, everything that 
 breathed, in a captured city. To the objec- 
 tions raised by humanity against the slaughter 
 of the Canaanites, Christian apologists have 
 made various and, as one of their number 
 admits, not very consistent replies. While 
 Bishop Butler holds that divine command in 
 itself constituted morality, Mozley, the But- 
 ler of our day, holds that the divine command 
 could not constitute morality had not the 
 general morality of the people been on that 
 level. Some say that in conquering Canaan 
 the Israelites did but recover their own, a 
 plea which, even if it had not been ousted 
 by prescription, would be totally inconsistent 
 with the account of the sojourning of Abra- 
 ham and of his purchase of a plot of land. 
 Others maintain that, having been driven by 
 force from Egypt, they had a right to help 
 themselves to a home where they could find 
 
68 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 it, and to put all the existing inhabitants to 
 the sword. The bequest of Noah is also 
 pleaded. But at last the apologist has to 
 fall back upon the simple command of the 
 Almighty, which is justified on the ground 
 that the Canaanites were idolaters, they never 
 having heard of the true God. 
 
 Such examples as the slaughter of the 
 Canaanites, the killing of Sisera, the assassi- 
 nation of Eglon, the hewing of Agag in 
 pieces by Samuel before the Lord, Elijah's 
 massacre of the prophets of Baal, the hang- 
 ing of Haman with his ten sons commem- 
 orated in the hideous feast of Purim, have, 
 it is needless to say, had a deplorable effect 
 in forming the harsher and darker parts of 
 the character which calls itself Christian. 
 They are responsible in no small degree for 
 murderous persecutions, and for the extirpa- 
 tion or oppression of heathen races. The dark 
 side of the Puritan character in particular is 
 traceable to their influence. Macaulay men- 
 tions a fanatical Scotch Calvinist whose writ- 
 ings, he says, hardly bear a trace of acquaint- 
 ance with the New Testament. Scotch Cal- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 69 
 
 vinism itself has in fact ethically in it not a 
 little of the Old Testament. 
 
 Jael, when she decoyed her husband's ally 
 into her tent and slew him while he was rest- 
 ing trustfully beneath it, broke in the most 
 signal manner the sacred rule of Arab hospi- 
 tality, as well as the ordinary moral law. 
 The comment of orthodoxy upon this is : " If 
 we can overlook the treachery and violence 
 which belong to the age and country, and 
 bear in mind Jael's ardent sympathies with 
 the oppressed people of God, her faith in the 
 right of Israel to possess the land in which 
 they were now slaves, her zeal for the glory 
 of Jehovah as against the gods of Canaan, and 
 the heroic courage and firmness with which she 
 executed her deadly purpose, we shall be ready 
 to yield to her the praise which is her due." 1 
 The extenuating motives supplied by the com- 
 mentator are not to be found in the text. To 
 reconcile us to the assassination of Eglon, a 
 distinction is drawn between God's providential 
 order and his moral law, the providential order 
 ordaining what the moral law would forbid. 
 1 The Speaker's Commentary, ad loc. 
 
70 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 Perhaps nothing in the Old Testament is 
 more instinct with fanatical tribalism or more 
 revolting than the praise of Rahab, the harlot 
 of Jericho, who secretes the spies of the rob- 
 ber tribe which is coming to destroy her 
 country, and who, though a traitress, has a 
 place of honour as a heroine in one of the 
 genealogies of Jesus. 
 
 The writer heard the other day a very 
 beautiful Christian sermon on the purity of 
 heart in virtue of which good men see God. 
 But the lesson of the day, read before that 
 sermon, was the history of Jehu. Jehu, a 
 usurper, begins by murdering Joram, the son 
 of his master Ahab, king of Israel, and 
 Ahaziah, the king of Judah, neither of whom 
 had done him any wrong. He then has Jeze- 
 bel, Ahab's widow, killed by her own servants. 
 Next he suborns the guardians and tutors of 
 Ahab's seventy sons in Samaria to murder 
 the children committed to their care and 
 send the seventy heads to him in baskets to 
 be piled at the gate of the city. Then he 
 butchers the brethren of Ahaziah, king of 
 Judah, with whom he falls in on the road, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 71 
 
 two and forty in number, for no specified or 
 apparent crime. On his arrival at Samaria 
 there is more butchery. Finally he entraps 
 all the worshippers of Baal, by an invitation 
 to a solemn assembly, and massacres them 
 to a man. At the end of this series of 
 atrocities the Lord is made to say to him, 
 " Because thou hast done well in executing 
 that which is right in mine eyes and hast 
 done unto the house of Ahab all that was in 
 my heart, thy children unto the fourth gen- 
 eration shall sit on the throne of Israel." 
 Jehu had undoubtedly done what was in the 
 heart of the Jehovist party and right in its 
 eyes. But between the sensuality of the 
 Baalite and the sanguinary zealotry of the 
 Jehovist it might not have been very easy 
 to choose. 
 
 David is loyal, chivalrous, ardent in friend- 
 ship, and combines with adventurous valour 
 the tenderness which has led to our accept- 
 ing him as the writer of some of the Psalms. 
 So far, he is an object of our admiration, 
 due allowance for time and circumstance 
 being made. But he is guilty of murder and 
 
72 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 adultery, both in the first degree ; he puts to 
 death with hideous tortures the people of a 
 captured city ; on his death-bed he bequeaths 
 to his son a murderous legacy of vengeance ; 
 he exemplifies by his treatment of his ten 
 concubines, whom he shuts up for life, the 
 most cruel evils of polygamy (2 Samuel 
 xx. 3). The man after God's own heart he 
 might be deemed by a primitive priesthood 
 to whose divinity he was always true ; but it 
 is hardly possible that he should be so deemed 
 by a moral civilization. Still less possible is 
 it that we should imagine the issues of spirit- 
 ual life to be so shut up that from this man's 
 loins salvation would be bound to spring. 
 
 The books of the Old Testament, and nota- 
 bly the historical books, are for the most 
 part by unknown authors and of unknown 
 dates. That the early part of Genesis is 
 made up of two narratives, the Elohistic, in 
 which the name of God is Elohim, and the 
 Jehovistic, in which the name is Jehovah, all 
 experts are now agreed, and even the un- 
 learned reader may verify the fact. A com- 
 bination of two narratives is still traceable in 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 73 
 
 the history of Abraham and his son. That 
 in the account of the creation and the flood, 
 Assyrian legend is the basis on which the 
 Hebrew built a more monotheistic and sub- 
 limer story, is the opinion of writers who still 
 deem themselves orthodox and who apparently 
 do not shrink from the hypothesis that the 
 Deity in compiling an account of his own 
 works was fain, as the basis of his narrative, 
 to avail himself of an Assyrian legend. Docu- 
 mentary analysis and the philosophy of his- 
 tory combined have made it highly probable 
 that writings, ascribed by our Bible to Moses, 
 not only were not his, but were of a date as late 
 as the Captivity. It is likely that the schools 
 of the prophets played a great part, as did the 
 monasteries of the Middle Ages, in composing 
 the chronicles of the nation. The pensive- 
 ness of the Captivity seems to pervade the 
 Psalms. These, as has been already said, 
 are matters at present of hypothesis, and 
 though most interesting to the learned, little 
 affect the practical question whether the writ- 
 ings ascribed to Moses should continue to be 
 read in churches as authentic and inspired. 
 
74 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 That they are not authentic is certain. It is 
 not less certain that by whomsoever, at what- 
 ever time, and by whatever process they 
 may have been produced, we are without an 
 assignable reason for supposing them to be 
 inspired. 
 
 Nor do the Old Testament writers themselves 
 put forward any claim to inspiration. Where 
 they cite elder authorities, such as the book 
 of Jasher, they in effect declare themselves 
 indebted to human records, and therefore un- 
 inspired. Preachers, especially preachers of 
 reform, speak in the name of Heaven. Ori- 
 ental and primitive preachers speak as the 
 inspired organs of Heaven. The prophets, 
 whose name, with its modern connotation, is 
 scarcely more appropriate than it would be if 
 applied to Savonarola or John Wesley, are in 
 this respect like others of their class. One of 
 them when bidden to prophesy calls for a 
 minstrel, under the influence of whose strains 
 the hand of the Lord comes upon him (2 Kings 
 iii. 15 ; see also 1 Samuel x. 5). All seers, 
 as their name imports, have visions. Primitive 
 lawgivers speak by divine command. In no 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 75 
 
 other way, apparently, is inspiration claimed 
 by the authors of the Old Testament. 
 
 Jesus came to substitute a religion of con- 
 science for that of law, a religion of humanity 
 for that of a race, worship in spirit and in 
 truth for worship in the temple. His preach- 
 ing was a reaction against the Judaism then 
 impersonated in the Pharisee, afterwards de- 
 veloped in the Talmud, and now fully repre- 
 sented in the Talmudic Jew. But he was not 
 a revolutionist. Like Socrates, he accepted 
 established institutions, including the national 
 ritual, and in that sense fulfilled all righteous- 
 ness. Nor was he, on any hypothesis as to 
 his nature, a critic or concerned with any 
 critical objections to the sacred books. Ad- 
 dressing an audience which believed in them, 
 he cited them and appealed to their authority 
 in the usual way. He cites the book of Jonah, 
 and in terms which seem to show that he 
 regards it as a real history ; so that a literalist, 
 like the late Dr. Liddon, took fire at being told 
 that the book was an apologue, considering this 
 an impeachment of the veracity of Jesus. Yet 
 few, even of the most orthodox, would now pro- 
 
76 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 fess to believe that Jonah sojourned in the belly 
 of a fish. St. Paul in like manner treats the 
 narrative of the fall of Adam in Genesis as 
 historical and connects a doctrine with it, 
 though the mythical character of the "narrative 
 is admitted, as we have seen, even by a digni- 
 tary of the Church. 
 
 The Evangelists, simple-minded, find in the 
 sacred books of their nation prognostications 
 of the character and mission of Jesus. Some- 
 times, as critical examination shows, a little 
 has been enough to satisfy their uncritical 
 minds (see Matthew ii. 18 ; xxi. 5). But 
 surely it is something like a platitude to as- 
 cribe to them such an idea of Old Testament 
 prophecy as is worked out for us by Keith 
 and other modern divines. No real and specific 
 prediction of the advent of Jesus, or of any 
 event in his life, can be produced from the 
 books of the Old Testament. At most we 
 find passages or phrases which are capable of 
 a spiritual application, and in that metaphorical 
 sense prophetic. Even of the famous passage 
 in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, if it is read 
 without strong prepossessions, no more than 
 this can be said. 
 

 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 11 
 
 Beyond contest and almost beyond com- 
 pare is the beauty, spiritual as well as lyri- 
 cal, of some of the Psalms. But there are 
 others which it is shocking to hear a Chris- 
 tian congregation reciting, still more shock- 
 ing, perhaps, to hear it chanting in a church. 
 To wish that your enemy's wife may be a 
 widow, and that his children may be father- 
 less and have none to pity them, is oriental. 
 To wish that his prayer may be turned to 
 sin and that Satan may stand at his right 
 hand, to wish in short for his spiritual ruin, 
 is surely oriental and something more. The 
 writer in Lux Mundi, already cited, would 
 persuade himself and us that these utter- 
 ances are not those of personal spite, but 
 "the claim which righteous Israel makes 
 upon God that he should vindicate himself 
 and let her eyes see how righteousness turns 
 again to judgment." This is the way in 
 which we have been led by our traditional 
 belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament 
 to play fast and loose with our understand- 
 ings and with our moral sense. It might 
 almost as well be pretended, when the Greek 
 
78 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 poet Theognis longs to drink the blood of 
 his political enemies, that he is not actuated 
 by hatred, but has some great moral object 
 in his mind. 
 
 What is the Old Testament? It is the 
 entire body of Hebrew literature, theology, 
 philosophy, history, fiction, and poetry, in- 
 cluding the poetry of love as well as that of 
 religion. We have bound it all up together 
 as a single book, and bound up that book 
 with the New Testament, as though the 
 religion of the two were the same and the 
 slaughter of the Canaanites or the massacre 
 of the day of Purim were a step towards 
 Christian brotherhood and the Sermon on 
 the Mount. We have forcibly turned He- 
 brew literature into a sort of cryptogram 
 of Christianity. The love-song called the 
 Song of Solomon has been turned into a 
 cryptographic description of the union of 
 Christ with his Church. A certain divine, 
 when his advice was asked about the method 
 of reading the Scriptures, used to say that 
 his method was to begin at the beginning 
 and read to the end; so that he would spend 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 79 
 
 three hours at least on the Old Testament 
 for one that he spent on the New, and would 
 read the list of the Dukes of Edom as often 
 as he read the Sermon on the Mount. The 
 first step towards a rational appreciation of 
 the Old Testament is to break up the vol- 
 ume, separate the acts of Joshua or Jehu 
 from the teachings of Jesus, and the differ- 
 ent books of the Old Testament from each 
 other. This has been done long since, men- 
 tally at least, by the critic; but it has not 
 been done by the churches. Nor have the 
 churches ceased to ascribe the Pentateuch 
 to Moses, the book of Daniel to Daniel, and 
 both parts of Isaiah to the same prophet. 
 
 We are told in the book of Joshua (xxiv. 2) 
 that the ancestors of Abraham served other 
 gods. How, or by what influences, whether 
 those of individual reformers like the prophets 
 or of general circumstance, the nation was 
 raised from its primeval worship to tribal 
 monotheism of an eminently pure and exalted 
 type, seems to be a historical mystery. Higher 
 than to tribal monotheism it did not rise ; at 
 least, it advanced no further than to the belief 
 
80 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 that its God was superior in power as well as 
 in character to all other gods, and thus Lord 
 of the whole earth. Its God was still the 
 God of Israel, and the Jews were still his 
 chosen people. Nor did it wholly get rid of 
 localism. Jerusalem was still the abode of 
 God when Jesus, according to the fourth 
 Gospel, announced to the woman of Samaria 
 the abolition of local religion. Judaism, 
 therefore, never reached the religious ele- 
 vation of some chosen spirits among the 
 heathen world, such as Seneca, Marcus 
 Aurelius, and Epictetus ; although the Jew- 
 ish belief was more intense than that of the 
 philosophers and extended not only to a 
 select circle but to a portion at least of the 
 people. 
 
 Nor could the Jew, hampered as he was 
 by lingering tribalism, form a conception of 
 the universality and majesty of divine gov- 
 ernment in the form of moral law such as 
 we find in Plato or in Cicero. There is 
 nothing in the Hebrew writings like a pas- 
 sage in Cicero's Republic, preserved by Lac- 
 tantius : " There is a true law, right reason, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 81 
 
 in unison with nature, all-embracing, consist- 
 ent, and eternal, which, by its commands, 
 calls to duty, by its prohibitions deters from 
 crime, which, however, never addresses to 
 the good its commands or its prohibitions 
 in vain, nor by command or prohibition 
 moves the wicked. This law cannot be 
 amended, nor can any clause of it be re- 
 pealed, nor can it be abrogated as a whole. 
 By no vote either of the Senate or of the 
 people can we be released from it. It re- 
 quires none to explain or to interpret it. 
 Nor will there be one law at Rome and 
 another at Athens ; one now and another 
 hereafter. For all nations and for all time 
 there will be one law, immutable and eter- 
 nal; there will be a common master and 
 ruler of all, God, the framer, exponent, and 
 enactor of this law, whom he who fails to 
 obey will be recreant to himself, and, re- 
 nouncing human nature, will, by that very 
 fact, incur the severest punishment, even 
 though he should escape other penalties real 
 or supposed." 1 Equally broad is the Ian- 
 1 Divin. Instit., VI., 8. 
 
82 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 guage of the De Legibus: "Since, then, noth- 
 ing is superior to reason, whether in God or 
 man, it is by partnership in reason, above 
 all, that man is connected with God. Part- 
 nership in reason is partnership in right 
 reason; and as law is right reason, law 
 again is a bond between God and man. 
 Community of law is community of right. 
 Those to whom these things are common 
 are citizens of the same commonwealth. If 
 men obey the same power and rule, much 
 more do they obey this celestial code, the 
 divine mind arid the supreme power of God. 
 So that we must regard this universe as 
 one and a single commonwealth of gods and 
 men. And whereas in states, on a prin- 
 ciple of which we will speak in the proper 
 place, the position of the citizen is marked 
 by his family ties, in the universal nature of 
 things we have something more august and 
 glorious, the bond of kinship between gods 
 and men." 1 
 
 Of a belief in the immortality of the soul no 
 evidence can be found in the Old Testament, 
 iDeLeg., I., 7. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 83 
 
 though readers of the Bible who continue to 
 use the unrevised version may remain under 
 the impression that the doctrine is found in 
 Job. Sheol is merely, like the Hades of the 
 Odyssey, a shadowy abode of the dead. Had 
 the doctrine of a resurrection been proclaimed 
 in the Mosaic books, it could hardly have been 
 denied by the Sadducees ; its acceptance by 
 the Pharisees was a speculation of their school. 
 In Ezekiel xviii. life is held out as the re- 
 ward of those who do well ; death is the pen- 
 alty of those who do evil. But the "life," for 
 all that appears, is temporal, though the Chris- 
 tian, by reading into it immortality, may apply 
 the chapter to his own use. Enoch and Elijah 
 are represented as translated to heaven, not as 
 living after death, nor is it said that the appari- 
 tion of Samuel called up by the witch of Endor 
 was the spirit of Samuel himself ; it appears 
 rather to have been like the apparitions sum- 
 moned by the witches in Macbeth. The re- 
 wards and punishments of the Old Testament 
 are temporal and material ; its rewards are 
 wealth and offspring, its punishments are beg- 
 gary and childlessness. The only immortality 
 
84 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 of which it speaks is the perpetuation of a 
 man's family in his tribe. The vindication 
 and requital of Job's virtue are added wealth 
 and multiplied offspring. Nor do we find in 
 the Old Testament that moral immortality, if 
 the expression may be used, which is found in 
 Greek and Roman philosophers, who, without 
 speaking definitely of a life after death, identify 
 the virtuous man with the undying power of 
 virtue and intimate that it will be well with 
 him in the sum of things. 
 
 Not assuredly that the Hebrew literature 
 lacks qualities, irrespective of its dogmatic posi- 
 tion, such as may well account for the hold 
 which it has retained, in spite of its primeval 
 cosmogony, theology, or morality, on the alle- 
 giance of civilized minds. The sublimity of its 
 cosmogony impressed, as we know, Longinus. 
 Voltaire himself could hardly have failed to 
 acknowledge the magnificence of some parts of 
 the prophetic writings, though in other parts 
 he might find marks for his satire. All must 
 be touched by the beauty of the story of Joseph 
 and of the book of Ruth. Admirable, we repeat, 
 are both the religious and the lyrical excel- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 85 
 
 lence of some of the Psalms. The histories are 
 marred by tribalism, primeval inhumanity, and 
 fanaticism ; but they derive dignity as well as 
 unity from the continuous purpose which runs 
 through them, and which in the main is moral ; 
 since Jehovah was a God of righteousness and 
 purity, in contrast with the gods of other tribes. 
 His worship, though ritual, sacrificial, and un- 
 like the worship "in spirit and in truth," the 
 advent of which was proclaimed to the woman 
 of Samaria, was yet spiritual compared with 
 that of deities whose votaries gashed them- 
 selves with knives or celebrated lascivious 
 orgies beneath the sacred tree. 
 
 Hebrew law is primitive, and the idea of 
 reviving it, conceived by some of the Puritans, 
 was absurd. But it is an improvement in 
 primitive law. It makes human life sacred, 
 treating murder as a crime to be punished with 
 death, not as a mere injury to be compounded 
 by a fine. It recognizes the avenger of blood, 
 the rude minister of justice before the insti- 
 tution of police ; but it confines his office to 
 the case of wilful murder, and forbids heredi- 
 tary blood-feuds. It recognizes asylum, a nee- 
 
86 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 essary check on wild primeval passion, but 
 confines it to accidental homicide, ordaining 
 that if a man slay his neighbour with guile, 
 he shall be taken, even from the altar, and 
 put to death. It recognizes the father's power 
 of life and death over his child, patria potestas 
 as the Roman called it, but unlike the hideous 
 Roman law, it requires public procedure and 
 a definite charge, while it secures mercy by 
 requiring the concurrence of the mother. It 
 recognizes polygamy, but strives to temper the 
 jealousies and injustice of the harem. It is 
 comparatively hospitable and liberal in its 
 treatment of the stranger. Its Sabbath was 
 most beneficent, especially to the slave, and 
 strict formality was essential to observance 
 among primitive people. Ordeal is confined 
 to the particular case of a wife suspected of 
 infidelity, and divination is forbidden save 
 by the Urim and Thummim. The law miti- 
 gates the customs of war, requiring that a city 
 shall be summoned before it is besieged, and 
 forbidding the cutting down of the fruit trees 
 in a hostile country, which was regularly prac- 
 tised by the Greeks ; while the female captive, 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 87 
 
 instead of being dragged at once to the bed of 
 the captor, is allowed a month of mourning. 
 Nor is war exalted or encouraged, as it was 
 among the Assyrians and the Persians. Ser- 
 vice is to be voluntary ; captains are to be 
 chosen only when the army takes the field, so 
 that there would be no military class ; horses 
 and chariots are not to be multiplied. Jeho- 
 vah, though a God of battles, is not char- 
 acteristically so. Not victory in war, but 
 peace, is the normal blessing. Kings it was 
 expected the Israelites would have, like the 
 nations around them. But unlike the kings 
 of the nations around them, their king was 
 to be the choice of the nation ; he was to be 
 under the law, which he was to study that 
 his heart might not be lifted up among his 
 brethren ; and his luxury, his harem, his accu- 
 mulation of treasure, and his military estab- 
 lishment were to be kept within bounds. 
 Finally, while there was to be a priestly order, 
 that order was not to be a caste. The Levites 
 were to be ordained by the laying on of the 
 hands of the whole assembly of Israel. Nor, 
 while the ritual was consigned to the priest- 
 
88 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 hood, was religious teaching confined to them ; 
 its organs were the prophet and the psalmist. 
 Worship was sacrificial, and all sacrifice is 
 irrational, but there was no human sacrifice, 
 and the scape-goat was a goat, not, as among 
 the polished Athenians, a man. The Ameri- 
 can slave-owner could appeal to the Old Testa- 
 ment as a warrant for his institution. Slavery 
 there was everywhere in primitive times, but 
 the Hebrew slave-law is more merciful than 
 that either of Greece or Rome, notwithstand- 
 ing the ordinance, shocking to our sense, which 
 held the master blameless for killing his slave 
 if death was not immediate, on the ground that 
 the slave "was his money." 1 The belief in 
 witchcraft as a crime to be punished by death 
 is also accepted as true, and, though not promi- 
 nent, gave birth in misguided Christendom to 
 an almost incredible series of atrocities. How 
 
 1 An essay written by the author on the question " Does 
 the Bible Sanction American Slavery? " has probably been 
 long since forgotten. In its line of argument against slavery 
 as an anachronistic and immoral revival of a primitive and 
 once moral institution it was consistent with the present 
 paper. But the essay was written in the penumbra of ortho- 
 doxy and would now require very great modification. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 89 
 
 far these ordinances or any of them actually 
 took effect we cannot say. Probably they 
 were to a great extent speculative and ideal. 
 The ordinance against cutting down the fruit 
 trees in an enemy's country certainly was not 
 observed, for the fruit trees of the Moabites 
 are cut down, Elisha giving the word (2 Kings 
 iii. 19). The agricultural polity of family 
 freeholds, reverting to the family in the year 
 of jubilee, may safely be said to have never 
 come into practical existence, but to have 
 been the ideal Republic of some very Hebrew 
 Plato. Nor was the court or the harem of 
 Solomon limited by any jealous regulations. 
 
 From the social point of view, perhaps 
 the most notable passages of the Old Testa- 
 ment "are those rebuking the selfishness of 
 wealth and the oppression of the poor in the 
 prophetic writings and the Psalms, which have 
 supplied weapons for the champions of social 
 justice. There is scarcely anything like these 
 in Greek or Roman literature. Juvenal com- 
 plains of the contempt and insult to which 
 poverty exposes a man, but he does not de- 
 nounce social oppression. In this respect the 
 
90 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 Mahometan and the Buddhist are perhaps 
 superior to the Greek or Roman. But we 
 shall hardly find anywhere a moral force equal 
 in intensity to that of the Hebrew prophets, 
 narrowly local and national though their 
 preaching is. 
 
 In forming an estimate of Hebrew litera- 
 ture we may have still to be upon our guard 
 against a lingering belief in the inspired char- 
 acter of the books which is apt to betray itself 
 in a somewhat unbounded admiration. Much 
 in the prophets surely is rhapsody to which in- 
 tense self -excitement might give birth. Of the 
 history we have only the prophet's version, and 
 if the other side had spoken, complaints of 
 gloomy and oppressive fanaticism might have 
 been heard. It was hardly well that modern 
 religion and life should take their colour from 
 a sombre struggle between Jehovah and Baal. 
 There is in Hebrew literature comparatively 
 little of tenderness or geniality, of humour 
 nothing, unless it be the grotesque adventures 
 of Samson among the Philistines. To the 
 growth of science blind belief in the Old 
 Testament, which represents each event of 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 91 
 
 nature as the direct act of Jehovah, exclud- 
 ing secondary causes, has been morally op- 
 posed. Neither of science nor of art had the 
 Jew any share ; and both defects make them- 
 selves felt. 
 
 Religion in the primitive state of man is 
 identified with nationality. For a member of 
 the tribe or of the nation, which inherited the 
 religion of the tribe, to worship any but the 
 tribal or national god or gods is treason pun- 
 ishable by death. " He that sacrificeth unto 
 any god save unto the Lord only he shall be 
 utterly destroyed." To the importation of 
 this feature of an obsolete tribalism into Chris- 
 tianity, Christendom in part at least owes the 
 fatal identification of the Church with the 
 State, the extermination of the Albigenses, the 
 religious wars, the Inquisition, the burning of 
 Servetus. At the end of the seventeenth 
 century a boy was put to death by the Cal- 
 vinistic fanatics of Scotland for having blas- 
 phemed the Lord by disparaging the dogma of 
 the Trinity. Nor have we yet got rid of the 
 shade cast over human life by superstitious 
 use of a literature dark with struggles of 
 
92 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 religion or race, stern with denunciation, de- 
 void of humour or playfulness, and seldom 
 in touch with common humanity. 
 
 We have been taught by philosophic apolo- 
 gists to believe in Jewish history and legisla- 
 tion as the education of a chosen people 
 directed by the Almighty and leading them 
 gradually from a low to a high morality, 
 from fetishism or primitive superstition to 
 monotheism, and from tribalism to humanity. 
 This, as it recognizes a low beginning and a 
 gradual improvement, is at all events a rational 
 view compared with the common bibliolatry. 
 But Jewish progress after all is only a segment, 
 however momentous a segment, of the progress 
 of civilization. There is nothing in it which 
 denotes the exclusive action of deity. This, 
 since a broader view has been taken of history, 
 is almost universally acknowledged. Then the 
 education thus designated as divine, in what 
 did it end ? In the Jews of Ezra, with their in- 
 tensified tribalism and self-estrangement from 
 humanity, not only renouncing intermarriage 
 with other races, but ruthlessly putting away 
 the wives, mothers, and children with whom 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 93 
 
 they had been living ; in Pharisaism ; in cere- 
 monialism, the most irrational and oppressive ; 
 in Jewish angelology and demonology, the 
 craziest of superstitions ; in the Talmud with 
 its extravagant legalism and its unspeakable 
 nonsense ; in the murder of the great Teacher 
 of humanity and the rejection of his Gospel ; 
 in the perpetuation of tribalism of the most 
 hateful kind by a vast cosmopolitan race of 
 usurers wandering over the world without a 
 country, treating, in their pride of race, their 
 fellowmen as gentiles and unclean, preying on 
 all the nations, and inevitably hated by them 
 all. 
 
 If Jerusalem may be credited with Christian- 
 ity as her final development, papal Rome may 
 be credited with the religion of the Refor- 
 mation. There is a continuity, there is an en- 
 during element in both cases. The Sanhedrim 
 understood Judaism, and when it yelled " Cru- 
 cify him " it knew what the relation was be- 
 tween its own religion and the teaching of 
 Christ. 
 
 That which is not a supernatural revelation 
 may still, so far as it is good, be a manifestation 
 
94 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 of the divine. As a manifestation of the 
 divine the Hebrew books, teaching righteous- 
 ness and purity, may keep their place in our 
 love and admiration for ever ; while of their 
 tribalism, their intolerance, their religious 
 cruelty, we for ever take our leave. The time 
 has surely come when as a supernatural reve- 
 lation they should be frankly though reverently 
 laid aside, and no more allowed to cloud the 
 vision of free inquiry or to cast the shadow 
 of primeval religion and law over our modern 
 life. 
 
 It surely is useless and paltering with the 
 truth to set up, like the writer in Lux Mundi, 
 and other rationalistic apologists, the figment 
 of a semi-inspiration. An inspiration which 
 errs, which contradicts itself, which dictates 
 manifest incredibilities, such as the stopping 
 of the sun, Balaam's speaking ass, Elisha's 
 avenging bears, or the transformation of Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, is no inspiration at all. It requires 
 the supplementary action of human criticism 
 to winnow the divine from the human, the 
 truth from the falsehood ; and the result of the 
 process varies with the personal tendencies of 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 95 
 
 the critics. The use of the phrase " inspiration " 
 when the belief has really been abandoned is 
 worse than weak ; it is Jesuitical, and will end 
 as all Jesuitry must end. Those who try to 
 break the fall of orthodoxy will only make the 
 fall heavier at last. When we are told that 
 there are in the Old Testament Scriptures both 
 a human and a divine element, we must ask 
 by what test the divine is to be distinguished 
 from the human and proved to be divine. 
 Nobody would ever have thought of "partial 
 inspiration" except as an expedient to cover 
 retreat. We do but tamper with our own 
 understandings and consciences by such at- 
 tempts at once to hold on and let go, to retain 
 the shadow of the belief when the substance has 
 passed away. Far better it is, whatever the 
 effort may cost, honestly to admit that the 
 sacred books of the Hebrews, granting their 
 superiority to the sacred books of other nations, 
 are, like the sacred books of other nations, the 
 works of man and not of God. Compared with 
 the semi-inspirationist, the believers in verbal 
 inspiration, of whom some still remain, des- 
 perate as are the difficulties with which they 
 
96 THE CHURCH AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 have to contend, stand upon firm ground. 
 Verbal inspiration is at all events a consecrated 
 tradition as well as a consistent view. Semi- 
 inspiration is a subterfuge and nothing more. 
 
 That the semi-inspiration theory is entirely 
 new and has sprung up to meet the inroads of 
 destructive criticism, those who have embraced 
 it do not deny. Yet Providence would surely 
 have shown a curious indifference to its own 
 ends if it had so constructed revelation that a 
 false view of it, entailing the most disastrous 
 consequences, should have inevitably prevailed 
 and been disseminated through all the churches 
 till now. 
 
 These are troublous times. The trouble is 
 everywhere : in politics, in the social system, 
 in religion. But the storm-centre seems to 
 be in the region of religion. The fundamental 
 beliefs on which our social system has partly 
 rested are giving way. To replace them 
 before the edifice falls, and at the same time 
 to give us such knowledge as may be attainable 
 of man's estate and destiny, thought must be 
 entirely free. 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 THE appearance of a portly and learned 
 volume by the Rev. Dr. Salmond on The 
 Christian Doctrine of Immortality shows the 
 anxious interest which has been awakened in 
 these questions. His treatment of the subject 
 also recognizes the necessity which is felt of 
 perfectly free though reverent inquiry, as our 
 sole way of salvation amidst the perplexities, 
 theological, social, and moral, in which we 
 are now involved. For himself, he unreserv- 
 edly accepts the Christian revelation. Chris- 
 tianity, he is so happy as to believe, "has 
 translated the hope of immortality from a 
 guess, a dream, a longing, a probability, into 
 a certainty, and has done this by interpreting 
 us to ourselves and confirming the voice of 
 prophecy within us." But he subjects the 
 sacred records of Christianity to critical exam- 
 
100 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 ination. He does not talk effete orthodoxy 
 to an age of reason. Nor does he rest upon 
 the evidence of Revelation alone. He en- 
 deavours to combine with it that of Manifesta- 
 tion as presented by reason and history. 
 
 The change made by Darwin's great dis- 
 covery as, with all rights of modification 
 reserved, it may surely be called, 1 in our 
 notions regarding the origin of our species 
 could not fail to stimulate curiosity as to its 
 destiny. We held, it is true, before Darwin 
 that man had been formed out of the dust ; 
 in that respect our ideas have undergone no 
 change. It is true also that whatever our 
 origin may have been, and through whatever 
 process we may have gone, we are what we 
 are, none the less for Darwin's discovery ; 
 while the fact that we have risen from the 
 
 1 1 once ventured to ask an eminent Darwinian whether 
 he thought that within any limit of time assignable for the 
 duration of bird life upon this planet, the Darwinian pro- 
 cess of natural selection could have produced a bird which 
 should build a nest in anticipation of laying an egg. He 
 said that account must be taken of the faculty of imitation. 
 To which the reply was, that to produce that faculty another 
 Darwinian process, extending through countless aeons, 
 would be required. 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 101 
 
 dust or from the condition of the worm, in- 
 stead of leading us to despair, ought rather 
 to inspire us with hope. Still, before Darwin 
 we rested in the belief that man had been 
 called into existence by a separate creation, in 
 virtue of which he was a being apart from all 
 other animals; and this belief has by Darwin 
 been dispelled. A being apart from the other 
 animals man remains in virtue of his reason, 
 of which other animals have, at most, only the 
 rudiments, and yet more perhaps in virtue of 
 his aspirations and his capacity for improve- 
 ment, of which even the most intelligent of 
 the other animals, so far as we can see, have 
 no share. He alone pursues moral good ; he 
 alone is religious ; he alone is speculative, 
 looking before and after ; he alone feels the 
 influence of beauty and expresses his sense of 
 it in poetry and art ; what is lust in brutes in 
 him alone is love ; he alone thinks or dreams 
 that there is in him anything that ought not 
 to die. Yet Darwin's discovery has effaced 
 the impassable line which we took to have 
 been drawn by a separate creation between 
 man and the beasts which perish. 
 
102 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 Science, moreover, Darwinian and general, 
 has put an end to the traditional belief in 
 the soul as a being separate from the body, 
 breathed into the body by a distinct act of 
 the Creator, pent up in it as in a prison-house, 
 beating spiritually against the bars of the flesh 
 and looking to be set free by death. Soul 
 and body, we now know, form an indivisible 
 whole, the nature of man being one, enfolded 
 at first in the same embryo, advancing in all 
 its parts and aspects through the same stages 
 to maturity, and succumbing at last to the 
 same decay. Not that this makes our nature 
 more material in the gross sense of that term. 
 Spirituality is an attribute of moral elevation 
 and aspiration, not of the composition of the 
 organism. Tyndall called himself a "materi- 
 alist," yet no man was ever less so in the 
 gross sense. If we wish to see clearly in these 
 matters it might be almost better to suspend 
 for a time our use of the word "soul," with 
 its traditional connotation of antagonism to 
 the body, and to speak only of the higher life 
 or of spiritual aim and effort. 
 
 We have, moreover, in approaching these 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 103 
 
 questions to clear our minds entirely of geo- 
 centricism, theological and philosophical as 
 well as physical, of our notions of this earth 
 as the centre of the universe and the grand 
 scene of providential action, and at the same 
 time of the ideas of our religious infancy 
 about the Mosaic beginning and the Apoca- 
 lyptic end of things. We have wholly to 
 banish the creations of Milton's fancy, so 
 strongly impressed upon our imaginations, as 
 well as the Ptolemaic cosmography, and think 
 no more of a heaven above and an earth be- 
 low, with angels ascending and descending 
 between them, or of a court of heaven look- 
 ing down upon the earth. We must float out 
 in thought into a universe without a centre, 
 without limit, without beginning or end, of 
 which all that we see on a starlight night is 
 but a point, in which we ourselves are but 
 living and conscious atoms. To fathom the 
 mystery of the universe, that is, the mystery 
 of existence, we cannot hope. Of eternity 
 and infinity we can form no notion ; we can 
 think of them only as time and space extended 
 without limit, a conception which involves a 
 
104 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 metaphysical absurdity, since of space and 
 time we must always think as divisible into 
 parts, while of infinity or eternity there can 
 be no division. The thought of eternal ex- 
 istence, even of a life of eternal happiness, 
 if we dwell upon it, turns the brain giddy ; 
 it is a sort of mental torture to attempt to 
 realize the idea. 
 
 The doctrine of a future life with rewards 
 for the good and punishment for the wicked, 
 as we all know, pervades the New Testament. 
 That this present world is evil, and Christians 
 must look forward to a better, is the senti- 
 ment of the Founder of Christianity and of 
 all the Christian churches. It could not fail 
 to be fostered by the state of the world, 
 especially of a province like Galilee, under the 
 Roman Empire. The Christian martyrdoms 
 are a signal testimony to the same belief. 
 Yet the doctrine can hardly be said to be 
 so distinctly stated in the New Testament 
 as its overwhelming importance might have 
 led us to expect. It is in fact rather as- 
 sumed than stated. The passages concern- 
 ing it are rather homiletic than dogmatic ; 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE 105 
 
 they are enforcements of the infinite blessed- 
 ness of piety and goodness, of the infinite 
 curse attending wickedness, rather than enun- 
 ciations of an article for a creed. Nor is 
 anything explicitly said as to the manner in 
 which the mortal is to put on immortality, 
 or as to the state and occupations of the 
 blessed in the next world. White robes, 
 harps, palm branches, a city of gold and 
 jewels, are not spiritual; they must be taken 
 as material imagery ; taken literally, they 
 provoke the derision of the sceptic. 
 
 Difficulties crowd upon us and severely tax 
 the exegetical resources of Dr. Salmond. A 
 sudden and absolute change of nature is con- 
 trary to all our experience, which would lead 
 us to believe that gradual progress is the 
 law. The disproportion of eternal rewards 
 and punishments to the merits or sins of 
 man's short life is profoundly repugnant to 
 our moral sense. When we take in the 
 cases of children, of savages, of the hapless 
 offspring of the slums, of the heathen who 
 have never heard the Word, the difficulty is 
 immensely increased. 
 
106 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 In all the churches there is now a revolt 
 against the belief in eternal fire, which, never- 
 theless, if the Gospel is to be taken literally, 
 it would seem difficult to avoid. Such a 
 belief in fact can hardly be thought ever to 
 have gained a practical hold on the mind ; 
 if it had, it would almost have dissolved hu- 
 manity with terror. Imagination could not 
 have played with the idea as it does in the 
 poem of Dante, where God, with his everlast- 
 ing torture-house, is a thousand times more 
 cruel than Eccelino or the tyrants of Milan. 
 
 Nor is there in reality any such line of de- 
 marcation between the good and the wicked 
 as that drawn in the homiletic language of 
 the Gospel between the wheat and the tares, 
 between the sheep and the goats, between 
 the people of the wide and those of the nar- 
 row gate. Between the extreme points of 
 goodness and wickedness there are gradations 
 of character in number infinite and fluctuat- 
 ing from hour to hour. The Roman Catholic 
 Church tries to meet this difficulty by the 
 invention of Purgatory, which, it is needless 
 to say, is a creation of her own. In this case 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 107 
 
 also the difficulty is enhanced when we take 
 in children and those on whom circumstances 
 have borne so hardly as almost to preclude 
 volition. 
 
 Is the doctrine of resurrection to be extended 
 to every being that has borne human form, 
 the Caliban just emerging from the ape, the 
 cave-dweller, the Carib, the idiot, as well as 
 the infant in whom reason and morality had 
 barely dawned ? Where can the line be drawn ? 
 
 Nor are the passages in the Gospel concern- 
 ing the future state, if pressed literally, alto- 
 gether consistent with each other, at least 
 with regard to the mode of the transition. 
 The idea generally presented is that of a final 
 judgment in which the good are to be sepa- 
 rated from the wicked, the good entering into 
 eternal joy, the wicked into eternal fire, and 
 of a period of sleep or unconsciousness which 
 is to last till the Judgment Day. But this 
 is not consistent with the parable of Dives 
 and Lazarus, with the preaching of Christ to 
 the souls in prison, or with the words of 
 Christ on the cross to the penitent thief. 
 These variations become more important when 
 
108 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 we consider the unspeakably vital character 
 of the doctrine. 
 
 Resurrection of the body is an article of 
 the Creed. It presents insuperable difficul- 
 ties ; not only are the particles of the body 
 dispersed, but they must often be incorpo- 
 rated into other bodies. Besides, is a babe 
 to rise again a babe, and is an old man to 
 rise with the body of old age ? Devices for 
 meeting such difficulties may be found ; but 
 they are devices and not solutions. St. 
 Paul's answer to doubters involves the false 
 analogy of the seed, which germinates when 
 he fancies that it dies. 
 
 It is on the Christian revelation that our 
 hope has hitherto rested. Butler, when he 
 applies reason to the question of a future life, 
 has revelation all the time in reserve. He 
 professes not to offer independent proof of 
 the doctrine, but merely to disarm Reason of 
 the objections which she might urge against 
 Revelation. Of independent proof, with def- 
 erence be it said, he offers, not so much as, 
 with our present scientific lights at all events, 
 will amount even to a serious intimation. 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 109 
 
 Assuming, after the fashion of his day, that 
 the soul is a being apart from the body, he 
 suggests that it may be a simple monad, inde- 
 cerptible and therefore indestructible, or at 
 least not presumably liable to dissolution when 
 the body is dissolved. But we know that 
 his presumption is unfounded, and that what 
 he calls the soul is but the higher and finer 
 activity of our general frame. He says that 
 the faculties and emotions sometimes remain 
 unaffected by mortal disease even at the point 
 of death. But they do not remain unaffected 
 by a disease of the brain. His strongest point 
 perhaps is the unbroken continuance of con- 
 scious identity notwithstanding the change 
 of our bodily frame by the flux of its compo- 
 nent particles, and in spite of sleep and fits 
 of insensibility. But the flux of particles or 
 the suspension of consciousness by sleep or a 
 fainting fit is a different thing from total 
 dissolution, such as takes place when the body 
 moulders in the grave. Besides, the phe- 
 nomenon is common to us with brutes, and 
 the objection that this or any other of But- 
 ler's arguments would apply as well to brutes 
 
110 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 as to man is not to be evaded by calling 
 it invidious. The great thinker would per- 
 haps have seen this more clearly had he lived 
 in the Darwinian age and been disenchanted 
 of his belief in the special breathing of a soul 
 into man. He is so far from our present 
 point of view as to think that dreams are prod- 
 ucts of the mind acting apart from the bodily 
 sense. Do not dogs also dream? 
 
 There are those who, like Mr. Francis 
 Newman when he wrote The Soul, discard all 
 arguments on this subject addressed to the 
 intellect apart from the intuitions of the spirit- 
 ual man. Intuition is incommunicable, and 
 it is to the intellect alone that arguments can 
 be addressed. Besides, if intuition or faith 
 were traced to its source, it might be found 
 to have sprung from an intellectual convic- 
 tion implanted in early years. The existence 
 of such a faculty as religious intuition inde- 
 pendent of any action of the intellect would 
 surely be difficult to demonstrate. 
 
 The great thinkers of antiquity, while they 
 lacked our modern science, had the advantage, 
 when they had once thrown off their state 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? Ill 
 
 polytheism, of studying the problem of exis- 
 tence with minds free from ecclesiastical or 
 theological prepossession. Of the two greatest 
 of them Plato believed intensely in a future 
 life, for which this present life is but a train- 
 ing, and in a future state of rewards and 
 punishments. His arguments, put into the 
 mouth of Socrates, who is about to die, come 
 to us in the most persuasive guise. But they 
 are entangled with the fanciful tenets of pre- 
 existence, of knowledge as a reminiscence from 
 a previous state, and of the real existence of ab- 
 stract ideas. They are based on the erroneous 
 conception of the soul as an entity distinct from 
 the body and imprisoned in it, so that, in the 
 case at least of one who has kept his soul 
 pure and healthy by philosophy and asceticism, 
 death would be emancipation. The soul, 
 Plato thinks, cannot be affected by diseases 
 of the body, but only by its own diseases, 
 ignorance and vice. An evidence of more 
 weight practically than any of the metaphysi- 
 cal arguments adduced by the disciple of 
 Socrates is the death of Socrates itself, which, 
 like the Christian martyrdoms, implies a strong 
 
112 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 and rooted faith in the future reward of 
 loyalty to truth and virtue. The same faith 
 is expressed by Plato in the Republic. To 
 him amid the license of Athenian democracy 
 in its hour of decay, as to the Christian amid 
 the demoralization of the Roman Empire, the 
 world seemed evil ; and he found support for 
 righteousness in the conviction that though 
 the righteous man may suffer obloquy, perse- 
 cution, and even a painful and shameful death 
 in this life, it would be well for him in the 
 final result. If there is a soul of the uni- 
 verse and if it holds communion in any way 
 with the soul of man, such a belief would 
 seem likely to be no mere hallucination. 
 
 In Aristotle's Ethics there is no trace of the 
 doctrine, either in its specific form or in the 
 form of faith in the ultimate triumph of vir- 
 tue which it assumes in Plato. The fact is 
 that virtue, in our sense of the word and as 
 denoting obedience to a moral law, is hardly 
 a term of Aristotle's system. His virtue is 
 not so much obedience to a moral law as the 
 functional activity of fully developed and 
 perfectly balanced humanity, such as is pre- 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 113 
 
 sented with a rather statuesque dignity in 
 his moral character of the high-minded man 
 (/^aXoS/rir^o?). All that he wants is a life 
 sufficiently long for full development (/Sto? 
 re'Xeto?). Of compensation or retribution he 
 seems to have no idea. 
 
 In the great Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus 
 Aurelius, there is no expression of belief in a 
 personal life beyond the present. What they 
 seem to expect is absorption in the universe, 
 which, if personality is merged, would be the 
 extinction of our personal selves. On the 
 other hand, they show the profoundest faith in 
 the divinity of the moral law, in the nothing- 
 ness of present pleasures or pains, and in the 
 infinite reward of virtue. Their asceticism 
 that of Marcus Aurelius on a throne 
 was a practical demonstration of their faith. 
 In Seneca may be found a vague intimation 
 of belief that death is a transition to a 
 higher life ; but Seneca is a rhetorician rather 
 than a philosopher. 
 
 A belief in the immortality of the soul has 
 been a part of most of the religions, yet not 
 of all. It is absent from the sacred books 
 
114 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 of the Hebrews, strenuous as have been the 
 efforts to import it into them, and bold as is 
 the statement of the Anglican Articles that 
 both in the Old and the New Testament 
 everlasting life is offered to mankind through 
 Christ. An exception such as that of the 
 Hebrews, an eminently religious nation, is 
 enough to bar any argument from universal 
 consent, even if universal consent, where it 
 can be explained by natural desire, were 
 sufficient to prove a belief innate. The other 
 world has often formed the lucrative domain 
 of priests, who have pretended by mystic rites 
 to provide the dying with a passport to ce- 
 lestial bliss. Egypt seems to have been pre- 
 eminent in the definiteness of her creed and 
 the minuteness of her mortuary ritual, while 
 she was also strangely preeminent in the effort 
 to protract the existence of the bodily tene- 
 ment, showing thereby apparently an absence 
 of belief in the separate existence of the soul. 
 The Persian faith in a future life appears also 
 to have been strong, though mixed with de- 
 grading absurdities which make it philosophi- 
 cally worthless. Buddhism is a philosophy 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 115 
 
 rather than a religion, while upon any hypothe- 
 sis as to the meaning of Nirvana, the hope of 
 the Buddhist is not personal immortality but 
 escape from personal existence. Be Nirvana 
 what it may, it is a fancy, generated in part 
 by local influences, and offers nothing in the 
 way of verification. 
 
 " The evidences of a future life, sir, are 
 sufficient," was Boswell's remark to Johnson. 
 " I could wish for more, sir," was Johnson's 
 reply. It was no doubt his sense of the in- 
 sufficiency of the evidences, considering the 
 vital character of the doctrine, that disposed 
 Johnson to belief in ghosts, and made him 
 anxious to investigate all stories of the kind, 
 even when they were so absurd as that of the 
 ghost of Cock Lane. It cannot be necessary to 
 discuss such fictions. The only case, so far 
 as we are aware, in which there is anything 
 like first-hand evidence is that of the warning 
 apparition to Lord Lyttelton, which may be 
 explained as the masked suicide of a voluptuary 
 sated with life. Nor can Spiritualistic appari- 
 tions call for notice here. They have been 
 enough exposed. Nothing is proved by them 
 
116 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 but the fond credulity of bereavement pining 
 for communion with the lost. Spiritualism, it 
 should not be forgotten, had its farcical origin 
 in table-turning. Apart from the miraculous 
 resurrection of Christ, and Christ's miraculous 
 raisings from the dead, no one has been seen or 
 heard from after death. That evidence which 
 alone could be absolutely conclusive has never 
 been afforded. This is the stubborn fact with 
 which Butler and those who adopt his line of 
 argument have to contend. 
 
 Positivism hopes that it has indemnified, or 
 more than indemnified, us for the loss of per- 
 sonal immortality by tendering an imper- 
 sonal immortality in the consequences of our 
 lives and actions prolonged through the gen- 
 erations which come after us to the end of 
 time. But this immortality is not only imper- 
 sonal, it is unconscious, and, therefore, so far 
 as our sensations are concerned, not distin- 
 guishable from annihilation. It is not even 
 specially human; we share it with every 
 motor, animate or inanimate ; with the horse 
 which draws a wagon, with the water which 
 turns a mill, with the food which passes into 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 117 
 
 the muscles of the consumer, with the falling 
 stone. 
 
 Besides, all theories which pretend to con- 
 sole man for his mortality by making him a 
 partaker in the immortality of his race, seem, 
 as was said before, to encounter the objection 
 that the race itself is not immortal. How long 
 the planet which is the abode of man will last 
 or remain fit for man's habitation, the oracles 
 of science may not be agreed, but they appear 
 to be agreed in holding that the end must 
 come. If they are right, philosophy does but 
 mock us when she bids us find our real spirit- 
 ual life in efforts to perfect humanity, and our 
 paradise in anticipation of the state of bliss 
 into which humanity, when perfected, will be 
 brought. At a certain, however remote, date 
 planetary wreck will be the end. Nor has the 
 promise of perfection by evolution, such as 
 another school of thinkers holds out, any ad- 
 vantage in this respect over the promise of 
 perfection by effort. Evolution, like effort, 
 comes at last to naught. That death is the 
 renewing of the species, and apparently indis- 
 pensable to progress, might be a satisfactory 
 
118 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 reflection if the species were everything and 
 the individual were nothing. But the indi- 
 vidual is something in his own eyes. Against 
 any scientific theory that human organisms are 
 simply vehicles for the transmission of life 
 the consciousness of each organism protests 
 and rebels. It is conceivable that by the 
 progress of humanity, before the end of our 
 world, some glorious consummation may be 
 reached. But it is hardly conceivable that 
 in that consummation we or the cave-dwellers 
 can have a share. 
 
 Still less can any substitute for our hope of 
 a personal immortality be found in demonstra- 
 tions of the indefeasible vitality of protoplasm. 
 The hope which we resign is personal. Proto- 
 plastic vitality is not. Life more or less active 
 may, as these comforters tell us, pervade all 
 things; and in that sense we may continue to 
 live after our dissolution and absorption into 
 the general frame of nature. But what is the 
 value of a life of which we shall not be indi- 
 vidually conscious ? There may be life in the 
 fermentation of a dunghill. But who can 
 imagine himself blest in the prospect of shar- 
 ing it ? 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 119 
 
 Of death and of the perpetual renewal of the 
 race the necessity is obvious so far as the 
 present estate of man is concerned. Upon 
 the succession of generations man's conjugal 
 and parental character, among other things, 
 depends. The existence of an undying man 
 would be that of one of Swift's " Struldbrugs " 
 infinitely prolonged. 
 
 There are those who think to console them- 
 selves for the shortness of life and its final ex- 
 tinction at death, by saying that its very short- 
 ness makes it all the more precious while it 
 lasts, and that a pensive, or, to use their phrase, 
 an idyllic tenderness, is imparted to it by the 
 prospect of its extinction. Such an argument 
 seems open to an easy reduction to absurdity, 
 since it implies that the more brief and pre- 
 carious the possession the more valuable is the 
 thing possessed. A great deal of poetry, no 
 doubt, has its source in our mortality. But 
 such poetry is not an expression of enjoyment 
 or gladness ; it is a melodious sigh in which 
 sadness finds relief. 
 
 It may be admitted that our non-existence 
 in the future is not less conceivable than 
 
120 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 our non-existence in the past, which we 
 take as certain, notwithstanding the Socratic 
 fancy of reminiscence. But we now exist, 
 and the question whether we continue to 
 exist or return to nothing is one of proba- 
 bility and evidence, not of possible con- 
 ception. That the universe might do without 
 us we may modestly admit ; whether it intends 
 to do without us is what we are feebly 
 endeavouring to divine. 
 
 John Stuart Mill, in a passage of his essay 
 on Immortality, highly lauded by Fitzjames 
 Stephen, admits the possibility of conceiving 
 that thought may continue to exist without a 
 material brain, the relation of the two being no 
 metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant 
 coexistence within the limits of observation. 
 Even if we suppose thought to embrace life, 
 feeling, and affection, the mere admission that 
 its disembodied existence is conceivable would 
 be but cold comfort. Mill himself seems to 
 fall back on the enjoyment of the present life 
 exalted by the religion of humanity and end- 
 ing in what he calls "eternal rest." "If," 
 he says in his essay on The Utility of Religion, 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 121 
 
 " the Religion of Humanity were as sedulously 
 cultivated as the supernatural religions are, 
 ... all who had received the customary 
 amount of moral cultivation would up to the 
 hour of death live ideally in the life of those 
 who are to follow them." What is the Re- 
 ligion of Humanity? How can there be a 
 religion without a God? How can we wor- 
 ship a generalization which cannot hear prayer 
 or hymn, which is not even complete, since the 
 history of man is unfinished, and of which, to 
 enhance the anomaly, the worshipper himself 
 is a part ? Is the religion of Humanity any- 
 thing more than a fervid philanthropy which 
 must probably be confined to a few choice 
 spirits and, so far as it involves self-sacri- 
 fice, is not likely to be increased by the con- 
 viction that the philanthropist, in giving up 
 present good, gives up all ? What again is 
 ideal life but unreal life? What is unreal 
 life but death? To Mill it appears probable 
 that after a length of time different in dif- 
 ferent persons they would have had enough 
 of existence and would gladly lie down to 
 take their eternal rest. Death is not rest : 
 
122 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 it is destruction. When we lay ourselves 
 down to rest it is with the prospect of wak- 
 ing again refreshed and invigorated to new 
 life. A Greek poet spoke to the heart when 
 he tearfully contrasted the lot of man with 
 that of the flowers of the field, which renew 
 their growth at the return of spring, while 
 man with all his bravery and wisdom, once 
 laid in his dark and narrow bed, sleeps a sleep 
 which knows no waking. 
 
 Yet it is not the extinction of bravery and 
 wisdom that most moves our pity for ourselves. 
 This the next generation may repair. The 
 torch of science is handed on, and the discovery 
 half made by one man of science is completed, 
 when he is gone, by a successor. It is the 
 perpetual slaughter of affection that touches us 
 most, and that, we should think, would most 
 touch the Power in whose hands we are, if in 
 its nature there is any affinity to mortal love. 
 Affection at all events, without the survival of 
 the personalities, must die for ever. 
 
 The mere existence of a desire in man to 
 prolong his being, even if it were universal, 
 can afford little assurance that the desire will 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 123 
 
 be fulfilled. Of desires that will never be 
 fulfilled man's whole estate is lamentably full. 
 If to each of us his own little being is inex- 
 pressibly dear, so is its own little being to the 
 insect, which nevertheless is crushed without 
 remorse and without hope of a future existence. 
 It is sad that man should perish, and 
 perish just when he has reached his prime. 
 This seems like cruel wastefulness in nature. 
 But is not nature full of waste ? Butler rather 
 philosophically finds an analogy to the waste 
 of souls in the waste of seeds. He might have 
 found one in the destruction of geological 
 races, in the redundancy of animal life, which 
 involves elimination by wholesale slaughter, in 
 the multitude of children brought into the 
 world only to die. The deaths of children, of 
 which a large number appear inevitable, seem 
 to present an insurmountable stumbling-block 
 to any optimism which holds that nature can 
 never be guilty of waste, even in regard to the 
 highest of her works. Waste there evidently 
 is in nature both animate and inanimate, and 
 to an enormous extent if our intelligence tells 
 us true. The earth is full of waste places as 
 
124 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 well as of blind agencies of destruction, such 
 as earthquakes, volcanic fires, and floods, while 
 her satellite appears to be nothing but waste. 
 
 Can we rest on the presumption that for all 
 suffering, at least for all unmerited suffering, 
 here, supreme justice must have provided com- 
 pensation hereafter? Is there not an infinity 
 of suffering among animals ? Are not many of 
 them by the very constitution of nature doomed 
 as the prey of other animals to suffer agonies 
 of fear and at last a painful death ? Are not 
 others fated to be tortured by parasites? Yet 
 where will be their compensation ? Where will 
 be the compensation of the hapless dog which 
 writhes beneath the knife of the vivisector, and 
 which not only is innocent but is an involun- 
 tary benefactor of humanity ? 
 
 That a survey of nature drives us to one of 
 two conclusions, either to the conclusion that 
 Benevolence is not omnipotent or to the con- 
 clusion that Omnipotence is not, in our accepta- 
 tion of the term, purely benevolent, has been 
 proved with a superfluity of logic. What may 
 be behind the veil we cannot tell. But in that 
 which is manifested to us there seems to be 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 125 
 
 nothing that can warrant us in looking for 
 immortality as the certain gift of unlimited 
 benevolence invested with unlimited power. 
 What lies beyond that which is manifested 
 to us is the region not of demonstration but 
 of hope. 
 
 Yet man shrinks from annihilation. If he 
 were certified of it, in spite of all that science 
 or criticism has done to prepare him for disen- 
 chantment, and notwithstanding the soothing 
 talk of philosophers about " eternal rest," his 
 being would receive a great shock. A fear- 
 ful light would be thrown on the misery and 
 degradation of which the world is full, has 
 always been full, and is likely long to remain 
 full. A fearful light would be thrown on all 
 the horrors of history. The sufferers of the 
 past at all events derived no comfort amidst 
 famine, plague, massacre, and torture, from 
 these theories of an "ideal life," of a "Reli- 
 gion of Humanity," and of a "posthumous 
 and subjective existence in the progress of 
 the species." A selfish tyrant like Louis XIV. 
 would on this supposition, at least while his 
 fortune lasted, have been of all men the 
 
 
126 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 happiest, while the victims of his selfish ambi- 
 tion or rapine, slaughtered in his profligate 
 wars, perishing of hunger through his extrava- 
 gance, or worked to death as slaves in his 
 galleys, would have been of all men the most 
 miserable. 
 
 Is there any voice in our nature which dis- 
 tinctly tells us that death is not the end ? If 
 there is, there seems to be no reason why we 
 should not listen to it, even though its message 
 may be incapable of verification such as in 
 regard to a material hypothesis is required by 
 physical science. That the intelligence of our 
 five senses, of which science is the systematized 
 record, is exhaustive, we have, as was before 
 said, no apparent ground for assuming; the 
 probability seems to be the other way ; it 
 seems likely that our senses, mere nerves even 
 if completely evolved, are imperfect monitors, 
 and that we may be living in a universe of 
 which we really know as little as the mole, 
 which no doubt seems to itself to perceive 
 everything that is perceptible, knows of the 
 world of sight. Now, there does seem to be 
 a voice in every man which, if he will listen to 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 127 
 
 it, tells him that his account is not closed at 
 death. The good man, however unfortunate 
 he may have been, and even though he may 
 not have found integrity profitable, feels at the 
 end of life a satisfaction in his past and an 
 assurance that in the sum of things he will find 
 that he has chosen aright. The most obdu- 
 rately wicked man, however his wickedness may 
 have prospered, will probably wish when he 
 comes to die that he had lived the life of the 
 righteous. It may be possible to explain the 
 sanctions or warnings of conscience generally 
 as the influence of human opinion reflected in 
 the individual mind, transmitted perhaps by 
 inheritance and accumulated in transmission. 
 But such an explanation will hardly cover the 
 case of death-bed self -approbation or remorse. 
 There seems to be no reason why we should 
 not trust the normal indications of our moral 
 nature as well as the normal indications of our 
 bodily sense ; and against the belief that the 
 greatest benefactors and the greatest enemies 
 of mankind rot at last undistinguished in the 
 same grave our moral nature vehemently 
 rebels. 
 
128 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 This at all events is certain : if death is 
 to end all alike for the righteous and for the 
 unrighteous, for those who have been blessings 
 and for those who have been curses to their 
 kind, the Power which rules the universe can- 
 not be just in any sense of the word which 
 we can understand. 
 
 Is there anything which appears to transcend 
 the conditions of man's present existence, to 
 be likely to survive and be carried over to a 
 larger sphere of being ? This seems to be the 
 practical question if the subject is to be re- 
 garded from the strictly rational point of view. 
 Character is no doubt formed by action on a 
 basis of natural tendency, under the moulding 
 environment of circumstance ; nor can it be 
 affirmed that there is anything in moral action 
 not dictated by the present requirements of 
 our state as domestic and social beings, having 
 relations with others, as well as being under 
 the necessity of caring for ourselves. Yet, 
 while formed and manifested by acting in 
 conformity with the rules of our present life, 
 character seems when formed to have a value 
 and a beauty of its own, apart from its use- 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 129 
 
 fulness in current action ; so that we can 
 contemplate it, mark its improvement or dete- 
 rioration in ourselves, and make its improve- 
 ment the object of distinct and conscious 
 effort. What we call spiritual life seems in 
 fact to be the cultivation of character carried 
 on under religious influence by a sort of inner 
 self. It is conceivable that good and beauti- 
 ful character may be prized by the Soul of 
 the Universe, if the universe has a soul, as 
 capable of union with itself, and that it may 
 thus transcend the limits of our being here. 
 If this is but a hint, on a question at once so 
 dark and of such overwhelming importance, 
 we may gladly welcome the faintest gleam 
 of light. 
 
 At the same time, so far as we can discern, 
 character can be formed only by effort, which 
 implies something against which to strive; 
 so that without evil, or what appears to us 
 evil, character could not be formed. The ex- 
 istence of evil in fact, so far as we can see, is 
 the necessary condition of active life. For 
 aught we know, effort, or something which we 
 can only describe as effort, not fiat or mere 
 
130 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 evolution, riM.y be the real law of the universe. 
 It is true that the immortality to which 
 any suggestion of this kind points would be 
 of the conditional kind, since good character 
 only could have a life-giving affinity to the 
 power of good. 
 
 To all the questionings about the origin of 
 evil, which the writer of Genesis answered 
 by the story of the Forbidden Fruit, our 
 answer must be that what we call evil is a 
 part of the constitution of the universe. 
 
 Supposing all proofs of personal immor- 
 tality failed us, we should have to fall back 
 upon the Stoic idea of reabsorption in the 
 universe and union with its workings and 
 destinies, whatever they may be. If con- 
 sciousness and affection are lost, pain, suf- 
 fering, and unfulfilled desire at all events 
 will be no more. 
 
 All arguments of this kind of course have 
 relation to the natural aspect of things apart 
 from revelation. He who, with Dr. Sal- 
 mond, believes that he has a divine revela- 
 tion in the Gospel, and a pledge of immor- 
 tality in union with Christ, can stand in no 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 131 
 
 need of further assurance otherwise than in 
 the way of corroboration. He discusses the 
 natural evidences, like Butler, with revelation 
 in reserve. 
 
 There are those who think they display 
 their good sense in bidding us give up these 
 speculations, which, they tell us, are beyond 
 the range of our understandings, and culti- 
 vate our pleasure and happiness in the present 
 world. One element of our pleasure and 
 happiness is the gratification of curiosity on 
 the highest subjects. Our curiosity has been 
 or is being gratified as to the origin of our 
 species, and surely the destiny of our species 
 is a question not less interesting even to sci- 
 ence, while it is inevitably set on foot by the 
 other. However, pleasure and happiness are 
 different things. Pleasure may be felt by the 
 condemned convict in eating his last meal. 
 But happiness seems to imply the sense of 
 security and permanence. It can hardly be 
 predicated of a being whose life is never safe 
 and at most endures but for an hour. 
 
 The estate of man upon this earth of 
 ours may in course of time be vastly improved. 
 
132 IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 
 
 So much seems to be promised by the recent 
 achievements of science, whose advance is in 
 geometrical progression, each discovery giv- 
 ing birth to several more. Increase of health 
 and extension of life by sanitary, dietetic, and 
 gymnastic improvement ; increase of wealth 
 by invention, and of leisure by the substitu- 
 tion of machinery for labour ; more equal dis- 
 tribution of wealth, with its comforts and 
 refinements; diffusion of knowledge; political 
 improvement; elevation of the domestic affec- 
 tions and social sentiments ; unification of 
 mankind, and elimination of war through 
 ascendency of reason over passion, all these 
 things may be carried to an indefinite extent, 
 and may produce what in comparison with the 
 present estate of man would be a terrestrial 
 paradise. Selection and the merciless struggle 
 for existence may be in some measure super- 
 seded by selection of a more scientific and 
 merciful kind. Death may be deprived at 
 all events of its pangs. On the other hand, 
 the horizon does not appear to be clear 
 of cloud. The pressure of population is 
 a danger which the anti-Malthusian can no 
 
IS THERE ANOTHER LIFE? 133 
 
 longer set at naught, and to check which it 
 is certain that Providence will not interpose. 
 The tendency of the factory with its increas- 
 ing division of labour has not hitherto been 
 to make industrial life less monotonous or 
 more cheerful. Frost, heat, storm, drought, 
 and earthquake, human progress can hardly 
 abate. Art and poetry do not seem likely to 
 advance with the ascendency of severe science. 
 There is some truth in the saying of the poet 
 that a glory has passed away from the earth. 
 However, let our fancy suppose the most 
 chimerical of Utopias realized in a com- 
 monwealth of man. Mortal life prolonged to 
 any conceivable extent is but a span. Still 
 over every festal board in the community of 
 terrestrial bliss will be cast the shadow of 
 approaching death; and the sweeter life be- 
 comes, the more bitter death will be. The 
 more bitter it will be at least to the ordinary 
 man, and the number of philosophers like 
 John Stuart Mill is small. 
 
THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 IN 
 
THE MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 THE effect produced by the teaching of 
 Jesus and his disciples is, beyond question, 
 the most momentous fact in history. If cir- 
 cumstances, such as the fusion of races under 
 the Roman Empire and the distress attend- 
 ant on the decline of the Empire concurred, 
 Christianity was the motive power. The con- 
 version of Saul marks the greatness of the 
 moral change. It is the proclamation of a 
 new ideal of human brotherhood and purity 
 of life. Here, if at any point in history, we 
 may believe that the Spirit of the World, if 
 the world has a spirit, was at work. If evil 
 to a terrible extent as well as good has appar- 
 ently flowed from the Gospel; if Christianity 
 has given birth to priestcraft, intolerance, 
 persecution, and religious war, as well as to 
 137 
 
138 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 some perversions of morality, it is because 
 the miraculous elements, and the circle of 
 ecclesiastical dogma which under the theo- 
 sophic influences of the succeeding age formed 
 itself around them, have been allowed to 
 overlay and obscure the character and teach- 
 ing of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 The author of Supernatural Religion, after 
 demolishing, as he conceives, the authority of 
 the ecclesiastical canon, himself says of the 
 ethical system of Christianity: 
 
 "It must be admitted that Christian ethics 
 were not in their details either new or origi- 
 nal. The precepts which distinguish the 
 system may be found separately in early 
 religions, in ancient philosophies, and in the 
 utterances of the great poets and seers of 
 Israel. The teaching of Jesus, however, car- 
 ried morality to the sublimest point attained 
 or even attainable by humanity. The influence 
 of his spiritual religion has been rendered 
 doubly great by the unparalleled purity and 
 elevation of his own character. Surpassing 
 in his sublime simplicity and earnestness the 
 moral grandeur of Qh&kya-mouni, and putting 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 139 
 
 to the blush the sometimes sullied, though 
 generally admirable, teaching of Socrates and 
 Plato, and the whole round of Greek philoso- 
 phers, he presented the rare spectacle of a 
 life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly 
 noble and consistent with his own lofty prin- 
 ciples, so that the 'imitation of Christ ' has 
 become almost the final word in the preach- 
 ing of his religion, and must continue to be 
 one of the most powerful elements of its 
 permanence. His system might not be new, 
 but it was in a high sense the perfect devel- 
 opment of natural morality, and it was final 
 in this respect amongst others, that, super- 
 seding codes of law and elaborate rules of 
 life, it confined itself to two fundamental 
 principles: love to God and love to man. 
 Whilst all previous systems had merely sought 
 to purify the stream, it demanded the purifi- 
 cation of the fountain. It placed the evil 
 thought on a par with the evil action. Such 
 morality, based upon the intelligent and ear- 
 nest acceptance of divine law, and perfect 
 recognition of the brotherhood of man, is the 
 highest conceivable by humanity, and although 
 
140 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 its power and influence must augment with 
 the increase of enlightenment, it is itself be- 
 yond development, consisting as it does of 
 principles unlimited in their range and in- 
 exhaustible in their application. Its perfect 
 realization is that true spiritual Nirvana which 
 Qhakya-mouni has clearly conceived, and ob- 
 scured with Oriental mysticism: extinction 
 of rebellious personal opposition to divine 
 order, and the attainment of perfect harmony 
 with the will of God." 1 
 
 Of the four religions which have been styled 
 universal, Christianity alone is universal in 
 fact. Christianity alone preaches its Gospel 
 to the whole world. A Buddhist element has 
 recently found its way into a certain school 
 of European philosophy, but not through Bud- 
 dhist preaching or under a Buddhist form. 
 Mahometanism and Buddhism are something 
 more than local or tribal, yet less than uni- 
 versal. Mahometanism is military, as its 
 Koran avows. In conquest it lives, with con- 
 quest it decays; it also practically belongs 
 to the despotic, polygamic, and slave-owning 
 i Vol. II., pp. 487-8. 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 141 
 
 East. It has never been the religion of a 
 Western race, or of a free and industrial com- 
 munity. By arms it has been propagated, or 
 by local influence and contagion, not by mis- 
 sions. Buddhism, if it is really a religion 
 and not rather a quietist philosophy engen- 
 dered of languor and suffering, is partly 
 a religion of climate and of race; of its 
 boasted myriads the majority, the Chinese, 
 retain little more than a tincture of Buddha, 
 while all are enclosed within a ring-fence in 
 a particular quarter of the globe. Its Euro- 
 pean offspring is a philosophy of despair. 
 Judaism, after its rejection of Christianity, 
 itself fell back into a tribalism, which is of 
 all tribalisms morally the most anti-social, 
 since it is not primitive and natural but self- 
 enforced and artificially maintained in the face 
 of humanity ; while the proselytism which was 
 rife when the philosophic Judaism of Philo was 
 verging on universality has since that epoch 
 ceased. It is to be noted also that Christianity 
 is almost alone in its display of recuperative 
 power. No parallel to the revivals of Wycliff, 
 Luther, Calvin, and Wesley is presented by any 
 
142 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 other religion. The Wahabi movement will 
 hardly be thought as a spiritual revival to 
 deserve that rank. 
 
 Moral civilization and sustained progress' 
 have been thus far limited to Christendom. 
 So have distinct and effective ideas of human 
 brotherhood, which implies a common pater- 
 nity, and of the service of humanity. In Bud- 
 dhism, if they have been distinct, they cannot 
 be said to have been equally effective. They 
 seem to be closely connected with the Christian 
 idea of the Church, with its struggle for the 
 emancipation of the world from the powers 
 of evil and with its hope of final victory. 
 
 Much, therefore, of what we have cherished 
 would still stand even if our evidence for the 
 miracles should fall. 
 
 We need hardly expend thought on the 
 discussion as to the possibility of believing 
 in miracles. The very term supposes the 
 existence of a power above nature, able to 
 reveal itself by a suspension of nature's ordi- 
 nary course and willing so to reveal itself for 
 the salvation of mankind. There is nothing 
 apparently repugnant to reason in such a sup- 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 143 
 
 position. The existence of the power is even 
 implied in the phrase " laws of nature " con- 
 stantly used by science; for wherever there 
 is a law there must be a law-giver, and the 
 law-giver must be presumed capable of sus- 
 pending the operation of law. This Hume 
 himself would hardly have denied. In fact, 
 the metaphysical argument against mira- 
 cles comes, as has been said before, pretty 
 much to this, that a miracle cannot take 
 place, because if it did it would be a miracle. 
 We could not help believing our own senses 
 if we actually saw a man raised from the 
 dead. There is no reason why we should not 
 believe the testimony of other people, pro- 
 vided that they were eye-witnesses, that they 
 were competent in character and in intelli- 
 gence, and that their testimony had been 
 submitted to impartial and thorough investi- 
 gation. Suppose a hundred men of known 
 character, judgment, and scientific attain- 
 ments were to unite in declaring that they 
 had seen a blind man restored to sight or a 
 man raised from the dead in circumstances 
 precluding the possibility of fraud or illusion, 
 
144 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 should we, as Hume says, at once reject their 
 testimony? On what ground? On the ground 
 of universal experience? Experience, being 
 only previous uniformity, is broken by a well- 
 attested exception. We assume an adequate 
 object, such as the revelation to man of vital 
 truth undiscoverable by his own intellect 
 would be. It is simply a question of evi- 
 dence. All will allow that we require either 
 the evidence of our own senses or an extraor- 
 dinary amount of unexceptionable testimony 
 to warrant us in accepting a miracle. 
 
 That the Supreme Being, supposing that 
 he intended to reveal himself by miracle for 
 the salvation of mankind, and required belief 
 in the miracle as the condition of our salva- 
 tion, would provide us with conclusive evi- 
 dence, may surely be assumed. A miracle is 
 an appeal to our reason through our senses, 
 and to make it valid either the evidence of 
 our own senses, or evidence equivalent to 
 that of our own senses, is required. To call 
 upon us to believe without sufficient evidence 
 would be to put an end to belief itself in 
 any rational sense of the term. Theologians 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 145 
 
 always take advantage of proof so far as it 
 is forthcoming. Faith, to which they have 
 appealed in defect of proof, is a belief, not 
 in things unproved, but in things unseen. 
 Miracles may be accepted on the evidence of 
 a church assumed to be itself divine; they 
 may even be accepted on the supposed evi- 
 dence of a spiritual sense illuminated by 
 divine influence; but if we are to accept 
 them on the evidence of reason, there must 
 be satisfactory eye-witnesses. What ocular 
 testimony do we possess? 
 
 In the fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle 
 to the Corinthians St. Paul says that the 
 risen Christ had appeared to him. He says 
 simply appeared (axfrOrj). He gives no par- 
 ticulars nor anything which can enable us to 
 judge whether the apparition was certainly 
 real, or whether it may have been the product 
 of ecstatic imagination, like the apparition 
 seen by Colonel Gardiner or those which made 
 Coleridge say that he did not believe in 
 ghosts because he had seen too many of them. 
 Three detailed accounts of the vision are 
 given in the Acts, but not one of them can 
 
146 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 be traced to St. Paul, though two of them 
 are put into his mouth; and they are at vari- 
 ance with each other, one (Acts ix. 7) say- 
 ing that St. Paul's fellow-travellers heard 
 the voice but saw no man; another (Acts 
 xxii. 9) saying that they saw the light but 
 did not hear the voice; while the utterances 
 of the voice itself differ widely in the three 
 passages (compare Acts ix. 4-7, with Acts 
 xxii. 7, 8, and more especially with Acts 
 xxvi. 14-19), though it would seem that the 
 words ought to have made an indelible im- 
 pression; not to mention that "it is hard for 
 thee to kick against the goad" is a strange 
 phrase to be used by a voice from heaven. 
 
 In the same passage of the first Epistle to 
 the Corinthians St. Paul states "that Christ 
 died for our sins according to the Scriptures; 
 that he was buried; that he had been raised 
 on the third day according to the Scriptures; 
 that he had appeared unto Cephas, then to the 
 twelve; that he had afterwards appeared to 
 about five hundred brethren at once, of whom 
 the greater part remained till that time, but 
 some were fallen asleep; then to James; then 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 147 
 
 to all the apostles." It is natural to assume 
 that St. Paul learned this from Peter and 
 James, the two apostles whom he saw on his 
 first visit to Jerusalem after his conversion. 
 But he does not cite their authority, much 
 less does he say that he had taken any meas- 
 ures to sift their evidence. Nor is it likely 
 that he would have taken such measures, 
 being, as he was, an ardent proselyte of 
 three years' standing, and having staked his 
 spiritual life on the resurrection of Christ. 
 Here again he uses the expression "appeared" 
 (wfydrf), and leaves us once more to speculate 
 on the effect of enthusiasm in giving birth to 
 visions and on the contagion of excited im- 
 agination. He says nothing about the inter- 
 course of the risen Christ with his Apostles 
 during the days preceding the Ascension. Nor 
 does it seem easy to harmonize his story with 
 that of the Gospels. 
 
 Some attestations of miracles given in the 
 Acts are in the first person, implying that 
 an eye-witness is speaking. The eye-wit- 
 ness, however, is anonymous, and we have 
 no means of testing his trustworthiness. The 
 
148 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 escape of St. Paul at Melita from the sting 
 of the viper which had come out of the 
 burning sticks and fastened on his hand, 
 and his prophetic reliance upon God in the 
 shipwreck, while they are vividly attested, 
 can hardly be called miraculous. 
 
 In 1 Corinthians xii. 4-11, St. Paul refers 
 in a general way to the existence of miracu- 
 lous gifts among members of the Church : 
 "Now there are diversities of gifts, but 
 the same Spirit. And there are diversities 
 of ministrations, and the same Lord. And 
 there are diversities of workings, but the 
 same God, who worketh all things in all. 
 But to each one is given the manifestation 
 of the Spirit to profit withal. For to one is 
 given through the Spirit the word of wis- 
 dom; and to another the word of knowledge, 
 according to the same Spirit: to another 
 faith, in the same Spirit; and to another 
 gifts of healings, in the one Spirit; and to 
 another workings of miracles; and to another 
 prophecy; and to another discernings of 
 spirits: to another divers kinds of tongues; 
 and to another the interpretation of tongues: 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 149 
 
 but all these worketh the one and the same 
 Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as 
 he will." Gifts of divers kinds of tongues 
 and of the interpretation of tongues, it will 
 be observed, are put on a level with the rest, 
 though St. Paul himself (1 Corinthians xiv.) 
 treats those gifts as equivocal, and we know 
 from modern experience that they may be the 
 offspring of self-delusion; while the account 
 of the gift of tongues in Acts ii. 8, as that 
 of speaking divers known languages, is at 
 variance with the words of St. Paul, who 
 describes it as that of speaking in a tongue 
 unknown to all. St. Paul does not testify to 
 the occurrence of any specific miracle other 
 than his own vision, nor does he profess to 
 have performed a specific miracle himself. 
 His general appeal is not to miracles but to 
 the divine character and merits of Christ. 
 
 In the first Epistle of St. Peter there are 
 allusions (i. 3 and iii. 18) to the resurrec- 
 tion of Christ. But they are connected with 
 an allusion to his preaching "unto the spirits 
 in prison, which aforetime were disobedient, 
 when the longsuffering of God waited in 
 
150 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the days of Noah, while the ark was a pre- 
 paring"; a tradition which implies belief in 
 the Noachic legend, while its character seems 
 to militate against the authenticity of the 
 Epistle as the work of a companion of 
 Christ, since actual contact with reality 
 usually sets bounds to imagination. In the 
 second Epistle of St. Peter there is an allu- 
 sion to the Transfiguration. But the authen- 
 ticity of the second Epistle of St. Peter is 
 strongly impugned and feebly defended. 
 
 The testimony comprised in the above pas- 
 sages is, apparently, the sum-total of the 
 ocular evidence producible for the miracu- 
 lous part of Christianity. Besides this there 
 is nothing but tradition of unknown origin 
 recorded by unknown writers at a date 
 uncertain and, for aught that we can tell, 
 many years after the events. The four 
 Gospels are anonymous. Two of them, the 
 second and third, are not even ascribed to 
 eye-witnesses, while the preface to the third 
 distinctly implies that it is not the work of 
 an eye-witness, but of one of a number of 
 compilers. The first Gospel, if Matthew were 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 151 
 
 really its author, would be the work of an 
 eye-witness. But it seems to be certainly 
 attested that if Matthew wrote a Gospel at 
 all it was in Hebrew, whereas the first Gos- 
 pel is in Greek and is pronounced to be not 
 even a translation from the Hebrew. In the 
 fourth Gospel there is an attestation; but it 
 is anonymous and suspicious, serving rather 
 to shake than to confirm our belief in apos- 
 tolic authorship; for why should not the 
 writer himself have given his name instead 
 of leaving the authenticity to be attested by 
 an unknown hand? Of the proof tendered for 
 the authenticity of this Gospel as the work 
 of St. John, it may safely be said that it is 
 not such as would be accepted in the case of 
 any ordinary work. Of the most recent 
 experts there is a decided and apparently 
 growing majority on the other side. The 
 Apocalypse as well as the Gospel was 
 ascribed by the Church to St. John, and as 
 the difference of character and style is such 
 that the two cannot have been by the same 
 hand, whatever makes for the authenticity 
 of the Apocalypse makes against the authen- 
 
152 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ticity of the Gospel. Nothing can seem more 
 unlikely than that a Gospel tinctured with 
 Alexandrian theosophy should be the work of 
 a simple fisherman of Galilee. Nor is there 
 any similarity between the character of John 
 depicted in the first three Gospels and that 
 with which the fourth Gospel is suffused. The 
 writer's attitude of aversion towards the Jews 
 and his references to their laws and customs as 
 those of another nation are scarcely compatible 
 with the supposition that he was himself a Jew. 
 Not one of the four Gospels can be shown 
 with any certainty to have existed in its 
 present form till a period had elapsed after 
 the events fully sufficient, in a totally un- 
 critical age, for the growth of any amount of 
 miraculous legend, as the biographies of 
 numerous saints in the Middle Ages prove. 
 This much at the very least seems to have 
 been established by the author of Super- 
 natural Religion, whose main argument, as 
 Matthew Arnold says, is not to be shaken 
 by pursuing him into minor issues and dis- 
 crediting him there. It is alleged that the 
 Gospels must have been written before the 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 153 
 
 destruction of Jerusalem, because they do not 
 refer to that catastrophe but seem to speak 
 of the "altar" as if it were still existing. 
 The answer appears to be that if the tradi- 
 tions worked up by the Evangelists were 
 anterior to the fall of Jerusalem, there is no 
 reason why that event should be imported 
 into them. Legends do not ordinarily men- 
 tion intervening events. Besides, there does 
 appear in Matthew xxiv. and Mark xiii. to 
 be an allusion to the flight of the Christians f 
 in the day of conflict. 
 
 In the narratives of the first three Evan- 
 gelists, there is found a large common ele- 
 ment. It appears that if the whole text of 
 the Synoptics is broken up into one hun- 
 dred and seventy-four sections, fifty-eight of 
 these are common to all three; twenty-six 
 besides to Matthew and Mark; seventeen to 
 Mark and Luke; thirty-two to Matthew and 
 Luke; leaving only forty-one unshared ele- 
 ments, of which thirty-one are found in 
 Luke, seven in Matthew, and three in Mark. 1 
 
 1 Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 184. See 
 also the following pages. 
 
154 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 This similarity in the selection of a limited 
 portion of the Life, combined with the actual 
 identity of language in so many passages, has 
 been justly thought to preclude the hypothesis 
 of independent authorship and to suggest com- 
 pilation on a common basis. There must on 
 that supposition have been an interval of time 
 between the events and the compilation during 
 which the common basis was formed. 
 
 It is surely incredible that divine Provi- 
 dence, intending to consign facts on the 
 knowledge of which the salvation of man 
 depended to particular writings, should not 
 have placed the authorship and date of those 
 writings beyond a doubt. 
 
 Not one of the four Evangelists claims 
 inspiration. The author of the third Gospel 
 seems distinctly to renounce it, putting his 
 narrative on a level with a number of others, 
 over which he asserts his superiority, if at 
 all, only in carefulness of investigation. The 
 Church, however, has treated all four Gospels 
 as equally inspired. Papias on the other hand, 
 in the middle of the second century, seems to 
 recognize no Gospel as inspired, holding that 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 155 
 
 nothing derived from books was so profitable 
 as the living voice of tradition. 
 
 There would be a natural and almost over- 
 whelming temptation to ascribe an anony- 
 mous and popular history of Christ to one of 
 the apostles; and this would be done in an 
 uncritical age without any thought of fraud. 
 It is true that we accept without question 
 the works of Tacitus and other ancient his- 
 torians, though anonymous, as those of their 
 reputed authors. But in these cases there 
 was no temptation to false ascription, nor 
 does it greatly signify who wrote the his- 
 tory, the facts neither requiring an extraor- 
 dinary amount of evidence, nor being vital to 
 the salvation of mankind. 
 
 Of some of the miraculous parts of the 
 Gospel, such, for instance, as the Temptation 
 in the Wilderness, and the Agony in the 
 Garden, with the descent of the angel, there 
 could be no eye-witnesses. Of the Annuncia- 
 tion and the Immaculate Conception the only 
 possible witness tells us nothing. It is hard 
 indeed to see how we could have eye-wit- 
 nesses to anything which happened before 
 
156 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the calling of the apostles. Who can have 
 reported to the Evangelist the canticles of 
 Mary, Zacharias, and Simeon? Here surely 
 we are dealing with legend and poetry, not 
 with historic fact. 
 
 Between the narratives of the different 
 Gospels there are discrepancies which baffle 
 the harmonists. Between the narratives of 
 the Resurrection and the events which follow 
 there are discrepancies which drive the har- 
 monists to despair. There are contradictions 
 as to the names of the apostles, the behav- 
 iour of the two thieves at the Crucifixion, 
 the attendance at the cross. There is a con- 
 tradiction with regard to the miracle at 
 Gadara, one Gospel giving a single demo- 
 niac, the other a pair. Three Gospels treat 
 Galilee, the fourth Judea, as the chief centre 
 of the ministry. One Gospel gives, another 
 omits, such incidents as the Annunciation, 
 the Adoration of the Magi, the Temptation, 
 the Transfiguration, the raising of Lazarus, 
 and the conversation with the woman of 
 Samaria; while the suggestion that the nar- 
 ratives were intended to supplement each 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 157 
 
 other is gratuitous in itself, and is repelled 
 by the existence of a large common element 
 in the first three. But the most notable 
 discrepancy of all perhaps is that respecting 
 the day of the Crucifixion, and the character 
 of the Last Supper. The first three Gospels 
 make Christ eat the Passover with his dis- 
 ciples and suffer on the day following; the 
 fourth puts the Crucifixion on the day of 
 the Preparation for the Passover, suggesting 
 that Christ was the Paschal Lamb sacrificed 
 for the sins of the world. In the first three 
 Gospels the Last Supper plainly is the Pass- 
 over; in the fourth it as plainly is not. To 
 force the two accounts into agreement des- 
 perate expedients, such as the supposition 
 of a religious meal, not identical with the 
 Passover but identical with the Last Supper, 
 have been tried. But God would scarcely 
 have left inspired narratives of an event on 
 which human salvation was to depend to be 
 reconciled by extreme expedients invented 
 eighteen centuries afterwards by learned and 
 ingenious minds. Unless the two accounts 
 can be reconciled, it is obvious that the 
 
158 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 author of one of them can have been no eye- 
 witness nor even well-informed. 
 
 It is idle to contend that such discrepan- 
 cies are of a minor kind and the ordinary 
 variations of human testimony, even on the 
 strange supposition that the Holy Spirit 
 would either lapse into the infirmities of 
 human testimony or simulate them in dic- 
 tating the Gospel narrative. They are such 
 as would certainly invalidate human testi- 
 mony to any extraordinary event. 
 
 Between the general representation of 
 Christ's character and teaching in the first 
 three Gospels and that in the fourth, there 
 is marked divergence. The teaching in the 
 first three is generally ethical, in the fourth 
 it is theological. The character of Christ in 
 the first is that of a divine teacher; in the 
 fourth it is that of the second Person in the 
 Trinity and the Logos. The fourth Gos- 
 pel has, indeed, in modern times been pre- 
 ferred to the other three on account of its 
 specially theological character and its spir- 
 itual elevation. When we find a similar 
 divergence between the Xenophontic and the 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 159 
 
 Platonic Socrates, we conclude that the Pla- 
 tonic Socrates is largely the creation of Plato. 
 Testimony is plainly invalidated by the ascen- 
 dency of imagination. 
 
 Sufficient attention seems hardly to have 
 been paid to the adverse weight of negative 
 evidence. A teacher who has been drawing 
 all eyes upon him by his words and by a course 
 of stupendous miracles, culminating in the 
 raising from the dead of a man who had been 
 four days in the grave, enters Jerusalem amidst 
 the acclamations of a vast concourse of people. 
 He is brought before the Sanhedrim and after- 
 wards tried in the most public manner before 
 the Roman governor. The governor's wife is 
 warned about him in a dream. He is crucified, 
 and when he expires miraculous darkness covers 
 the earth for three hours, the earth quakes, the 
 veil of the temple is rent in twain from the 
 top to the bottom, the tombs are opened, and 
 bodies of the saints that slept come forth 
 out of the grave, enter into the holy city, 
 and appear to many. The Roman centurion 
 and the watch are impressed, and say that 
 this truly was the Son of God. But other- 
 
160 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 wise no impression is made, no notice of 
 these tremendous events seems to be taken, 
 no trace of them is left in general history, 1 
 no one apparently is converted, not even 
 Saul. The Jews, of whose acts this was an 
 overwhelming condemnation, are so little 
 impressed that they think only of bribing the 
 watch to confess that the body of Jesus had 
 been stolen from the tomb. 
 
 We cannot pick and choose. The evidence 
 upon which the miraculous darkness and the 
 apparitions of the dead rest is the same as 
 that upon which all the other miracles rest, 
 and must be accepted or rejected in all the 
 cases alike. 
 
 The Acts, like the Gospels, is anonymous, 
 and if its author is identical with the author 
 of the third Gospel, this shows that he 
 was not an eye-witness of the Resurrection. 
 An examination of its internal difficulties 
 
 1 Gibbon, who has not failed to make the point, though 
 he has hardly pushed the argument home, observes that the 
 preternatural darkness happened in the time of Pliny, the 
 naturalist, and of Seneca, who wrote a collection of natural 
 facts in seven books, and is not mentioned by either of them. 
 Pliny, however, would be a boy at that date. 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 161 
 
 would be beside our present purpose, which is 
 to ascertain the amount and value of the ocular 
 testimony to the miracles. It seems to be ad- 
 mitted that there is no positive and unequiv- 
 ocal evidence of the existence of this book 
 till towards the end of the second century. 
 
 Is it conceivable that Providence would 
 allow vital truth, or anything essential to 
 our belief in vital truth, to be stamped with 
 the mark of falsehood? The demoniac mira- 
 cles are clearly stamped with the mark of 
 Jewish superstition. To the imagination of 
 the Jews at this period, spirits good and evil 
 were everywhere present. They were with 
 you in the lecture-room; they were with 
 you in every function of life. From the 
 fourth Gospel demoniac miracles are absent, 
 not because that Gospel is supplementary, a 
 supposition for which, as was before said, 
 there is no sort of colour, but because the 
 first three Gospels were written for Jewish 
 readers to whom demoniac miracles were con- 
 genial, while the fourth Gospel was written 
 for an intellectual circle to which they were 
 not congenial, and perhaps at a later day. 
 
162 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 According to Mark, Jesus casts a legion 
 of devils out of a man into a herd of two 
 thousand swine, which forthwith rush down 
 into the sea and are drowned. The comment 
 of an orthodox writer of great eminence upon 
 this astounding and repellent miracle is 
 this: "That the demoniac was healed 
 that in the terrible final paroxysm which 
 usually accompanied the deliverance from 
 this strange and awful malady, a herd of 
 swine was in some way affected with such 
 wild terror as to rush headlong in large 
 numbers over a steep hillside into the waters 
 of the lake and that, in the minds of all 
 who were present, including that of the suf- 
 ferer himself, this precipitate rushing of the 
 swine was connected with the man's release 
 from his demoniac thraldom thus much is 
 clear." 1 Such attempts to minimize the 
 miracles or reduce them within the compass 
 of possible belief are common in writings 
 of liberal theologians, especially of Germans. 
 In the miracle of the conversion of water 
 into wine at Cana, Olshausen would have us 
 1 The Life of Christ, by Frederic W. Farrar, I., 337. 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 163 
 
 suppose that we have only an accelerated 
 operation of nature ; Neander, that the water 
 was magnetized ; Lange, that the guests were 
 in a state of supernatural exaltation. With 
 regard to the acceleration hypothesis, a criti- 
 cal physicist has remarked that nature alone, 
 whatever time you give her, will never make 
 thirty imperial gallons of wine without at 
 least ten pounds of carbon. 1 
 
 What is hard to believe in the miracle of 
 Bethesda, the liberal theologian escapes by 
 remarking that there is no indication in the 
 narrative that any one who used the water 
 was at once or miraculously healed; that the 
 repeated use of an intermittent and gaseous 
 spring, a character which more than one of 
 the springs about Jerusalem continue to bear 
 to the present day, was, doubtless, likely to 
 produce most beneficial results. He further 
 suggests that it was as much the man's will 
 that was paralyzed as his limbs. Of the troub- 
 ling of the water by the angel, apologists are 
 glad to be rid by dismissing it as a popular 
 legend, interpolated into the text of St. John. 
 But so long as anything miraculous is left the 
 i Farrar, i. 168. 
 
164 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 difficulty of proof remains; while if nothing 
 miraculous is left there is an end of this dis- 
 cussion. Nor, it must be repeated, can we 
 pick and choose among the miracles, as some 
 are evidently inclined to do. The evidence 
 for the miracle of the demoniac and the swine 
 is just the same as that for any other miracle. 
 All rest upon the same testimony and must 
 stand or fall together. 
 
 Jewish belief both in angels and devils is 
 entwined with the history of the first three 
 Gospels; the archangel Gabriel, with a He- 
 brew name, announces the birth of Christ; 
 angels proclaim it to the shepherds: angels 
 appear again at the tomb of Christ; Satan 
 comes in person to tempt Christ in the wil- 
 derness. There are angels in the fourth 
 Gospel, but there is no personal Satan. 
 
 From the preface to the third Gospel it 
 appears that many had drawn up narratives 
 concerning the life of Christ. Upon what 
 principle the four were selected by the 
 Church as inspired and authoritative we can- 
 not tell. Irenseus said that as there were 
 four quarters of the world and four chief 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 165 
 
 winds, the Gospels, which were to be coex- 
 tensive with the world and to be the breath 
 of life to its inhabitants, must be four. Be- 
 sides, the Gospel was given by him who sits 
 above the fourfold cherubim, four was the 
 number of the Beasts, and four were God's 
 covenants through Adam, Noah, Moses, and 
 Christ. It is probable that these four narra- 
 tives survived by their intrinsic merits. But 
 for their authenticity little security can be 
 found in the critical faculty or discernment 
 of the patristic age. 
 
 Miraculous Christianity involves anti-sci- 
 entific ideas of the world. It assumes that 
 the earth is the centre of the universe with 
 the heaven, which is the abode of the Deity, 
 stretched above it, and Hades sunk beneath 
 it. The angels and the mystic dove descend 
 from the skies, and the risen Christ ascends 
 to them. When Satan shows Christ all the 
 kingdoms of the earth from a high mountain, 
 the writer seems to take the globe for a 
 plane. The theological geocentricism, which 
 makes our planet the centre of all interest, 
 the especial care of the Divinity, and the sole 
 
166 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 field of divine action, appears in the Johan- 
 nine doctrine of the Trinity. It might be 
 possible to imagine Deity stooping from a 
 limited heaven to redeem the inhabitants of 
 earth. It would have been hardly possible 
 to imagine a Being who fills eternity and 
 infinity becoming, for the redemption of one 
 speck in the universe, an embryo in the 
 womb of a Jewish maiden. For this stupen- 
 dous doctrine our principal evidence is the 
 anonymous work of a mystic writer. 
 
 The Incarnation, it will be observed, is 
 the centre of this whole circle of miracles. 
 Without it they can be hardly said to have 
 a purpose or a meaning. But since our rejec- 
 tion of the authenticity and authority of the 
 book of Genesis, the purpose and meaning of 
 the Incarnation itself have been withdrawn. 
 If there was no Fall of Man, there can be no 
 need of the Redemption. If there was no 
 need of the Redemption, there can have been 
 no motive for the Incarnation. The whole 
 ecclesiastical scheme of salvation with all its 
 miraculous appurtenances apparently falls to 
 the ground. This is a vital point. 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 167 
 
 In the story of the Star of the Nativity 
 primitive astronomy and astrology are involved. 
 It is useless to attempt scientific explana- 
 tions, such as a remarkable conjunction of 
 the planets, or the temporary appearance 
 and sudden extinction of a star. The Magi, 
 as astrologers, recognize the star of Christ; 
 it moves before them as a guide, regardless 
 of the general march of planets or the sidereal 
 system, and stops over the cradle in which 
 the child of destiny lies. 
 
 There is one class of the miraculous evi- 
 dences respecting which we have undoubtedly 
 the means of forming our own judgment. 
 We can tell whether there was really a 
 miraculous fulfilment of Hebrew prophecies 
 in the history of Jesus. To the alleged 
 prophecy that Christ should be called a 
 Nazarene, there is nothing whatsoever corre- 
 sponding in the Old Testament. Apologists, 
 after trying such expedients as the identifica- 
 tion of Nazarene with Nazarite, which even 
 if it were feasible would help them but 
 little, Christ having fulfilled none of the 
 conditions of a Nazarite, are fain to give up 
 
168 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the problem in despair. But once more it 
 must be said that we cannot pick and 
 choose. Our assurance of the miraculous 
 fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy in 
 this and the other cases is the same, while it 
 is impossible to think that the Holy Spirit 
 would either purposely misquote or lapse into 
 involuntary misquotation. In Matthew xxi. 
 5-7, the supposed fulfilment of the prophecy 
 is founded upon a literary error into which 
 a writer acquainted with Hebrew literature 
 could hardly have fallen. The "ass " and the 
 "colt, the foal of an ass," are in the Hebrew 
 not two things but two expressions for the 
 same thing, and we have before us not only 
 a misconstruction, but, as it is hardly possible 
 that Jesus could have ridden at once upon 
 the ass and upon the foal, a probable adapta- 
 tion of the history to the fulfilment of the 
 supposed prophecy. The same may be said 
 with regard to the alleged fulfilment of the 
 Scripture in John xix. 24, where the words 
 of the Psalm, "They parted my garment 
 among them, and upon my vesture did they 
 cast lots," are taken as denoting two actions, 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 169 
 
 when they are a double expression, after the 
 manner of Hebrew poetry, for one. "I called 
 my son out of Egypt," as it stands in Hosea 
 xi. 1, can by no ingenuity be referred to any- 
 thing but the Exodus, not to mention the 
 strong suspicion which here again is raised 
 of a story framed to correspond with the sup- 
 posed prophecy. "Behold a virgin shall con- 
 ceive and bear a son," in Isaiah vii. 14, is 
 evidently a sign given by the prophet in 
 relation to a crisis of contemporary history, 
 and has plainly not the remotest connection 
 with the immaculate conception of Jesus. 
 Messianic predictions, such as "The sceptre 
 shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler's 
 staff from between his feet until Shiloh come, 
 and unto him shall the obedience of the 
 peoples be," not only were not fulfilled but 
 were contradicted by the history of Jesus, 
 who was not a temporal ruler or deliverer, 
 and was therefore not recognized as the Mes- 
 siah by the Jews. None in short of the 
 so-called prophecies will be found to be 
 more than applications, and many of them as 
 applications are far fetched. This is true 
 
170 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 even of the most remarkable of the number, 
 the description of the oppressed and sorrow- 
 ing servant of Jehovah, in Isaiah liii. 3, 
 the author of which cannot be said to have 
 distinctly foretold anything in the history 
 of Jesus, even if we take Jesus to have 
 been so preeminently a man of sorrows, a 
 point on which a word will be presently 
 said. In no single case can Jesus, or 
 any event of his life, be said to have been 
 present to the mental eye of the prophet. In 
 fact, divines of the more rationalistic school 
 are retiring from the ground of miraculous 
 prophecy to that of ethical application, a 
 movement parallel to that which they are 
 performing in the case of the miracles by 
 substituting natural causes, as far as they 
 can, for divine interruption of the course of 
 nature. But applications, even if they are 
 apposite, are not prophecies. A similar set 
 might probably be framed for almost any 
 marked character of history in a nation pos- 
 sessed of an ancient literature. On this ques- 
 tion, as on that of miracles, orthodoxy retreats, 
 covering its movement with language which, 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 171 
 
 while it renounces inspiration, clings with- 
 out any definite reason to the belief in some- 
 thing which is not human but divine. 
 
 The martyrdoms of the apostles, it has been 
 said, are testimony of the miracles, since 
 without the assurance of the miracles the 
 pains of martyrdom would not have been 
 faced. This history contradicts. To say noth- 
 ing of the persecutions endured under Nero 
 and Diocletian, when belief in miracles still 
 lived, we have instances in abundance at 
 the time of the Reformation of martyrdom 
 undergone for the doctrine of the reformers, 
 though no miracles were even alleged to have 
 taken place. Nor are such cases confined to 
 the Christian pale. The sect of the Babis in 
 Persia has in recent times undergone the most 
 cruel persecution, not only without the sup- 
 port of miracles but for a faith which Chris- 
 tians pronounce false. Servetus died for 
 Socinianism, and Giordano Bruno for scep- 
 ticism. St. Paul endured a life of martyr- 
 dom, but evidently it was for love of Christ 
 and for the faith. That Christ had risen was 
 an essential part of his faith, and it is in this 
 
172 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 aspect, rather than as a confirmatory miracle, 
 that it presents itself to the mind of Paul. 
 
 No man of comprehensive mind, unless it 
 be Renan in his dealing with the raising of 
 Lazarus, has taken the miracles for creations 
 of fraud. They are the offspring of a child- 
 like fancy in a totally uncritical age. They 
 are a halo which naturally grew round the 
 head of the adored Teacher and Founder, as 
 it grew round the head of every mediaeval 
 saint. That world teemed with miracle, both 
 divine and diabolical. Jesus himself is rep- 
 resented as recognizing miracles of both 
 kinds. He challenges his opponents to say, 
 if he by Beelzebub casts out devils, by whom 
 do their sons cast them out. Instead of a 
 disposition to criticise, there was a domi- 
 nant predisposition to accept. If in the 
 country of Descartes highly educated men 
 could believe in the miracles wrought at the 
 tomb of the saintly Deacon Paris, how much 
 more easily could Galilean peasants, or sim- 
 ple-minded disciples of whatever race, believe 
 in the miracles ascribed, perhaps long after 
 his death, to Jesus? Dr. Arnold asked 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 173 
 
 whether it was possible that there should be 
 myths in the age of Tacitus. The age of 
 Tacitus it was, but not the country; though 
 even in the country of Tacitus miraculous 
 signs attended the births or deaths of Caesars, 
 and Tacitus himself records miracles reported 
 to have been performed by Vespasian, in 
 which, however, nobody believes. The Jews 
 were further prepared for the acceptance of 
 fresh miracles by their traditional acceptance 
 of those of the Old Testament. So devoid 
 were they of any conception of natural law, 
 or of anything except a direct action of Deity, 
 that with them a miracle would hardly be 
 miraculous. 
 
 If we must resign the miracles, the Mes- 
 sianic prophecies with their supposed fulfil- 
 ment in Christ, and the Trinitarian creed, 
 what remains to us of the Gospel? There 
 remain to us the Character, the sayings, and 
 the parables, which made and have sustained 
 moral, though not ritualistic, dogmatic, or 
 persecuting, Christendom. There remain 
 the supremacy of conscience over law and 
 the recognition of motive as that which 
 
174 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 determines the quality of action. The 
 character is only impaired as the model 
 and guiding star of humanity by supposing 
 that it was preterhuman. We cannot even 
 conceive the union of two natures, divine 
 and human, though we may mechanically 
 repeat the form of words. The sayings of 
 Christ would be not less true or applicable 
 if they had been cast ashore by the tide of 
 time without anything to designate their 
 source. The parable of the prodigal son, 
 that of the labourers in the vineyard, or 
 that of the Good Samaritan, would touch our 
 hearts whoever might be deemed their author. 
 There remains, moreover, the ethical beauty 
 of the Gospels themselves, unapproachable 
 after its kind. Their miracles are miracles 
 of mercy, not of destruction, like many of the 
 miracles of the Old Testament. When James 
 and John propose to perform an Old Testa- 
 ment miracle by commanding fire to come 
 down from heaven and destroy an inhospita- 
 ble village, they are rebuked and told they 
 know not of what manner of spirit they are. 
 In this sense it may be said that the mira- 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 175 
 
 cles confirm the Gospel and the Gospel con- 
 firms the miracles. The Inquisition, to justify 
 its existence, could find among Christ's words 
 none more apposite than "Compel them to 
 come in," said by the giver of the feast in 
 the parable. The halo of miracle is worth}' 
 of the figure. If there is a Supreme Being, 
 and if he is anywhere manifest in human 
 history, it is here. 
 
 A biography of Christ there cannot be. 
 There are no genuine materials for it, as 
 Strauss truly says. Four compilations of 
 legend cannot be pieced together so as to 
 make the history of a life. No ingenuity 
 can produce a chronological sequence of 
 scene such as a biographer requires. The 
 "Lives," so called, are merely the four Gos- 
 pels cut into shreds, which are forced into 
 some sort of order, while, to impart to 
 the narrative an air of reality, it is pro- 
 fusely decked out with references to local 
 scenery, allusions to national customs, and 
 Hebrew names. Each biographer gives us 
 a Christ according to his own prepossessions ; 
 Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or 
 
176 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Rationalist. The Roman Catholic priest pre- 
 sents him as a living crucifix; the New York 
 minister as a divine preacher. Renan's Life 
 of Jesus, though it is exquisite as a work of 
 literary art, as a biography is worth no more 
 than the rest. It has no critical basis, and 
 the facts are arbitrarily selected and arranged 
 in virtue of a learned insight which Renan 
 supposes himself to possess. Nothing is 
 more arbitrary than the selection of the rais- 
 ing of Lazarus as an example of pious fraud. 
 Nor does Renan's work escape the idiosyn- 
 crasy of the writer. We find in it a touch 
 of sentimentality, or even of something ver- 
 ging on the sensuous, which bespeaks a 
 Parisian hand. 
 
 Did Jesus give himself out or allow his 
 followers to designate him as the Messiah? 
 It is impossible to tell. All that we can say 
 is that his disciples, and not only those 
 whose traditions are embodied in the first 
 Gospel, desired to identify him with the hope 
 of Israel and applied or wrested passages of 
 the Old Testament to that intent. With 
 that object evidently were produced, by two 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 177 
 
 different hands, the two genealogies, which 
 hopelessly diverge from each other, while one 
 of them, by arbitrary erasion, forces the pedi- 
 gree into three mystic sections of fourteen 
 each; a clear proof that it was not taken 
 from any public record, even if we could 
 suppose it possible that amid all the convul- 
 sions of Judea the record of a peasant's 
 pedigree had been preserved. One of the 
 genealogies, moreover, includes the mythical 
 line of patriarchs between Adam and Abra- 
 ham. The Messiahship of Jesus is a ques- 
 tion with which we need practically concern 
 ourselves no more. The Messiah was a 
 dream of the tribal pride of the Jew, to 
 which, as to other creations of tribal or 
 national pride or fancy, we may bid a long 
 farewell. That it should be necessary for 
 the redeemer of the Jewish race to trace his 
 pedigree to a hero so dear to the national 
 heart, though morally so questionable, as 
 David, was natural enough; but who can 
 believe that this was necessary for the Re- 
 deemer of mankind? It is rather lamentable 
 to think how much study and thought have 
 
178 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 been wasted in the attempt to establish the 
 fulfilment of a Hebrew vision, devoid of 
 importance or interest for the rest of the 
 human race. 
 
 What was the relation of Christ to Juda- 
 ism ? His culture manifestly was Jewish ; he 
 accepted the sacred books of the nation, 
 treating the book of Daniel as authentic and 
 the story of Jonah as history; he taught in 
 the synagogues; he fulfilled all righteousness 
 by his observance of the ceremonial law. He 
 was a reformer and a regenerator, not a revo- 
 lutionist. It can hardly be doubted that he 
 was of pure Jewish race, though the popula- 
 tion of Galilee was very mixed and was, on 
 that account, despised by the blue blood of 
 Jerusalem, while the fabrication of genealo- 
 gies seems rather to indicate some misgivings 
 on this point. Here, again, we are perplexed 
 by the discrepancies among the authorities, 
 if authorities they can be called. In some 
 places Christ is made to represent himself as 
 being sent only to the lost sheep of the 
 house of Israel ; as coming not to destroy the 
 law, but to fulfil it and to establish every 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 179 
 
 jot and tittle of it for ever; as regarding all 
 outside the pale of Judaism in the light of 
 dogs, worthy only to eat of the crumbs 
 under the Judaic table; as forbidding his 
 apostles to enter any city of the Gentiles or 
 Samaritans. Elsewhere he selects a Samaritan 
 in contrast to the self-righteous Jew as a 
 type of charity, praises the faith of a hea- 
 then soldier as greater than any found in 
 Israel, and chooses the Samaritan woman as 
 the recipient of his highest and most memor- 
 able utterance concerning the nature of reli- 
 gion, while the parables of the prodigal 
 son and the labourers in the vineyard seem 
 also symbolically to suggest the conversion 
 and admission of the Gentiles. The writer 
 of the first Gospel evidently draws one way; 
 the writer of the fourth, who betrays a posi- 
 tive antipathy to the Jews, the other. What 
 is certain is that practically Jesus put con- 
 science above the law, even above the law of 
 the Decalogue; and in place of the tribal 
 and half-local religion of the Jew introduced 
 the religion of humanity. For this Judaism 
 rejected him, crucified him, and itself, sink- 
 
180 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ing deeper than ever into its tribalism and 
 legalism, remained the enemy of his reli- 
 gion and of his brotherhood of man. In the 
 Pauline Epistles we see Christianity detach- 
 ing itself by a painful effort from Judaism; 
 and we willingly believe that Paul is right 
 in holding that the genuine tradition of 
 Jesus is on the side of emancipation. 
 
 Did Jesus regard himself or allow himself 
 to be regarded as God? Unitarians quote 
 strong texts to the contrary. The Trinita- 
 rians get their texts chiefly from the fourth 
 Gospel, which is manifestly imbued with the 
 peculiar views of its writer and his circle. 
 In fact, it may be said to be one note of 
 the comparatively late composition of that 
 Gospel, that time must have elapsed sufficient 
 for the Teacher of Galilee to become, first 
 divine, and then the Second Person of the 
 Trinity and the Alexandrian Logos. It 
 seems unlikely that even in those days of 
 theosophic reverie the author of the sayings 
 and the parables should ever have been led 
 by spiritual exaltation or by the adoring love 
 of his disciples to form and promulgate such 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 181 
 
 a conception of himself. At any rate, we have 
 done with the Alexandrian Logos, as well as 
 with the paradoxes of the Athanasian Creed. 
 
 We have done, too, for ever with the mixt- 
 ure of Rabbinism and Alexandrian theoso- 
 phy, with which St. Paul has been accused 
 of overlaying the Christian faith. We may 
 bid farewell to his doctrine of the Atone- 
 ment. That doctrine is bound up with the 
 belief in the fall of Adam, and the fall of 
 Adam is now abandoned as a fact even by 
 orthodox theologians, though they would fain 
 substitute for it some lapse of the human 
 race from a more perfect state, without any 
 proof either of the more perfect state or of 
 the lapse. As was said before, if there was 
 no Fall, there was no need of an Atonement; 
 if no need of an Atonement, there was no 
 need of an Incarnation ; and that whole cycle 
 of dogma apparently falls to the ground. 
 
 In calling himself the Son of Man Jesus 
 might seem to identify himself with a mystic 
 figure in Daniel; but the Son of Man is not 
 the Son of God, nor is it the Son of a Jew; 
 it is a title of humanity. 
 
182 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 From such ethical limitations and peculi- 
 arities as cling to the characters and teach- 
 ing of philosophers of Athens and Roman 
 Stoics, the character and teaching of Jesus 
 are essentially free. There is no brand of 
 nationality or race to interfere with our 
 acceptance of him as pattern and model of 
 humanity. His limitations are those of a 
 peasant of Galilee seeing nothing of modern 
 and complex civilization. For Jesus politics 
 had no existence; at least, the only political 
 relation known to him was that of provincial 
 subjection to the military empire of Rome, 
 so that all political questions were perfectly 
 solved for him when he had said, "Render 
 unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, 
 and unto God the things which are God's." 
 He saw little of commerce; if he ever 
 looked on Tyre and Sidon it was from afar; 
 trade, as it showed itself in the money- 
 changers and salesmen of the temple, was 
 revolting to him; from the magnificent 
 buildings of the capital his simplicity seems 
 to have recoiled. Art Judea had not, but 
 to art he would probably have been in- 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 183 
 
 different. To his eye the lily of the field 
 was more beautiful than Solomon in all his 
 glory, and would have been more beautiful 
 than the work of Phidias. Wealth ap- 
 peared to him only in the guise of Dives 
 with Lazarus lying at his gate, not in its 
 more beneficent form; and therefore to him 
 wealth seemed in itself unblest and poverty 
 in itself blest. His benign influence has 
 been mainly over the individual heart and 
 in the simple relations of life. Over poli- 
 tics, commerce, the great world, and civiliza- 
 tion generally his influence, notwithstanding 
 national professions and state churches, has 
 been far less. The pursuit of wealth has 
 been eager among the professed disciples of 
 him who preached the Sermon upon the 
 Mount, and in the temples of the Prince 
 of Peace have been hung up the trophies of 
 war. The morality of civil, commercial, and 
 social life has, perhaps, rather suffered by 
 the formal profession of an unattainable 
 standard, and the world has been more evil 
 than it might have been if the ideal of good 
 men had not been withdrawal from an evil 
 
184 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 world. Among the teachings of Jesus re- 
 corded in the Gospels, learning, literature, 
 and science have no place. To the mind of 
 Jesus, had they presented themselves, they 
 would probably have seemed entirely alien. 
 The simplicity of the child and the spiritual 
 insight of poverty were in his eyes superior 
 to the wisdom of the wise. In this respect 
 his thoroughgoing disciples have generally 
 reflected the image of their Master. What 
 would St. Francis of Assisi have made of 
 European civilization? Other limitations of 
 Jesus were his estrangement from domestic 
 life with its relations, and the curtailment of 
 his experience by an early death. 
 
 To one of low estate in a province 
 oppressed by foreign rule, full of misery 
 and leprosy, it might well seem that this 
 world was evil and the only chance of hap- 
 piness for man was by escaping from it to a 
 better. There can be no doubt that the pes- 
 simist has a right to say that the Gospel is 
 with him so far as the present world is con- 
 cerned. 
 
 Allowance must be made also for Oriental 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 185 
 
 hyperbole. Over-carefulness poisons life; 
 but if we literally cared not for the things 
 of to-morrow, we and our families should 
 starve. The sparrows do not look to Provi- 
 dence to feed them; they search for food the 
 livelong day themselves. Forgiveness is the 
 general principle which even self-interest 
 prescribes; but if we were to offer the 
 other cheek to the smiter, the other cheek 
 would too often be smitten; and if we were 
 to forgive all wrong-doers until seventy 
 times seven, wrong would fill the world. 
 To the brotherhood of men there is a 
 rational limit. In our relations to each 
 other, if there is something that is fraternal, 
 there is something that is not. Competition 
 and antagonism are normal facts. The prac- 
 tical truth lies somewhere between the view 
 of Hobbes and that of the Gospel, though 
 with a recognition of the Gospel view as the 
 ideal. Justice, with her scales and her 
 sword, will keep her place as well as love 
 or the enthusiasm of humanity. If the 
 aggressor tries to take away your coat, you 
 will have, instead of giving him your cloak 
 
186 MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 also, to withstand his aggression in the court 
 of law or by force. It would be bad for him 
 as well as for you if you did not. 
 
 Of the intolerance, persecutions, and reli- 
 gious wars which have resulted from dog- 
 matism, on the other hand, the true Jesus is 
 blameless. If anything like narrowness or 
 intolerance is thrust upon him by a dogmatic 
 narrator, his own character and the general 
 scope of his teaching repel it. His genuine 
 teaching clearly was ethical and spiritual, not 
 dogmatic. Nor to him can be fairly ascribed 
 asceticism, eremitism, the false idea of saint- 
 ship as seclusion and self-torture, or the 
 hideous array of hospital pathos embodying 
 that idea which fills the galleries of mediaeval 
 art. His ministry commences at a marriage 
 feast and his enemies reproach him with not 
 being ascetic. In his character and history 
 there is no doubt a large element of sorrow, 
 without which he would not have touched 
 humanity. Yet we think too much of Jeru- 
 salem and of the closing scene with its ago- 
 nies, its horrors, and the circle of dark, even 
 of dreadful, dogma which has been formed 
 
MIRACULOUS ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY 187 
 
 around it. We think too little of the preach- 
 ing of the Word of life, and of the land in 
 which the Word of life was preached. Let 
 us sometimes draw a veil over the Cross, 
 banish from our imaginations Jerusalem and 
 its temple reeking with bloody sacrifice, its 
 fanatical Judaism, its hypocritical Pharisa- 
 ism, its throng of bigots yelling for a judi- 
 cial murder. Let us learn to see the great 
 Teacher of humanity in the happy days of 
 his mission, while he gathers round him the 
 circle of loving disciples and of simple hearts 
 thirsting for the waters of life, in the vil- 
 lage synagogue, on the summer hillside or 
 lake shore, amidst the vines and oleanders 
 and lilies of Galilee. 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 MR. LESLIE STEPHEN, at the conclusion of 
 his Science of Ethics, admits, with his usual 
 candour and courage, that one great difficulty 
 remains not only unsolved but insoluble. 
 "There is," he says, "no absolute coinci- 
 dence between virtue and happiness. I can- 
 not prove that it is always prudent to act 
 rightly or that it is always happiest to be 
 virtuous." In another passage he avows that 
 in accepting the altruist theory he accepts, 
 as inseparable from it, the conclusion that 
 " the path of duty does not coincide with the 
 path of happiness"; and he compares the 
 attempt to establish an absolute coincidence 
 to an attempt to square the circle or dis- 
 cover perpetual motion. In another passage 
 he puts the same thing in a concrete form. 
 "The virtuous men," he says, "may be the 
 191 
 
192 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 very salt of the earth, and yet the discharge 
 of a function socially necessary may involve 
 their own misery." "A great moral and 
 religious teacher," he adds, "has often been 
 a martyr, and we are certainly not entitled 
 to assume either that he was a fool for his 
 pains or, on the other hand, that the highest 
 conceivable degree of virtue can make mar- 
 tyrdom agreeable." We may doubt, in his 
 opinion, whether it answers to be a moral 
 hero. "In a gross society, where the tem- 
 perate man is an object of ridicule and nec- 
 essarily cut oft' from participation in the 
 ordinary pleasures of life, he may find his 
 moral squeamishness conducive to misery; 
 the just and honourable man is made miser- 
 able in a corrupt society where the social 
 combinations are simply bands of thieves, 
 and his high spirit only awakens hatred; and 
 the benevolent is tortured in proportion to 
 the strength of his sympathies in a society 
 where they meet with no return, and where 
 he has to witness cruelty triumphant and 
 mercy ridiculed as weakness." So that not 
 only are men exposed to misery by reason of 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 193 
 
 their superiority, but "every reformer who 
 breaks with the world, though for the world's 
 good, must naturally expect much pain and 
 must be often tempted to think that peace 
 and harmony are worth buying, even at the 
 price of condoning evil." "'Be good if you 
 would be happy ' seems to be the verdict 
 even of worldly prudence; but it adds, in an 
 emphatic aside, 'Be not too good.'' Of a 
 moral hero it is said, that "it may be true 
 both that a less honourable man would have 
 had a happier life, and that a temporary fall 
 below the highest strain of heroism would 
 have secured for him a greater chance of 
 happiness." Had he given way, "he might 
 have made the discovery not a very rare 
 one that remorse is among the passions 
 most easily lived down." Mr. Stephen fully 
 recognizes the existence of men "capable of 
 intense pleasure from purely sensual gratifi- 
 cation, and incapable of really enjoying any 
 of the pleasures which imply public spirit, 
 or private affection, or vivid imagination"; 
 and he confesses that with regard to such 
 men the moralist has no leverage whatever. 
 
194 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 The physician has leverage; so has the 
 policeman; but it is possible, as Mr. Stephen 
 would probably admit, to indulge not only 
 covetousness but lust at great cost to others 
 without injury to your own health, and with- 
 out falling into the clutches of the law. 
 
 The inference from Mr. Stephen's admission 
 seems to be that duty is a theistic term. The 
 same may be said of its synonyms, moral 
 obligation and moral law. We cannot tell 
 whether they are binding on reason unless 
 we know whether there is a God or some 
 superior power to impose the law, bestow the 
 reward, and enforce the penalty. We may 
 extend the statement to perfect happiness, 
 which, as a state distinct from pleasure, seems 
 to imply a guarantee superior to the accidents, 
 and a duration uncurtailed by the brevity, of 
 mortal life. 
 
 With every man his own interest must be 
 paramount, and every man's interest is the 
 fulfilment of his strongest desires. As a 
 general rule, our desires, seeing that we are 
 domestic and social as well as individual, 
 may lead us to promote the good of the 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 195 
 
 family and of society. But this is not in- 
 variably the case, and when it is not the 
 case, supposing that there is no God to fix 
 his canon against evil-doing, what is there 
 to withhold a man from gratifying his de- 
 sires at the expense of society, or to make 
 his gratification criminal? Napoleon avowed 
 that he deliberately excluded from his mind 
 thoughts about any world but this, and that 
 had he not done so he could not have achieved 
 great things. Of the great things which he 
 did achieve, his agnosticism was unquestionably 
 a condition. But of the great things which the 
 Antonines and other Roman Stoics achieved, 
 the condition was not less unquestionably the 
 ascendancy of thoughts which Napoleon ex- 
 cluded. It was not in their case a definite 
 religious belief, but it was a belief in a power 
 of righteousness and in an assured reward of 
 virtue. Observe, too, that Napoleon found it 
 necessary, in the interest of political and social 
 order, to restore religion. 
 
 "Virtue is the doing good to mankind in 
 obedience to the will of God and for the 
 sake of everlasting happiness." So says 
 
196 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 Paley, speaking with his usual directness. 
 He omits to note those social and domestic 
 desires and necessities of our nature which, 
 in themselves, move us to do good to man- 
 kind as well for the pleasure of doing good 
 as for the hope that good will be done to us 
 in turn. Yet it seems impossible to doubt 
 that morality, personal and social, but espe- 
 cially social, has hitherto largely rested, in 
 ordinary minds, on a foundation of religious 
 belief, including the belief in another life 
 and in future rewards and punishments. 
 That foundation is now manifestly giving 
 way. Literature teems with the proofs of 
 this. So does the conversation of the edu- 
 cated classes. So does even apologetic the- 
 ology, the attitude of which is generally one 
 of concession and retreat, while among large 
 bodies of quick-witted mechanics, even in 
 England, still more in France and other 
 countries, scepticism is undisguised and 
 blunt, in France going the length even of 
 a comic Life of Christ. It is natural to 
 fear that unless a substitute for religion 
 can, within a measurable time, be found, a 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 197 
 
 period of some moral confusion will ensue. 
 Philosophers, of course, will be kept right, 
 not only by their philosophy, but by the char- 
 acter which dedication to philosophy implies. 
 Nobody expects that they will fall to com- 
 mitting murder or adultery; although the 
 writer, as he believes, may himself say that 
 he has witnessed the case of a highly edu- 
 cated mind to which the leap from theism 
 to agnosticism proved morally fatal. It is not 
 likely that there will be any sudden catas- 
 trophe. Society will not fall to pieces. It 
 will be held together by the necessity of 
 labour, of order, of mutual help and forbear- 
 ance, by the domestic and social affections, 
 by opinion, by the law and the police. It 
 has, in fact, been held together, after a cer- 
 tain fashion, in China by these forces with 
 little aid from religion. But it does not 
 follow that, pending the reparation of the 
 basis, society may not undergo a bad quarter 
 of an hour, especially if, in the absence of 
 spiritual aims and of any hopes beyond this 
 world, a passionate thirst for pleasure, and 
 for the means of obtaining it, should prevail. 
 
198 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 A moral interregnum of this kind there actu- 
 ally was between the decline of mediaeval 
 Catholicism and the installation of Protes- 
 tantism or reformed Catholicism in its place. 
 To that interregnum belong the Borgias, the 
 Visconti, Machiavel, and Catherine de Medi- 
 cis. The chief of Christendom glories in the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew, and even the 
 court of England thinks so lightly of it as to 
 continue negotiating with Catherine de Medici 
 for a marriage between the queen of England 
 and one of Catherine's sons. The present 
 vogue of ethical heterodoxy under the guise 
 of works of fiction, among other things, is 
 surely a symptom of ethical disintegration. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin, describing the effects 
 of scepticism on himself and young men of 
 his time, says that with religion morality 
 gave way at once, even to common honesty 
 and common decency, and that it was only 
 after much reflection that he began to sus- 
 pect that wrong was not wrong because it 
 was forbidden, but that it was forbidden be- 
 cause it was wrong. It is true this was in 
 the eighteenth century, and the same effect 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 199 
 
 would not be produced on a Franklin now. 
 But the masses are not Franklins. They are 
 not as capable of reflection now as Franklin 
 was in his time, and while they are coming 
 up to his level the world may have that bad 
 quarter of an hour. 
 
 Even in countries where there is no state 
 church, society is still largely organized in 
 the form of churches. Philanthropy works 
 to a great extent through the churches, and 
 so, in some measure, does education. The 
 social shock occasioned by the departure of 
 religion would, therefore, in itself be severe. 
 It is probably the apprehension of this and 
 of the social and political consequences of 
 atheism, not less than the influence of habit 
 on fashion, that leads some, who themselves 
 believe no longer, to support the church. 
 Even pronounced Positivists have been known 
 to give money for this purpose. There is no 
 saying, indeed, how much of the apparent 
 church-going and contribution to church offer- 
 tories may be merely politic, or how hollow 
 the crust of profession may be. But taking 
 the lowest reasonable estimate of religious 
 
200 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 influence, what a void would the departure 
 of religion and the closing of the churches 
 leave in life! 
 
 Again, what is to become of the clergy? 
 Here is a great body of the very flower of our 
 morality, as well as of our culture, committed 
 to a calling the existence of which is bound 
 up, so far as we can see, certainly with 
 theism, if not with supernatural religion. 
 Supposing religion to fail, what would the 
 clergy do? Would they transform themselves 
 into teachers of ethics and social guides? 
 Would they starve? Would some of them 
 be drawn into revolution and thus add to the 
 seething elements of disturbance? A celibate 
 priest is well prepared for adventure, and he 
 may hope, however vainly, by throwing him- 
 self into a social revolution to found his 
 authority anew. Clergymen read and think. 
 Must not the mental state of some of them 
 already be uneasy? Is not Ritualism itself 
 in some cases the veil of doubt? 
 
 We talk of the moral law, and repeat the 
 famous saying of Kant that the two things 
 the contemplation of which filled his soul 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 201 
 
 with awe, were the moral law and the starry 
 heavens. This implies that the moral law is 
 one, and that, with the order of the heavens, 
 it is upheld by a power above us. What 
 power is there above us if there is no God 
 or we have no proof of his existence ? What 
 is the moral law? There are certain rules 
 of conduct which we must observe in order 
 to maintain our health, bodily and mental, to 
 keep our affections pure and warm, and to 
 enable us to earn our bread. There are other 
 rules which we must observe in order to 
 secure our domestic happiness. There are 
 also rules which we must observe in order 
 to secure our welfare as members of society, 
 of the commonwealth, of the race. These 
 rules play into each other, the preservation 
 of our health, for example, being essential to 
 our right temper and effective action in all 
 the fields; but they are apparently no more 
 one or capable of being represented as a self- 
 existing authority transcending all individual 
 interests, than our care for our own comfort 
 in travelling is capable of being represented 
 as one with our necessary respect for the 
 
202 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 comfort of our fellow-travellers. The rudi- 
 ments of morality have been shown to exist 
 in animals, which are as little conscious of 
 Kant's moral law as they are of the grandeur 
 which fills his soul with awe when he gazes 
 on the starry heavens. 
 
 Evolution clearly is not moral. There is 
 nothing moral in the struggle for existence 
 or in natural selection. This bold evolution- 
 ists, such as Haeckel, frankly admit. An 
 organism does not regulate its own stage of 
 evolution, nor does it select itself or endow 
 itself with the strength which will enable it 
 to triumph in the struggle for existence. It 
 is not answerable for its own propensities, 
 which may be those of a philanthropist or 
 those of an assassin; of a human being or of 
 a tiger. If it survives in the struggle for 
 existence its survival must be that of the 
 fittest, and therefore its sufficient justifica- 
 tion. The ultimate tendency of things may 
 be against it, as it is against the propensi- 
 ties of tigers, those of the human tiger per- 
 haps, as well as those of the tiger of the 
 jungle. But this does not make it the duty 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 203 
 
 of the offensive organism to cooperate in its 
 own elimination or to refrain from gratifying 
 its natural propensities while it exists. 
 
 So far as social morality depends on the 
 sanctity of human life or of humanity gener- 
 ally, it can hardly fail to be somewhat threat- 
 ened by evolution, which levels men in point 
 of origin, and, as some have begun to be- 
 lieve, in point of destiny with other animals. 
 A German physiologist of the extreme evo- 
 lutionary school said to Agassiz that the 
 kingdom of science would have really come 
 when you could go out and shoot a man for 
 the purpose of dissection. "Of course," 
 replied Agassiz, "you will take a fine speci- 
 men, a Goethe or a Von Humboldt." We 
 have still, no doubt, the same tribal interest 
 in safeguarding our own species, and this 
 will lead us to hang the murderer when we 
 catch him. But the murderer who by his 
 cunning escapes the gallows, and perhaps 
 comes into the enjoyment of wealth out of 
 which the life which he has taken would 
 have kept him, why should he feel any 
 more remorse than he would have felt if he 
 
204 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 had taken the life of a dog? Let us sup- 
 pose, for instance, that the life of a child 
 stands between a needy man and a great 
 estate; that he puts an end to the child's 
 life in such a way as to escape detection, 
 enters into the estate, lives a life of ease 
 and affluence instead of struggling for bread, 
 spends his money well and enjoys the good- 
 will of the people among whom he lives; 
 why is he to feel remorse, or, if he has a 
 twinge of it, why is he not to repress it as 
 he would any other unpleasant emotion or 
 bodily pain? 
 
 We speak of the brotherhood of man as 
 our great security for mutual benevolence 
 and our high inducement to virtuous effort. 
 But is it an absolute certainty that men are 
 brothers? Has science pronounced decisively 
 in favour of the unity of the race? Some 
 men of science certainly have pronounced on 
 the other side. Again, does not brotherhood 
 imply a common paternity, and where is the 
 common paternity unless we have all a father 
 in God? If that idea is set aside, are we 
 not as much competitors as brothers? 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 205 
 
 If we make of pleasure our ethical criterion, 
 how are we to distinguish between one kind 
 of pleasure and another, between the pleasure 
 of eating the bread which is honestly earned 
 and the pleasure of eating the bread which 
 is stolen? Those who select as an instance 
 of ethical perfection the reciprocal pleasure 
 enjoyed by a mother and the child at her 
 breast, must exclude from their idea of per- 
 fection anything that we should commonly 
 call moral, since there is nothing in the 
 suckling of a human infant more moral than 
 in the suckling of a calf. 
 
 Perfect adaptation, again, would appear 
 to fail as an ethical criterion or sanction. 
 Adaptation may be, and often is, as perfect 
 in the case of means adopted to do ill deeds 
 as in the case of means adopted to do good 
 deeds. Punctuality, which is selected as an 
 instance of adaptation, and on that account 
 moral, is shown as much in keeping a crimi- 
 nal assignation as in keeping an appoint- 
 ment for the best of objects. 
 
 The satisfaction of cooperating with the 
 motive power of evolution is tendered as an 
 
206 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 ethical inducement. It would hardly present 
 itself so to beings the elimination of whom 
 is a part of the process. Why should a 
 mortal sacrifice his enjoyments to the ten- 
 dencies, blind tendencies as far as we 
 know, of a soulless power or of a power 
 which to us manifests no soul? If the pro- 
 cess is, as an evolutionary philosopher repre- 
 sents it, one of alternating creation and 
 destruction, Prometheus might find satisfac- 
 tion rather in stopping the process at the 
 recommencement of its destructive part than 
 in devout cooperation. 
 
 The authors of systems of moral philosophy 
 have sought to discover some intellectual 
 principle from which all moral rules could 
 be logically deduced and the apprehension of 
 which would constrain all men to be moral. 
 But the question remains, why men who do 
 not like to be moral, as many men do not, 
 are to sacrifice their propensities to a logi- 
 cal deduction from an intellectual principle. 
 Suppose virtue to correspond, as Clarke says, 
 to the fitness of things, why is Borgia to 
 prefer the fitness of things to the enjoyment 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 207 
 
 of his orgies and to the criminal courses by 
 which the means of that enjoyment are to be 
 obtained? What is needed to influence the 
 actions of men is not an abstract principle 
 or a definition, but a motive. It is by 
 renewing and reinforcing the motive power, 
 not by defining morality, that the great moral 
 reforms and movements have been made. 
 Desire of health, of domestic happiness, of 
 the esteem and good-will of our fellows, of 
 the security for our lives and property which 
 we must purchase by reciprocal respect for 
 the lives and property of others, and by 
 obedience to the laws, are motive powers. 
 The necessity of obeying the will of God, 
 with eternal reward or punishment annexed, 
 on which Paley founds the inducement to 
 virtue, provided the truth of theism can be 
 proved, is a motive power of the most over- 
 whelming kind. Intellectual perception of the 
 fitness of things is not. 
 
 Systems of ethics founded on the moral taste 
 fail in the same way. They cannot show any 
 obligation to have the taste, or, in its absence, to 
 conform to the peculiarity of those who have it. 
 
208 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 Butler's ethics are founded on the system 
 of man's inward frame and the supremacy 
 of conscience, which he takes to be manifest, 
 in that system. "Appetites, passions, affec- 
 tions, and the principle of reflection," he 
 says, "considered merely as the several parts 
 of our inward nature, do not at all give us 
 an idea of the system or constitution of this 
 nature; because the constitution is formed 
 by a somewhat not yet taken into considera- 
 tion, namely, by the relations which these 
 several parts have to each other, the chief 
 of which is the authority of reflection or 
 conscience." Conscience, he says, if it had 
 power as it has authority, would rule the 
 world. Whence, then, its lack of power? 
 Butler manifestly assumes that man's inward 
 frame is regulated by divine ordinance, and 
 that conscience is the voice of God. Unless 
 it be the voice of God, it is nothing more 
 than an index, formed by experience and 
 ratified by tradition, to the course of indi- 
 vidual action which is best for the commu- 
 nity and the race. If a man cares nothing for 
 the community or the race, with him con- 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 209 
 
 science can have no authority. Such a man 
 will have nothing within him to restrain 
 him from sacrificing the happiness and lives 
 of other men without measure to the pro- 
 motion of his own interest or the gratification 
 of his passions. His only restraints, and the 
 only restraints of thoroughly selfish men in 
 general, will be social influence and, in the 
 last resort, the penal law. Social influence 
 will be strong in proportion as society is 
 well compacted and as the man is by nature 
 sensitive to opinion and to the advantages 
 of kindly relations with his fellows. Beyond 
 this there remains, to control the wicked, 
 nothing but the penal law, and the penal 
 law may be evaded; cupidity and passion 
 will, at least, often hope to evade it; while 
 a man of Napoleon's genius and fortunes 
 may raise himself entirely above it, as well 
 as above the pressure of opinion, and run, 
 without fear of punishment, a career of 
 slaughter and robbery on the most gigantic 
 scale. If he ever feels a twinge of remorse, 
 arising from early lessons or the force of 
 habit, there seems to be no assignable reason 
 p 
 
210 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 why he should not stifle it just as he would 
 assuage any bodily ache or pain. 
 
 In such action as is heroic, or involves great 
 sacrifice of self, especially, there appears to 
 be an element hardly separable from theism, 
 whatever allowance we may make for the 
 warmth of social feeling and what has been 
 called the enthusiasm of humanity. Any- 
 thing short of life perhaps we can imagine a 
 man would sacrifice from his love of his fel- 
 lows and in the hope of winning their love; 
 but the sacrifice of life seems to imply the ex- 
 istence of a hope beyond. One philosopher 
 has even found theism in the devotion of the 
 private soldier who is content, with almost 
 as little expectation of individual glory as 
 of profit, to give his life to the common 
 cause. 
 
 A great evolutionist deduced from evo- 
 lution the negation of free will and the 
 automatism of man. The discovery would 
 have been an end of anything that could 
 properly be called morality. The deduction, 
 however, supposing it logical, would be fatal 
 surely, not to free will, but to evolution. 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 211 
 
 That man has power over his own actions, 
 however limited or qualified that power may 
 be, and by whatever name you may choose to 
 call it, with the responsibility attendant, is 
 surely a fact of human nature no less unde- 
 niable than the existence of any one of our 
 bodily senses. We may puzzle ourselves over 
 it without end, but no one ever practically 
 denies it either in his reflections on his own 
 actions or in forming his opinion on the 
 actions of his neighbours. The whole course 
 of life, of society, of law, and of government, 
 implies it. Its presence has hitherto repelled 
 the attempt to construct a science of history 
 analogous to the physical sciences. If any- 
 body has ever persuaded himself, nobody has 
 ever acted on the persuasion, that the relation 
 of the inducement to the action, in him or 
 in his neighbours, is as the impact of one 
 billiard ball on the other. The feeling of 
 free will, indeed, may be roughly described 
 as our sense, given us by consciousness, of 
 the difference between physical and moral 
 causation. 
 
 Mr. Cotter Morison, a man himself of 
 
212 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 moral sensibility as well as the highest 
 cultivation, said that the sooner the idea of 
 moral responsibility was got rid of the better 
 it would be for society and moral education, 
 and that while virtue might, and possibly 
 would, bring happiness to the virtuous 
 man, to the immoral and the selfish virtue 
 would probably be the most distasteful or 
 even painful thing in their experience, while 
 vice would give them unmitigated pleasure. 1 
 His method of moral reform is the elimina- 
 tion or suppression of the bad. But if the 
 bad happen to be the stronger or the more 
 cunning, what is to prevent their eliminating 
 or suppressing the good? What is to prevent 
 their doing this, not only with a clear con- 
 science, but with a glow of self-approbation? 
 The author of Modern Thinkers, bravely 
 pushing agnostic principles to their extreme 
 conclusion, says: 
 
 " It is generally believed to be moral to tell the truth, 
 and immoral to lie. And yet it would be difficult to 
 prove that nature prefers the true to the false. Every- 
 
 1 See The Service of Man, by James Cotter Morison, pp. 
 293-314. 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 213 
 
 where she makes the false impression first, and only 
 after years, or thousands of years, do we become able 
 to detect her in her lies. . . . Nature endows almost 
 every animal with the faculty of deceit in order to aid 
 it in escaping from the brute force of its superiors. Why, 
 then, should not man be endowed with the faculty of 
 lying when it is to his interest to appear wise concern- 
 ing matters of which he is ignorant? Lying is often a 
 refuge to the weak, a stepping-stone to power, a ground 
 of reverence toward those who live by getting credit for 
 knowing what they do not know. No one doubts that it 
 is right for the maternal partridge to feign lameness, a 
 broken wing or leg, in order to conceal her young in 
 flight, by causing the pursuer to suppose he can more 
 easily catch her than her offspring. From whence, then, 
 in nature, do we derive the fact that a human being may 
 not properly tell an untruth with the same motive? Our 
 early histories, sciences, poetries, and theologies are all 
 false, yet they comprehend by far the major part of 
 human thought. Priesthoods have ruled the world by 
 deceiving our tender souls, and yet they command our 
 most enduring reverence. Where, then, do we discover 
 that any law of universal nature prefers truth to false- 
 hood, any more than oxygen to nitrogen, or alkalies to 
 salts? So habituated have we become to assume that 
 truth-telling is a virtue, that nothing is more difficult 
 then to tell how we came to assume it, nor is it easy of 
 proof that it is a virtue in an unrestricted sense. What 
 would be thought of the military strategist who made 
 no feints, of the advertisement that contained no lie, of 
 the business man whose polite suavity covered no false- 
 hood? 
 
 .- 
 
 9 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
214 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 "Inasmuch as all moral rules are in the first instance 
 impressed by the strong, the dominant, the matured, and 
 the successful upon the weak, the crouching, the infantile, 
 and the servile, it would not be strange if a close analysis 
 and a minute historical research should concur in prov- 
 ing that all moral rules are doctrines established by the 
 strong for the government of the weak. It is invariably 
 the strong who require the weak to tell the truth, and 
 always to promote some interest of the strong. . . . 
 
 " ' Thou shalt not steal ' is a moral precept invented 
 by the strong, the matured, the successful, and by them 
 impressed upon the weak, the infantile, and the failures 
 in life's struggle, as all criminals are. For nowhere in 
 the world has the sign ever been blazoned on the shop 
 doors of a successful business man, Closed because the 
 proprietor prefers crime to industry.' Universal society 
 might be pictured, for the illustration of this feature of 
 the moral code, as consisting of two sets of swine, one of 
 which is in the clover, and the other is out. The swine 
 that are in the clover grunt, ' Thou shalt not steal ; put 
 up the bars.' The swine that are out of the clover grunt, 
 'Did you make the clover? let down the bars.' 'Thou 
 shalt not steal' is a maxim impressed by property holders 
 upon non-property holders. It is not only conceivable, 
 but it is absolute verity, that a sufficient deprivation of 
 property, and force, and delicacy of temptation, would 
 compel every one who utters it to steal, if he could get 
 an opportunity. In a philosophic sense, therefore, it is 
 not a universal, but a class, law; its prevalence and 
 obedience indicate that the property holders rule society, 
 which is itself an index of advance toward civilization. 
 No one would say that if a lion lay gorged with his ex- 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 215 
 
 cessive feast amidst the scattered carcass of a deer, and a 
 jaguar or a hyena stealthily bore away a haunch thereof, 
 the act of the hyena was less virtuous than that of the 
 lion. How does the case of two bushmen, between whom 
 the same incident occurs, differ from that of the two 
 quadrupeds? Each is doing that which tends in the 
 highest degree to his own preservation, and it may be 
 assumed that the party against whom the spoliation is 
 committed is not injured at all by it. Among many 
 savage tribes theft is taught as a virtue, and detection 
 is punished as a crime. . . . Having control of the 
 forces of society, the strong can always legislate, or 
 order, or wheedle, or preach, or assume other people's 
 money and land out of their possession into their own, 
 by methods which are not known as stealing, since in- 
 stead of violating the law they inspire and create the law. 
 But if the under dog in the social fight runs away with a 
 bone in violation of superior force, the top dog runs after 
 him bellowing, Thou shalt not steal,' and all the other 
 top dogs unite in bellowing, ' This is divine law and not 
 dog law' ; the verdict of the top dog, so far as law, re- 
 ligion, and other forms of brute force are concerned, 
 settles the question. But philosophy will see in this 
 contest of antagonistic forces, a mere play of opposing 
 elements, in which larceny is an incident of social weak- 
 ness and unfitness to survive, just as debility and leprosy 
 are ; and would as soon assume a divine command, 
 'Thou shalt not break out in boils and sores,' to the 
 weakling or leper, as one of <Thou shalt not steal' to 
 the failing struggler for subsistence. So far as the irre- 
 sistible promptings of nature may be said to constitute a 
 divine law, there are really two laws. The law to him 
 
216 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 who will be injured by stealing is, 'Thou shalt not steal,' 
 meaning thereby, < Thou shalt not suffer another to steal 
 from you.' The law to him who cannot survive without 
 stealing is simply, 'Thou shalt, in stealing, avoid being 
 detected.' 
 
 " So the laws forbidding unchastity were framed by 
 those who, in the earlier periods of civilization, could 
 afford to own women, for the protection of their property 
 rights in them, against the poor who could not. . . . 
 We do not mean, by this course of reasoning, to imply 
 that the strong in society can, or ought to be, governed 
 by the weak : that is neither possible, nor, if possible, 
 would it be any improvement. We only assert that 
 moral precepts are largely the selfish maxims expressive 
 of the will of the ruling forces in society, those who have 
 health, wealth, knowledge, and power, and are designed 
 wholly for their own protection and the maintenance of 
 their power. They represent the view of the winning 
 side, in the struggle for subsistence, while the true in- 
 terior law of nature would represent a varying combat in 
 which two laws would appear, viz. : that known as the 
 moral or majority law, and that known as the immoral or 
 miuority law, which commands a violation of the other." l 
 
 Happily, the strong and the weak are not 
 two distinct sets of men. They are blended 
 together in society, by the common interests 
 and general opinion of which the strong in 
 the exercise of their strength are practically 
 
 1 Modern Thinkers, by Van Buren Denslow, pp. 240-246. 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 217 
 
 controlled. Men who are strong in one way 
 are very often weak in others ; men who are 
 weak in one way are strong in others ; and 
 there are innumerable gradations of every kind 
 of strength. 
 
 This, however, is free thought expressed 
 with a vigour and frankness for which in- 
 quirers after truth will be thankful. It is 
 curious, as an indication of the tendencies of 
 the philosophy to which it relates, and as a re- 
 ply to the historical scepticism which refuses 
 to believe that the teaching of the Sophists 
 really was what it is represented to have 
 been by Socrates or Plato. It would also 
 seem to be a conclusive answer to those 
 who utterly deride the apprehension of a 
 moral interregnum, and feel confident that 
 society is going to sail, without interruption 
 or disturbance of its rule of conduct, out of 
 the zone of theistic into that of scientific 
 morality. It suggests that between one state 
 and the other there may be an interval in 
 which the question will be not so much be- 
 tween the moral and the immoral, as between 
 the "top and the under dog." 
 
218 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 The Marquis of Steyne is an organism, 
 and, like all other organisms, so long as he 
 succeeds in maintaining himself against com- 
 peting organisms, is able to make good his 
 title to existence under the law of natural 
 selection. He has his pleasures; they are 
 not those of a St. Paul, or a Shakespeare, or 
 a Wilberforce, but they are his. They make 
 him happy, according to the only measure of 
 happiness which he can conceive; and if he 
 is cautious, as a sagacious voluptuary will 
 be, they need not diminish his vitality, they 
 may even increase it both in duration and 
 intensity, though they may play havoc with 
 the welfare of a number of victims and 
 dependants. He may successively seduce a 
 score of women without bad consequences to 
 himself. Why is he doing wrong? In the 
 name of what do you peremptorily summon 
 him to return to the path of virtue? In the 
 name of altruistic pleasure? He happens to 
 be one of those organisms which are not 
 capable of it. In the name of a state of 
 society which is to come into existence long 
 after he has mouldered to dust in the family 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 219 
 
 mausoleum of the Gaunts ? His reply will be 
 that as a sensible man he lives for the present, 
 not for a future in which he will have no 
 share. Suppose you could induce him to try 
 a course of virtue, or of altruism if the term 
 is more scientific, what in his case would be 
 the practical result? Would it not be a 
 painful conflict between passion and con- 
 science, or perhaps, in the terms of the 
 now current philosophy, between presented 
 sensations on the one hand, and represented 
 or re-represented sensations on the other? 
 Is it not probable that he would end his 
 days before that conflict had been brought 
 to a close? Its fruits, however imperfect, 
 would, of course, be both happy and precious 
 in the estimation of theism; but in the esti- 
 mation of any ethical philosophy founded on 
 pleasure and pain, what could they be but 
 pleasure, unquestionable pleasure, lost, and 
 pain, pain of a distressing kind, incurred? 
 So with other organisms, which, as thorough- 
 going evolutionism would lead us to think, 
 are pursuing their congenial, though conven- 
 tionally reprobated, walks of life. The assas- 
 
220 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 sin, the robber, and the sharper have their 
 status in nature, as well as any other members 
 of the predatory tribes. It is laid down that 
 the life and interest of the social organism 
 must rank above the lives and interests of its 
 component particles, the individual men, and 
 form the measure of their desires and actions. 
 This, however, would seem to be an arbitrary 
 assumption, and one on which morality can- 
 not be firmly founded. Can the term tl organ- 
 ism " itself be applied to society otherwise 
 than in a metaphorical or imperfect sense? Of 
 the particles of which society consists, each, 
 unlike the particles of a true organism, has a 
 consciousness and a unit of its own. Further 
 enforcement at least is needed. 
 
 Apprehension of a temporary disturbance 
 of social order, however, or even of an 
 ethical interregnum, is not our highest motive 
 for desiring to know whether the universe 
 is guided by a Providence or borne blindly 
 on by a material evolution, and whether 
 there is or is not a supreme power on the 
 side of virtue. No question surely can be 
 more practical than these, unless we are con- 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 221 
 
 tent to be as the beasts that perish; a fate 
 to which probably few are deliberately re- 
 signed, however, amidst the business or the 
 enjoyments of life we may put aside the 
 thought of our mortality. 
 
 In what position then, since the discoveiy 
 of evolution or, as we should rather say, to 
 avoid building too much on a particular 
 theory, since the recent revelations of sci- 
 ence, is the theistic hypothesis left? 
 
 Clearly, there is an end of our faith, so far 
 as cosmogony is concerned, in the sacred 
 books of the Hebrews, from which our no- 
 tions of creation and the Creator have 
 hitherto been largely derived. Those books 
 must now be placed on the same shelf with 
 the sacred books of other races. They are 
 superior to their fellows no doubt, not only 
 in loftiness of imagination, but in compara- 
 tive approach to scientific truth, especially in 
 regard to the great fact of the unity of crea- 
 tion, which astronomy and spectrum-analy- 
 sis have confirmed. It is in virtue of this 
 superiority that they have so long retained 
 
222 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 their hold upon our minds. But their narra- 
 tive of creation is hopelessly at variance 
 with scientific fact, while the authority of 
 some of them as the alleged works of Moses, 
 even if it could give them a title to accept- 
 ance as records of events anterior to the 
 existence of man, has been totally over- 
 thrown. The poetry of the Hebrew books 
 will never die. Of their cosmogony we 
 must, once for all, clear our minds. We are 
 in the position of the philosophers of Greece 
 when, having emancipated themselves from 
 the legendary cosmogony of the polytheistic 
 religion of the state, they faced with open 
 minds the problem of existence. 
 
 With belief in a first cause the theory of 
 evolution need not interfere. Evolution can- 
 not have evolved itself. It is a mode or 
 process, not a creative force. Some power 
 there must have been, if we can trust the 
 indications of our intelligence on such a 
 subject, to set evolution on foot and to 
 direct it in its course. Those who think to 
 account for all things by the hypothesis of 
 a vast alternation between homogeneity and 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 223 
 
 heterogeneity stand in need of a prime 
 motor; otherwise, whichever of the alternate 
 processes they take postulates the other as 
 its antecedent, and so backwards to infinity. 
 In plain language, they must have something 
 to set the see-saw going. If this objection 
 is said to be rather metaphysical, the answer 
 is that a hypothesis, before it can be applied 
 to facts, must be shown to be intelligible 
 and tenable in itself; a condition not ful- 
 filled by a hypothesis of original alternation. 
 
 It may be that evolution, as some say, 
 gives us a worthier idea of the majesty of 
 the Deity, who, instead of perpetual inter- 
 vention, has, once for all, commanded his 
 agents, and endowed them with the power, 
 to work out the universal plan. At the 
 same time the Deity seems to be removed to 
 an immeasurable distance from us. It is 
 difficult to understand how we can retain 
 the practice of prayer, at least for anything 
 material. Belief in special providence evolu- 
 tion seems absolutely to preclude. 
 
 The old proof of the existence of a Deity, 
 which satisfied Paley and the authors of the 
 
224 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 Bridgewater treatises, was the design assumed 
 to be visible in creation. But what is visi- 
 ble in creation is not design; it is only 
 adaptation, from which we are not warranted 
 in directly inferring design. Adapted to 
 each other things must have been; otherwise 
 the world could not have come into exist- 
 ence, or, when it had come into existence, 
 have held together. The arrangement of the 
 vertebrae is necessary to the support of the 
 skull. The position of the pebble beneath is 
 necessary to the support of the pebble above, 
 though we do not take the adaptation for 
 a proof of design. We have no other world 
 to compare with this, and, therefore, no 
 means of learning what could come by chance 
 or blind evolution and what could not. 
 Paley's man who finds the watch is able to 
 compare it with unwrought matter. He 
 knows that human artificers exist. He is a 
 man himself and can recognize the work of 
 his fellow. 
 
 The argument from design has been turned 
 on the upholders by the opponents of theism. 
 It has been said that contrivance is human 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM, 225 
 
 and inconsistent with our ideas of omnipo- 
 tence, which would produce perfection at 
 once by fiat. But here we are simply beyond 
 the range of our intelligence. We cannot 
 divine which way Deity would take to its 
 ends. There is nothing repugnant to reason 
 in the belief that what presents itself to our 
 minds as effort and a struggle towards per- 
 fection, rather than perfection by fiat, may 
 be the course chosen by the Master of the 
 universe and form its law. On the other 
 hand, it is evident that Paley's analogy 
 breaks down again in this respect, that God 
 is not like a mechanic, showing his skill by 
 his handling of matter, which, with its quali- 
 ties and its resistance, is given to him from 
 without. He is himself the Creator of the 
 matter with which he deals. 
 
 Science, it is true, frequently uses teleo- 
 logical language, language such as implies 
 design. But from this little can be inferred, 
 except that our established phraseology is 
 theistic and that science falls involuntarily 
 into the use of the familiar terms. 
 
 From mere inspection of the universe we 
 Q 
 
226 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 can only infer the existence of such a Deity 
 as the universe, including the nature of 
 man, discloses. This seems to be justly 
 urged by Hume; and a mere inspection of 
 the universe, at least of our part of it, can 
 hardly be said to disclose a moral Creator. 
 The Creator disclosed is one who sends not 
 only his sunshine and his rain, but his earth- 
 quakes, his plagues, and his famines, alike 
 upon the just and the unjust; who takes 
 away by death the good man from the house- 
 hold which loves him and depends on him for 
 bread, as well as the wicked man from his 
 den of crime; who, both among human beings 
 and among brutes, seems to scatter pain and 
 misery broadcast. What we see and experi- 
 ence may be, and probably is, but a faint 
 glimpse of the universal plan. But from 
 what we see and experience the combination 
 of omnipotence with beneficence, as we con- 
 ceive the one or the other, cannot be inferred. 
 For their ultimate union we must look behind 
 the veil. True, human effort is repaid, but 
 it is human. 
 
 In our own planet waste, wreck, and abor- 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 227 
 
 tion hold divided empire with economy, per- 
 fection, and fruitf ulness. In our satellite, 
 the telescope tells us, they reign alone. 
 Nothing apparently warrants us in assuming 
 that the character of the Creator is reflected 
 by one side of creation, not by the other. 
 
 Pessimism may be said to be the reverie 
 of disappointment and satiety, with an infu- 
 sion of Byronic sentiment and of the melan- 
 choly of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. But it 
 has, at all events, been able to show that 
 the theological optimism against which it 
 revolts is only less irrational than itself. 
 It has, at all events, put an end to the 
 attempts of the complacent optimist to vindi- 
 cate the Creator and establish the theistic 
 hypothesis by representing pain, suffering, 
 and evil generally as mere negation. To 
 give that pious legerdemain its death-blow 
 a Lisbon earthquake, a famine, or a pes- 
 tilence is not needed. A toothache will 
 suffice. 
 
 Neither from sense nor from science can 
 we be said to have actual proof of the 
 existence of intelligence other than our 
 
228 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 own, or even of any life other than that 
 which exists on our planet. Such is the 
 fact. But the mere statement of it seems to 
 carry the conviction that the range of our 
 senses, even with the aid of science and all 
 its instruments, must be narrow. It is in- 
 conceivable that we should be the sole con- 
 scious denizens of the universe. As has 
 been said before, there is no reason for the 
 presumption that the information of our 
 senses, or of science, which draws its know- 
 ledge from the senses, is exhaustive. We are 
 in a universe our knowledge of which is 
 probably mere purblindness. Gravitation is 
 only a fact observed but unexplained. Mind 
 itself, as it is in us, may not be ultimate. 
 
 It seems impossible to imagine that our intel- 
 ligence, whatever the mode of its development, 
 is without an intelligent author. 
 
 Science shows that the universe, so far as 
 it falls within our vision, is pervaded and 
 ruled by a single power, which, as its opera- 
 tions reveal themselves to our minds, we 
 cannot help divining to be a mind. Mono- 
 theism is at all events perfectly consistent 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 229 
 
 with the results of physical science; while 
 with polytheism science has done away. 
 Hence, science and religion, even the most 
 fervent religion, have been able to dwell 
 together in the intellects of Newton and 
 Faraday. 
 
 In metaphysical arguments there is little 
 comfort. Anselm thought that he had proved 
 the existence of a Deity by the argument 
 that our notion of the Deity was perfection 
 and that perfection implied existence. Des- 
 cartes reproduced the argument substantially 
 under a different form. Existence must enter 
 into our notion of a centaur or a griffin, and 
 is, in those cases, notional only, affording no 
 proof that the thing of which we think is 
 real. To all proofs of the existence of God 
 derived from supposed mental necessity, it 
 seems to be a sufficient answer that belief 
 in God has been, and is, absent from some 
 minds otherwise sound and normal. These 
 seem like relics of the scholastic fancy that 
 the mind is a casket containing in itself 
 knowledge about the universe which is ca- 
 pable of being educed by a logical process 
 
230 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 apart from observation of the universe itself. 
 Nothing metaphysical has ever taken much 
 hold on general intelligence or exerted much 
 influence on practical faith. A fervent reli- 
 gion, metaphysically kindled, or even a lively 
 conception of the character of the Deity de- 
 rived from metaphysical speculation, it would 
 surely be hard to find. 
 
 Intuitionists would settle the question by 
 laying it down that there are always present 
 in intelligence, whether developed or nas- 
 cent, three ideas; consciousness of the world, 
 consciousness of self, and consciousness of 
 God. As has been already said, there are 
 men who, if they know the contents of their 
 own intelligence, are without a consciousness 
 of God. Can this intuition of a Deity be 
 proved to exist in the mind quite indepen- 
 dently of any notion derived from without 
 either through education or tradition? If it 
 can, we may accept it as decisive. If it can- 
 not, its testimony fails. We need not go on 
 to ask what sort of Deity it is that is thus 
 intuitively revealed, that of Jehovah, that of 
 Jupiter, that of Allah, that of the All- 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 231 
 
 Father presented by the teachings of Jesus, 
 an amalgam of them all, or a cold and filmy 
 abstraction. 
 
 On the other hand, there can be no doubt 
 as to the historical importance of the reli- 
 gious sense in man, or as to the failure of 
 some of the attempts of evolutionists to 
 wrest the history of religion into conformity 
 with their system. The source of religion 
 has been found in dreams about departed 
 chieftains. It would be curious to see the 
 connection traced between such dreams and 
 the religion of Jesus, or that of Bacon, Pas- 
 cal, Butler, and Newton. Did all primeval 
 men dream about departed chieftains? How 
 did the religious tendency become universal? 
 How could a dream lead even to the most 
 primitive forms of worship, such as the 
 adoration of the sun? That religion began 
 in fetish-worship is a theory held by phi- 
 lology to be precarious. That its primitive 
 form was a worship of the powers of nature, 
 especially of those which most influence the 
 life of man, and of the sun above all, may 
 be taken to be true; but this accounts only 
 
232 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 for the selection of objects, not for the exist- 
 ence of the sentiment itself. We can hardly 
 imagine that the grandeur and powers of 
 nature produce any sentiment of awe or ten- 
 dency to worship in animals. Neither in the 
 primitive direction of the religious sentiment 
 nor in its aberrations, brutish or cruel as 
 some of them were, is there anything to 
 repel the suggestion that it had its source 
 in reality and betokens a connection between 
 humanity and the Spirit of the Universe. 
 
 Paley may have been right in saying that 
 the Deity could reveal himself only in mira- 
 cle. If he does not reveal he may yet mani- 
 fest himself without miracle through human 
 nature and history, through the discoveries 
 of science and by other than supernatural 
 means. If there is a Deity, the reasonable 
 presumption surely is that he will manifest 
 himself to creatures capable of receiving the 
 manifestation. His counsel may be that 
 instead of his revealing himself to us, we 
 should feel after him and find him. 
 
 Rational theology has, perhaps, hardly taken 
 sufficient notice of our sense of beauty in its 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 233 
 
 different grades, from the sublimity of the 
 star-lit heaven to the loveliness of the hum- 
 ming-bird, or of the poetry and art which 
 are the expressions of that sense. It would 
 be difficult to account for beauty, or the 
 sense of beauty, by physical evolution, while 
 their presence and the charm which they 
 throw over life seem to bespeak a certain 
 tenderness on the part of the Being in whose 
 power we are which softens the stern aspect 
 of evolution. The same may be said of the 
 poetic element in man, which as yet no one 
 has undertaken to trace to physical evolu- 
 tion; of the sentimental love, which is not 
 essential to procreation; and of the moral 
 beauty, which, though connected, is not iden- 
 tical with practical usefulness. Adaptation 
 is produced by evolution; but it is only in a 
 secondary sense that we call adaptation beau- 
 tiful. Darwin's loss of taste for poetry and 
 art is remarkable; he seems to have felt it as 
 a defect and as the atrophy of an essential 
 part of his nature, not as the necessary result 
 of devotion to scientific truth. 
 
 Man's notion of God has risen from nature- 
 
234 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 worship, it may be from fetishism, to the 
 conception of the Heavenly Father who is 
 the idealization of our own moral nature. 
 Anthropomorphism still clings to our theism; 
 the very name of Father involves it; so do 
 those of Benefactor and Judge; nor can we 
 think of a personal God without importing 
 human personality into the idea. But a short- 
 coming in our power of conception does not 
 prove the object of our thoughts to be unreal. 
 We fail to conceive infinity, yet we are sure 
 that the universe is infinite. For the purpose 
 of natural theology and especially of inquiries 
 like the present, it might be well to say Power 
 or Soul of the Universe instead of God. 
 
 Of the attempts to construct for us a reli- 
 gion without a God, it may surely be said 
 that they serve only to show the tenacity of 
 the religious sentiment and the void which 
 is left in the heart by the departure of reli- 
 gion. Of the Comtist Religion of Humanity 
 we have spoken already. We have only to 
 ask once more how it is possible for us 
 to bow down in adoration to an abstraction 
 which is insensible to our worship. An 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 235 
 
 abstraction, in fact, Comte's Great Being 
 must be; it cannot even have so much sub- 
 stance as there would be in a generalization, 
 since, history being unfinished, the basis for 
 the generalization is incomplete. The Posi- 
 tivist ritual and calendar, which are a fanci- 
 ful reproduction of Catholicism, appear to 
 have taken little hold compared with the 
 philosophic part of the system; while even 
 the philosophic part has taken hold less as 
 a scientific solution than as a negation of 
 the theistic view. The alleged account of 
 history as a succession of theistic, metaphysi- 
 cal, and Positivist conceptions of the universe 
 cannot be verified by facts, which fail espe- 
 cially in respect to the metaphysical period. 
 The Founder of the Religion of Humanity 
 believed in the finality of his own system, 
 assuming that progress had reached its com- 
 pletion in it, and that he could cast society 
 into its final mould. The limits which he 
 undertook to set to human knowledge have, 
 in one direction, already been overpast. Sup- 
 posing his theory of the three periods, the 
 theistic, the metaphysical, and the positive, 
 
236 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 were true, how could he tell that Positivism 
 was the last birth of time or that destiny 
 might not have a fourth period, possibly 
 even a reversion to theism in store? 
 
 Of Spiritualism little need be said. It 
 testifies to the craving of mankind for some- 
 thing beyond sense, and for something to fill 
 up the blank left by the failure of religious 
 faith, as well as to the desire of renewing 
 communion with the lost objects of affection. 
 It can hardly be admitted even to have a 
 good title to its name, since the dead are 
 made to "materialize," and to use material 
 instruments of communication. 
 
 Nor can it be necessary to dwell on the 
 different kinds of mysticism in which soli- 
 taries or small circles have taken refuge, 
 thinking that by seclusion they can shut out 
 the evil world, or soar above it by spiritual 
 ecstasy. We are not in Asia; and Lamaism, 
 though Schopenhauer would commend to us 
 something like it, with universal self-efface- 
 ment in prospect as the ultimate paradise, is 
 not likely to afford satisfaction here. 
 
 Others, Seeley, for instance, would give us, 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 237 
 
 as a substitute for definite belief in God, a 
 religion of enthusiastic admiration. "The 
 words 'religion' and 'worship,' " says Seeley, 
 "are commonly and conveniently appropriated 
 to the feelings with which we regard God; 
 but these feelings, love, awe, admiration, 
 which together make up worship, are felt in 
 various combinations for human beings and 
 even for inanimate objects." "It is not," he 
 says, "exclusively, but only par excellence, 
 that religion is directed towards God." Re- 
 ligion he elsewhere describes as "that higher 
 life of man which is sustained by admira- 
 tion," adding that "it has its essence in wor- 
 ship or some kind of enthusiastic contempla- 
 tion seeking for expression in outward acts." 
 If such is the origin of art, he is prepared 
 to call art religion. Enthusiastic nationality 
 with him is religion. He, and perhaps not 
 he alone, makes of the nation a god. This 
 surely is mere playing with words or worse; 
 it is an attempt to cheat us into the impres- 
 sion that we have a religious belief when we 
 have none. The objects of admiration, social, 
 scientific, or aesthetic, however salutary or 
 
238 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 elevating may be their influence, are not a 
 Father in heaven. Ask the widow with her 
 fatherless children whether they are. Nor 
 does the culture necessary for these lofty and 
 refined emotions extend, or bid fair within 
 any calculable time to extend, to the masses 
 of the people. A clown who cannot read or 
 write and who earns his bread by the coarsest 
 work can take in the idea of God and of 
 divine rewards and punishments as thor- 
 oughly as Professor Seeley with all his cult- 
 ured capacity for admiration. But it would 
 be difficult to infuse into the clown a reli- 
 gion of national aggrandizement or of art. 
 
 " Cosmic emotion " presents itself only as a 
 substitute for religious emotion, since nothing 
 has been said about embodying it in worship. 
 It comes to us commended by poetic quota- 
 tions, and for common hearts stands in need 
 of the commendation. Transfer of affection 
 from an all-loving Father to an adamantine 
 universe is a process which needs all the aid 
 that the witchery of poetry can supply, 
 though the poetry itself, for aught that we 
 can see, must be ground out by the same 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 239 
 
 mill of evolution which grinds out virtue and 
 affection. The symbols of cosmic emotion 
 seem to be the feelings produced by the two 
 objects of Kant's peculiar reverence, the 
 starry heavens and the moral faculties of 
 man. But, after all, what are these but 
 aggregations of molecules in a certain stage 
 of evolution? To be able to feel cosmic 
 emotion, at all events, you must be sure that 
 you have a cosmos. The phrase law is 
 taken by science from theology, or from 
 jurisprudence. Science can tell us nothing 
 but phenomena accumulated by experience 
 and methodized, which would not make a 
 law, properly speaking, though they had been 
 observed through myriads of years. In "cos- 
 mos " also a theistic connotation seems to 
 lurk, since order there could hardly be without 
 an ordering power. 
 
 Too little notice has been taken by moral 
 philosophers of the different situations and 
 circumstances of men. They write as though 
 all men were capable of philosophy and free 
 to follow its sublime advice. All men are 
 capable of religion; all men can understand 
 
240 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 the force of a divine command and the doc- 
 trine of future reward or punishment; but it 
 is vain to expect that a coal-heaver will 
 appreciate Shaftesbury's delineation of the 
 beauty of virtue like the persons of refine- 
 ment to whom it was addressed, or be made 
 to glow with cosmic emotion like Walt 
 Whitman; and until the structure of society 
 has been radically changed, coal-heavers, or 
 multitudes as little philosophic or poetic, 
 there will continue to be. We may begin 
 to think that we have reestablished religion, 
 when a practical impression, such as would 
 exhibit itself in worship or something equiva- 
 lent to it, has been made on common and 
 uncultivated minds. 
 
 If no divine command for the practice 
 of virtue can be shown, if no assurance of 
 the virtuous man's reward, such as Paley 
 assumes, can be given, moral philosophy 
 must, it would appear, be content simply 
 to take the observation of human nature as 
 its basis and to build its system on the 
 natural desires of man, offering them such 
 satisfaction as is consistent with the welfare 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 241 
 
 of the community and the race. We natu- 
 rally desire health, and to be healthy means 
 to be temperate and continent; we desire, 
 for ourselves and our families, the means of 
 living, and to obtain them we must be indus- 
 trious, frugal, and of good repute; we desire 
 domestic happiness, and to obtain it we must 
 practise the domestic virtues; we desire the 
 good-will of our fellow-men with the advan- 
 tages which it brings, and to obtain it we 
 must practise the virtues of good members of 
 society and good citizens. There is no such 
 thing as altruism in the literal sense of that 
 term. Self is present in all we do, though 
 the self is that of a being who desires love 
 and fellowship as well as food and raiment; 
 with which qualification the philosophy which 
 has resolved morality into self-interest, 
 though much decried, would be right enough. 
 No man ever really acts against what he 
 apprehends at the time to be his interest, 
 though his interest may lead him to sacrifice 
 his animal or individual to his domestic or 
 social desires. 
 
 The good which we do to others yields 
 
242 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 us a deeper and more lasting satisfaction 
 than the good which we do to ourselves. 
 This is a pregnant fact and may seem to 
 indicate the purpose of the author of our 
 nature, if our nature has an author, and to 
 promise a social consummation before the 
 close. How far devotion to the interests of 
 the race and heroic or philanthropic action 
 will be affected by the departure of theistic 
 belief will be seen when the kingdom of 
 atheism or agnosticism has fully come. But 
 it is not by such a figment as posthumous 
 fame that the hearts of reasoning beings will 
 be lifted above selfish desires. Nor is it 
 likely that tribalism, however exalted or re- 
 fined by nationality and patriotism, will act 
 as it did on the Greek or Roman, in whom 
 still lived, though in a sublimated form, the 
 gregarious instinct of the herd. 
 
 Intellectual effort, while it implies moral 
 conditions, such as may dispose to labour and 
 raise above sensual indulgence, has motive 
 powers and attractions of its own apart 
 from any which theism supplies. Yet we 
 can hardly feel sure that there is not a 
 
MORALITY AND THEISM 243 
 
 theistic element in the scientific conscience, 
 which sacrifices not only ease and pleasure but 
 sometimes reputation and everything else to 
 the pursuit of truth. 
 
 Whether this is, as Leibnitz thought, the 
 best, or, as Schopenhauer thought, the worst, 
 of all possible worlds, neither of them could 
 really tell. Neither of them had any means 
 of verifying his hypothesis by comparison or 
 in any other way. Practically it is a very 
 different world for different men. For the 
 Roman emperor this was not the worst of all 
 possible worlds; by the Roman slave it could 
 hardly be deemed the best. Man's temporal 
 estate is apparently capable of indefinite im- 
 provement within the limits of mortality, 
 though the improvement will not cancel the 
 sufferings of the generations that are past. 
 
 It takes, we are told, a period of time 
 longer than man's recorded history for a 
 ray of light to reach the earth from the 
 remotest telescopic star. Yet the starry field 
 swept by the telescope is inconceivably less 
 than that which we must assume to lie 
 beyond. In such a universe what is the life 
 
244 MORALITY AND THEISM 
 
 of a man? Our little being is lost in 
 immensity. This thought and that of the 
 impenetrable mystery of existence are likely, 
 rather than cosmic emotion, worship of hu- 
 manity, or any of the other substitutes for 
 theism, to take possession of the human mind 
 if the belief in a God is withdrawn. 
 
ONE WORD MORE 
 
ONE WORD MORE 
 
 THERE have been many notices of these 
 essays, but none, so far as the writer has 
 observed, distinctly traversing any material 
 statement or in that respect calling for a re- 
 ply. The writer has been thankful to see that 
 his tone has not been deemed irreverent or ir- 
 religious, and that credit has been given him 
 for a sincere desire of arriving at more posi- 
 tive conclusions, if proof of them can be found. 
 Who, indeed, seeing what religion, apart from 
 its unspeakable importance to each of us spirit- 
 ually, is to society, to the commonwealth, to the 
 home, even to the aesthetic part of our nature, 
 to poetry and art, can think of dealing with it 
 lightly or look forward without dread to its 
 departure ? Immense would be the void which 
 would be left in life. Churches are still 
 full, perhaps fuller than ever, ministration is 
 247 
 
248 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 more active than ever, yet it is hardly possible 
 that church or ministration should long survive 
 the intellectual downfall of the faith. 
 
 Criticism has fixed almost exclusively on the 
 essay of which the subject is the Old Testa- 
 ment. This essay is charged with lack of re- 
 search ; by which is probably meant failure to 
 deal with the dates and origin of the books. 
 That inquiry belongs to Hebrew and Oriental 
 experts. It not only was beyond the compass 
 of these essays, but would have been foreign 
 to the writer's purpose, which was, as the 
 preface stated, to put those practical questions 
 to which answers are urgently desired by plain 
 people. The facts practically important are 
 manifest and can be verified by all. Anybody 
 can see that of a book which speaks of the 
 death of Moses, Moses cannot have been the 
 writer ; that a book which speaks of the kings 
 of Israel cannot have been written before there 
 were any kings ; that a book which speaks of 
 a line of prophets cannot have been written 
 before that line came into existence. It is 
 certain that the anonymous author or authors 
 of Genesis were not present at the creation of 
 
ONE WORD MORE 249 
 
 the world, and that the account of the Creation 
 given in Genesis is irreconcilably at variance 
 with the discoveries of science. Any one, 
 moreover, can verify the fact that Genesis is 
 a composite document, combining duplicate 
 versions of the Creation, of the Flood, of the 
 story of Abraham and Isaac, and of the story 
 of Joseph. We can all see that the general 
 authorship is Priestly or Prophetic as well as 
 Jehovistic. We can hardly be wrong in say- 
 ing that the story of Korah, Dathan, and 
 Abiram, swallowed up by the earth for their 
 schism, is the production of an established 
 priesthood. We can hardly be wrong in say- 
 ing that the story of the forty-two children 
 miraculously destroyed by bears for an in- 
 sult to a prophet was the work of one of the 
 prophetic order. As to the dates of the books 
 and their specific sources, the writer has had 
 before him the critics, whose speculations, how- 
 ever, it seems to him, have not yet advanced 
 beyond hypothesis ; the last conjecture as- 
 cribing the Pentateuch to a Hebrew Homer, 
 whose figure lurks behind those of Elijah and 
 Elisha. But this inquiry, however interesting 
 
250 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 to scholars, comparatively little concerns those 
 who only want to know whether the books 
 of the Old Testament are or are not the in- 
 spired Word of God, the genuine manifesta- 
 tion of his will, and the true record of his 
 dealings with mankind. To the specialists it 
 must be left. Whatever the Book of Jasher 
 or the Book of the Wars of Jehovah may have 
 been, we may feel assured that an inspired 
 writer would not have cited an uninspired 
 document as an authority for his statements. 
 Whatever may be the exact relation of Genesis 
 to the Babylonian legends, we may feel assured 
 that the Creator would not have had recourse 
 to the Babylonian legends as a foundation for 
 his account of his own work. The religion of 
 the many cannot be founded on a literary criti- 
 cism or philosophical manipulation of the Bible, 
 any more than it can be founded on metaphys- 
 ics. It must be founded on plain fact. 
 
 The writer, some clerical critics say, has 
 been ignorantly dealing, not with the latest 
 phase of ecclesiastical thought, but with a 
 phase now bygone and discarded. Is there 
 any phase of ecclesiastical thought later or 
 
ONE WORD MORE 251 
 
 more advanced than Lux Mundi and the 
 works of Dr. Sanday and Dr. Farrar? Has 
 there been any advance in ecclesiastical opinion 
 about Genesis since the utterance of Canon 
 Bonney in 1895 ? Has any ecclesiastical writer 
 dealt with the subject of a future life since 
 Dr. Salmond? 
 
 There is a school, styled by one of its chief 
 members that of Liberal Orthodoxy, which be- 
 lieves that it has found a resting-place, per- 
 haps a refuge, between untenable tradition and 
 conclusions from which all who have been 
 brought up in the established faith, especially 
 clergymen, must naturally recoil. This school 
 would retain the orthodox forms and phrases, 
 infusing into them a rationalistic meaning. It 
 continues to speak of the Word of God, while 
 it admits that with the Word of God in the 
 Bible is blended much that is the work of err- 
 ing, and even of very erring, man. It retains 
 the terms " inspiration " and " revelation," while 
 it pares down inspiration to an excellent use 
 of the natural faculties, and identifies revelation 
 with evolution. The Messiah is transformed 
 into a representative of humanity, an idea 
 
252 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 foreign to the Jewish mind, and even to the 
 mind, larger in this respect, of the Greek. 
 The detailed account of the Creation in Gene- 
 sis, evidently meant by the writer as literal 
 truth without the slightest suggestion of alle- 
 gory or parable, is either allegorized or reduced 
 to a theistic hypothesis of Creation in line with 
 the discoveries of modern science. The Fall of 
 Man is made to mean the normal weakness of 
 the flesh. The Atonement and Redemption are 
 not an atonement or a redemption, but merely 
 an improvement through Christ of the relation 
 of man to the Deity. Miracles become mani- 
 festations of a higher law, in a word, are not 
 miracles at all, but natural though extraordi- 
 nary events ; an expedient which does not 
 remove the difficulty, since the necessity for 
 extraordinary evidence remains. The school 
 admits that the Hebrew books are a miscellany, 
 like the literature of other nations ; yet it re- 
 tains the name "Bible," with the ideas of unity 
 and of divine purpose pervading the whole 
 which that name connotes. 
 
 Those of us who have a practical object in 
 view, and are unshackled by any Articles or 
 
ONE WORD MORE 253 
 
 Confessions, may not care to be delayed in our 
 quest of the truth by detention in a halting- 
 place such as this. But we shall not quarrel 
 with those who do, provided that they will in 
 charity refrain from accusing us of infidelity, 
 or explain that they mean by infidelity only 
 frank acceptance of proved facts, and frank 
 rejection of those which are disproved. 
 
 We must, however, be permitted to protest 
 against the assumption that the view of a 
 select circle of learned rationalists is accepted 
 by the churches, and that criticism of any less 
 rationalistic view is consequently out of date 
 and belated. Are not the Anglican Articles, 
 the Westminster Confession, and the ordina- 
 tion vows of the clergy in other churches still 
 in force ? Is not the whole Bible still read in 
 church, tendered to the masses, presented by 
 missionaries to the heathen without discrimi- 
 nation or qualification as the Word of God? 
 In the last revision of the English Bible is not 
 the Pentateuch ascribed to Moses, the Book of 
 Daniel to Daniel, and the two parts of Isaiah to 
 a single writer, who is thus made to predict 
 Cyrus by name nearly two hundred years 
 
254 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 before his date ? Are not the imprecatory 
 Psalms used without distinction or warning? 
 Are they not read, and not only read but 
 chanted, with the same reverence as the other 
 Psalms? Does not the Anglican lectionary 
 include the sanguinary career of Jehu, conclud- 
 ing with the divine benediction? Did not 
 Dr. Liddon, full of all theological learning, 
 maintain the literal interpretation of the Book 
 of Jonah? Does not Dr. Stanley, a leading 
 liberal as well as widely read, in his Sinai 
 and Palestine treat the Exodus as certainly 
 historical ? Is not the Commandment assert- 
 ing that the Creator made the world in six 
 days and rested on the seventh still set up and 
 rehearsed in churches as the utterance of God 
 from Sinai? Liberal Orthodoxy asserts that 
 all educated orthodoxy is now liberal. Ortho- 
 doxy, not only educated, but highly educated, 
 replies by refusing Liberal Orthodoxy lecture 
 halls and professorial chairs. 
 
 "Many of the artisans," Dean Farrar says, 
 "have been persuaded to believe that the 
 Church is a hostile and organized hypoc- 
 risy." If they compare her authorized version 
 
ONE WORD MORE 255 
 
 of the Bible, her lectionary, her articles, 
 her creeds, her public teaching generally, 
 with the opinions personally avowed by some 
 of her most eminent divines, they may at 
 least be pardoned for doubting whether her 
 public professions and utterances are perfectly 
 sincere. The Dean's lamentation is the answer 
 to those who say, 'These things which you 
 tell us are familiar to all educated men; to 
 educated men let them be confined ; why 
 create disturbance and perhaps imperil the 
 social order which rests upon religious belief by 
 communicating them to the common people ? ' 
 The disturbance already prevails ; the common 
 people, such of them at least as think, are 
 already full of that suspicious and hostile scep- 
 ticism, the saddest frame of mind in which 
 they could be. The monopoly of free thought 
 by the select and enlightened few has come to 
 an end. Theological figments are no longer 
 of any use even for the sorry purpose of 
 police. 
 
 If two elements, a human and a divine, are 
 blended in the Bible, or in the Old Testament, 
 how are we to distinguish the divine from 
 
256 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 the human ? No test is suggested to us ex- 
 cept the test of reason and conscience. Dean 
 Farrar tells us, as Bishop Butler had told us, 
 that reason and conscience must be supreme. 
 But if reason and conscience are competent to 
 distinguish the divine from the human, and 
 thus to pass judgment on revelation, where was 
 the use of any revelation at all ? 
 
 Orthodox Liberals frankly admit that there 
 are in the Old Testament not only things 
 pre-scientific and unhistorical, but things re- 
 pugnant, and even revoltingly repugnant, to civ- 
 ilized morality. The massacre of the Canaanites 
 with their wives and children, the murder of 
 Sisera by Jael, the butcheries of Jehu, the 
 massacre in Esther, and the execution of 
 Haman's sons, are heartily condemned. So 
 are those fanatical and superstitious laws or 
 precepts in which religious persecution and 
 witch-burning found their warrants. Are we 
 to suppose, then, that the Holy Spirit, in the 
 mixture of the divine element with the human, 
 collaborated with the mouthpieces of immo- 
 rality, cruelty, and deadly superstition, know- 
 ing, as omniscience must, that of their teaching 
 
ONE WORD MORE 257 
 
 by precept or example, the extermination of 
 the Albigenses, the slaughter of the inhabi- 
 tants of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Inquisition, 
 the holocausts of innocent women as witches 
 would naturally and surely come ? Would the 
 God of mercy and justice, if he had taken 
 part in the work and sent it forth with his 
 authority, have allowed himself to be repre- 
 sented as stopping the course of the sun to 
 prolong the carnage of a battle, or as putting 
 to death all the first-born of Egypt, including 
 thousands of innocent babes, because the 
 despot who was their master would not let 
 Israel go ? The explanation tendered is that 
 the divine morality was accommodated to that 
 of the age. But to raise the morality of the 
 age to the level, or something nearer to the 
 level, of divine morality, was surely the only 
 intelligible object of revelation. 
 
 What is the real value, spiritual or literary, 
 of the several books of the Old Testament, we 
 shall be better able to judge when the supersti- 
 tious use of them is frankly laid aside and 
 when they are no longer irrationally bound up 
 
258 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 together and treated collectively as the Word 
 of God. It may be that while on the one 
 hand they will lose their fallacious exaltation, 
 they will on the other hand be relieved of the 
 prejudice which may be created against them 
 by their exaggerated demands on faith, the 
 identification of their inhuman or repulsive 
 passages with Deity, and the darkness of the 
 shadow which they have too often been allowed 
 and are still in some measure allowed to cast 
 on human life. 
 
 It is not open to us to dispose of such things 
 as the slaughter of the Canaanites and the mur- 
 der of Sisera by saying that they belong to 
 primeval sentiment in a barbarous age. The 
 events, if they really happened, perhaps did; 
 but the narratives belong to the spiritual me- 
 ridian of the nation, and there can be no doubt 
 that the narrator glories in his tale. Deborah 
 is made to sing a paean over the act of Jael. 
 The slaughter of the Canaanites is specially 
 ascribed by the narrator to God, who is de- 
 picted as assisting in it by miracles. The 
 imprecatory Psalms also probably belong to 
 the golden age. The story of Jehu ends 
 
ONE WORD MORE 259 
 
 with a divine benediction. David, besides 
 committing murder and adultery, both of the 
 deepest dye, for which he is rebuked and 
 gently punished in the death of his child, is 
 an example of the worst practices of the harem, 
 tortures to death the people of a captured city, 
 makes raids in which he saves neither man 
 nor woman alive, butchers two-thirds of the 
 Moabites for cause not shown, and leaves a 
 bequest of murderous vengeance on his death- 
 bed ; yet he is held up as one who had kept the 
 statutes of the Lord, repeatedly blessed, and 
 designated as the progenitor of the Messiah. 
 Solomon's heart, it is said (1 Kings xi. 4), 
 " was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was 
 the heart of David his father." So in reference 
 to Rehoboam : " I will not take the whole 
 kingdom out of his hand ; but I will make him 
 prince all the days of his life for David my 
 servant's sake, whom I chose because he kept 
 my commandments and my statutes." l With- 
 
 1 Dean Farrar seems to be offended with those who 
 refer to the expression, "man after God's own heart," as 
 a proof of David's Biblical position. The expression is used 
 in 1 Sam. xiii. 14, and cited in Acts xiii. 22: "And when 
 
260 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 out doubt, David did entirely commend himself, 
 if not to the Lord of mercy, justice, and purity, 
 to the priesthood of Jehovah. The two sons and 
 five grandsons of Saul are hanged and impaled 
 to satisfy the vengeance of the Gibeonites, and 
 we are told that "after this God was entreated 
 for the land." How is the uninspired mind to 
 pick its way through this confusion of the 
 divine with the extremely human? If the 
 uninspired mind of the expert can pick its way, 
 can that of the common people, can that of the 
 heathen into whose hands the missionary puts 
 the Bible as the Word of God ? 
 
 Grant that the conception of Deity in the 
 sacred books of the Hebrews soars far in purity 
 above the Hellenic conception ; from cruelty 
 it is not free. Socrates and his disciples dis- 
 
 he had removed him [Saul], he raised up unto them David 
 to be their king ; to whom also he gave testimony, and said, 
 I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own 
 heart, which shall fulfil all my will." It is true Samuel 
 spoke before David had sinned, but omniscience must have 
 known David's character and seen in him the future mur- 
 derer of Uriah and seducer of Bathsheba, as well as the 
 builder of the Lord's house. Compare the high and un- 
 qualified eulogy of David in Psalm Ixxxix. 20 et sq. 
 
ONE WORD MORE 261 
 
 carded and abhorred the licentious legends of 
 the Hellenic pantheon. But Christian divines 
 generally can hardly be said to have discarded 
 or to abhor the Hebrew representations of the 
 Deity as cruel and merciless, while the Jew 
 still keeps the feast of Purim. The Hebrew 
 as well as the Hellenic God is represented as 
 misleading men. If Zeus sends a lying dream 
 to Agamemnon, Jehovah puts lying spirits into 
 the mouths of Ahab's prophets. The God of 
 the Westminster Confession who, before the 
 foundation of the world, predestinates a part of 
 his creatures to eternal perdition, irrespective 
 of their faith or works, "for the glory of his 
 sovereign power," is surely the same with the 
 deity of the Hebrews who visits the iniquity of 
 the fathers upon the children. 1 
 
 1 Burton, the historian of Scotland, says of the fierce and 
 exterminating Cameronians, "By another way of describ- 
 ing the relative position of parties, the Cameronians were 
 the select people of God and his chosen instruments ; while 
 all who differed with, or opposed them, were the children of 
 perdition. They took their creed from the New Testament, 
 but their associations and religious revellings were all in the 
 Old ; and if the tone of their writings were held as a suffi- 
 cient indication, it might be said that they coldly adopted the 
 one as a formal text, but that their souls yearned after the 
 
262 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 To science the ascendancy of the Old Testa- 
 ment over the mind of Christendom has been 
 adverse, since the Jew habitually ascribed 
 everything in nature to the direct action of 
 God. The notion of science seems to have had 
 no place in the Hebrew mind. Most marked 
 is the inferiority in this respect of the Hebrew 
 to the Greek. Can writers, thus astray in their 
 interpretation of the universe, have been the 
 best interpreters of the ways of God to man ? 
 
 The very name " Bible " and the collection 
 of all the books, both Hebrew and Christian, 
 under the same cover have imbued us with 
 a false notion. "The marked separation of 
 the Bible," says Dean Farrar, "into the books 
 of the Old and New Covenants is alone suf- 
 ficient to show that the Bible cannot be 
 
 older dispensation, as a practical embodiment of their own 
 proud, fierce, and exclusive tempers. They loved the paral- 
 lels which it afforded them, in the day of oppression and 
 bondage, followed by that of victory and extermination ; and 
 though their faith bound them to the milder dispensation, 
 their sympathies ever unconsciously fell back on those self- 
 sufficient and tyrannical attributes, which the principles of 
 toleration have counted antagonistic to Christianity instead 
 of fundamental to it." History of Scotland, 1689-1748, 
 I., 33, 34 (1853). 
 
ONE WORD MORE 263 
 
 regarded as a simple homogeneous book." 
 " Both sections," he adds, " represent the se- 
 lected and fragmentary remains of extensive 
 literature." He afterwards illustrates the un- 
 reasonableness of treating the Bible as homo- 
 geneous, and of indiscriminate citation of it 
 as though it were all " on the same level of 
 moral insight," by saying that "it is as if a 
 man should try to represent the biography of 
 the English people, and in order to do so 
 should make a compilation from the fragments 
 of Saxon sagas and Witenagemot decisions, 
 with some paragraphs of the Venerable Bede, 
 of Gildas, of Beowulf, some poems of Csedmon, 
 of Walter Mapes, of Chaucer and Drayton and 
 Skelton and Thomas Tusser, some chapters of 
 Froissart's Chronicles, and of William of Tyre 
 and the Cresta Dei per Francos, and the his- 
 toric plays of Shakespeare, Spenser's Epithala- 
 mion, and parts of Milton and Bacon, ending 
 with selections of Pope, Cowper, Wordsworth, 
 Tennyson, and Browning." 1 It is needless 
 to say how completely this has been masked 
 from us. The impression which the Bible, 
 
 1 The Bible : Its Meaning and Supremacy, p. 83. 
 
264 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 Old and New Testament together bound up 
 as one volume, inevitably makes upon our 
 minds, is that it is a harmonious whole with a 
 divine purpose running through it; and from 
 this impression even learned divines of the 
 Liberal Orthodox school, though they clearly 
 enough see the fact, do not seem to have set 
 themselves free. They habitually use the 
 name which they virtually admit to be inap- 
 propriate, and yield to the impression the 
 fallacious character of which they have ex- 
 posed. 
 
 That a religious character runs through most 
 of the books of the Old Testament, giving them 
 a certain unity, is true ; though in parts there 
 is a visible antagonism between the righteous- 
 ness of the prophet and the legalism of the 
 priest. But the same may be said of the series 
 of medieval chronicles, which were generally 
 the work of ecclesiastics. 
 
 The moral strength of the Old Testament is 
 its preaching of righteousness, which has fur- 
 nished powerful weapons to those who were 
 protesting against injustice. This we may 
 trace largely to the influence of a school of 
 
ONE WORD MORE 265 
 
 prophets alien and antagonistic to power and 
 wealth, independent of the privileged priest- 
 hood, and disposed to act as tribunes of the poor 
 and oppressed. Yet the righteousness is not 
 free from tribalism, the spirit of which has per- 
 haps re-appeared in the doctrine of Election. 
 
 In the Psalms there is spiritual elevation. 
 But the general sign of Jehovah's favour is not 
 spiritual elevation ; it is worldly well-being, in- 
 cluding the tribal blessing of posterity. The 
 Book of Job, after all, solves or evades the 
 problem of suffering righteousness by restoring 
 to Job his possessions and the number of his 
 children two-fold. Aristotle, speaking of the 
 good man in adversity, says, "Yet in these mis- 
 fortunes beauty of character shines forth, when 
 one is seen bearing with patience a load of 
 calamity, not through insensibility, but through 
 nobleness and greatness of heart." l 
 
 The Being who fills infinity and eternity 
 enters into a covenant with a Hebrew sheikh, 
 in whose tent he is received and eats bread. 
 The covenant is sealed by the institution of 
 a barbarous tribal rite. In virtue of it the 
 
 1 Nicomachcean Ethics, I., x. 
 
266 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 Almighty pledges himself to take into his 
 special favour the sheikh's race, to promote its 
 interest and grandeur above those of other 
 races, and in time make it the head of the earth. 
 This is the basis of the dispensation and the 
 keynote of the history. Is it possible that 
 anybody can accept this legend, the manifest 
 offspring of tribal self-esteem, at the present 
 day ? Yet if we do not accept it, what becomes 
 of our faith in the Old Testament ? 
 
 No expedient, it would seem, could be more 
 desperate than that of identifying revelation 
 with evolution. Can any two ideas be more 
 contrary to each other? Did the real nature 
 of revelation remain hidden till the appear- 
 ance of Darwin's Origin of Species? If reve- 
 lation is in a constant state of evolution, 
 where is the process to end? What stage in 
 it is denoted by the coming and the teach- 
 ing of Christ? What did Paul mean when 
 he anathematized all who should preach any 
 other Gospel? Christendom must surely for 
 eighteen centuries have been strangely igno- 
 rant of itself. 
 
ONE WORD MORE 267 
 
 To pass from the Old Testament to the New. 
 To what was said about the want of ocular 
 evidence for the miracles, there has, so far as 
 the writer is aware, been no reply, and as was 
 before said, it is inconceivable that God, if 
 our faith was to depend on miracles, should 
 not have vouchsafed us sufficient evidence. 
 Without sufficient evidence, profession of be- 
 lief would be not faith, but infidelity. Above 
 all, there would surely have been the clear and 
 consistent testimony of undoubted eye-witnesses 
 to the resurrection of Christ. 
 
 Of the whole circle of miracles, the centre 
 and the ground is the Incarnation. If, as 
 science shows, there was no Fall of Man, but 
 instead of it a rise from the brute state to 
 that of humanity, there was no need for Re- 
 demption. If there was no need for Redemp- 
 tion, there was no reason for the Incarnation. 
 To this objection, which goes to the very root 
 of belief in the miracles, what answer can be 
 made ? If no answer can be made, what be- 
 comes of the history of the miraculous birth 
 and its accompaniments ? What becomes of 
 the Resurrection? What becomes of tho 
 
268 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 whole historical and dogmatic system? These 
 questions have hitherto been asked in vain. 
 
 May it not be said of the doctrine of the 
 Incarnation that conception of it, and therefore 
 belief of it, is impossible ? The second Person 
 of the Trinity fills, as God, with the first and 
 third Persons, all Being ; yet he is sitting in 
 human form with human body at the right 
 hand of God, whence he shall come to judge 
 the world. We may say this with our lips, 
 but with all reverence it may be asked, can we 
 attach any meaning to our words ? 
 
 Not in the twilight of the first or second 
 century, but in the meridian light of the nine- 
 teenth, we have seen the Virgin Mary declared 
 immaculate in her conception, and infallibility, 
 a long step towards divinity, conferred upon 
 the Pope. 
 
 It was noticed in the essay that of the three 
 miracles attested by some one, anonymous 
 and unknown, but speaking as an eye-witness, 
 in the latter part of the Acts, two, the ship- 
 wreck and preservation of Paul, in accordance 
 with his presentiments, and his escape from 
 the sting of the viper, would hardly be deemed 
 
ONE WORD MORE 269 
 
 miracles at all. The third case, that of the 
 revival of Eutychus (Acts xx. 9-12), is, to 
 say the least, equivocal. Paul, embracing the 
 prostrate youth, says, "Trouble not yourselves; 
 for his life is in him." He utters no miracle- 
 working word. He then returns to the upper 
 chamber and breaks bread. After which the 
 youth, having had time for recovery, is brought 
 in alive and well. There is no absolute neces- 
 sity for construing this as a miracle of raising 
 the dead. 1 Nor is there anything necessarily 
 miraculous, or beyond the play of a highly 
 wrought fancy, in the silencing of the pro- 
 phetic maid whose importunities offended Paul 
 (Acts xvi. 18). In the narrative of the mirac- 
 ulous release of Paul and Silas from prison, the 
 first person is not used. It is remarkable that 
 in the only cases in which the narrator, who- 
 ever he may have been (and it must be re- 
 peated that we know not who he was), speaks 
 as an eye-witness, it is possible at least to 
 
 1 De Wette and Olshausen both render the words fydi) 
 veK/?6s "was taken up for dead," and this interpretation 
 might probably be defended. But it seems more likely that 
 the writer meant to give the incident a miraculous colour. 
 
270 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 explain the miracle away. The speaking in 
 unknown tongues is sufficiently attested by St. 
 Paul, but it can hardly be said that he attests 
 its miraculous character. We have had it re- 
 peated by the Irvingites beneath the critical 
 eye of the nineteenth century. Far easier 
 would have been innocent self-deception in 
 St. Paul's day. 
 
 Dean Farrar, in a work which we have all 
 read with interest and respect, says, "About 
 the miracles performed by our Lord and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ about the Incarnation, the Res- 
 urrection, and the Ascension, which are the 
 most stupendous of them all I can still say, 
 with all my heart, 4 Manet immota fides.'' " l If 
 the Dean's faith remains unmoved, the same 
 can hardly be said of all the miracles. 
 
 " And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded 
 up his spirit. And behold the veil of the temple was 
 rent in twain from the top to the bottom ; and the earth 
 did quake ; and the rocks were rent ; and the tombs were 
 opened ; and many bodies of the saints which were fallen 
 asleep were raised ; and coming forth out of the tombs, 
 after his resurrection, they entered into the holy city and 
 appeared unto many." Matthew xxvii. 50-53, R.V. 
 
 1 The Bible : Its Meaning and Supremacy, p. 225. 
 
ONE WORD MORE 271 
 
 It would seem that there can be no state- 
 ment plainer than this, or of which we could 
 say with more certainty that the writer meant 
 it in its literal sense. But what is the Dean's 
 version ? 
 
 "At that moment the vail of the Temple was rent 
 in twain from the top to the bottom. An earthquake 
 shook the earth and split the rocks, and as it rolled away 
 from their places the great stones which closed and cov- 
 ered the cavern sepulchres of the Jews, so it seemed to 
 the imaginations of many to have disimprisoned the 
 spirits of the dead, and to have filled the air with 
 ghostly visitants, who after Christ had risen appeared 
 to linger in the Holy City." l 
 
 Prodigies were believed by educated men 
 to have accompanied the death of Charles L, 
 which by royalists and High Churchmen was 
 profanely likened to that of Christ. The halo 
 of miraculous legend which formed itself round 
 Charles in an intellectual and literary age 
 deserves attention as showing how much en- 
 thusiastic fancy can do. 
 
 Dean Farrar's interpretation of the miracle of 
 the swine has already been in part quoted. 
 But the whole passage is worth giving as a 
 1 Life of Christ, II., 418, 419. 
 
272 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 specimen of the necessity under which its 
 excellent author and other orthodox but con- 
 scientious writers find themselves placed by the 
 advance of criticism and science : 
 
 " That the demoniac was healed that in the terrible 
 final paroxysm which usually accompanied the deliver- 
 ance from this strange and awful malady, a herd of 
 swine was in some way affected with such wild terror as 
 to rush headlong in large numbers over a steep hill-side 
 into the waters of the lake and that, in the minds of 
 all who were present, including that of the sufferer him- 
 self, this precipitate rushing of the swine was connected 
 with the man's release from his demoniac thraldom 
 thus much is clear. 
 
 " And indeed, so far, there is no difficulty whatever. 
 Any one who believes in the Gospels, and believes that 
 the Son of God did work on earth deeds which far sur- 
 pass mere human powers, must believe that among the 
 most frequent of His cures were those of the distressing 
 forms of mental and nervous malady which we ascribe to 
 merely natural causes, but which the ancient Jews, like all 
 Orientals, attribute to direct supernatural agency. And 
 knowing to how singular an extent the mental impres- 
 sions of man affect by some unknown electrical influence 
 the lower animals knowing, for instance, that man's 
 cowardice and exultation, and even his superstitious 
 terrors, do communicate themselves to the dog which 
 accompanies him, or the horse on which he rides there 
 can be little or no difficulty in understanding that the 
 shrieks and gesticulations of a powerful lunatic might 
 
ONE WORD MORE 273 
 
 strike uncontrollable terror into a herd of swine. We 
 know further that the spasm of deliverance was often 
 attended with fearful convulsions, sometimes perhaps 
 with an effusion of blood ; and we know that the sight 
 and smell of human blood produces strange effects in 
 many animals. May there not have been something of 
 this kind at work in this singular event ? " l 
 
 No relief is really obtained by thus minimiz- 
 ing miracles. So long as a particle of the 
 miraculous is left, not only the testimony of 
 eye-witnesses, but an extraordinary amount of 
 it, will still be required. 
 
 Neander, Olshausen, and other Liberal theo- 
 logians have betrayed the same honest per- 
 plexity respecting the apparitions of the dead 
 at the time of the Crucifixion. Can we doubt 
 that those apparitions, as well as the earth- 
 quake, the rending of the veil of the Temple, 
 and the miraculous darkness which covers the 
 earth, are pious embellishments of the Saviour's 
 death imagined by a writer who was not a 
 witness of the event ? But if this is so, what 
 becomes of that writer's testimony to any 
 miracle? Rationalism cannot be allowed to 
 
 1 Life of Christ, I. , 337, 338. 
 
274 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 pick and choose among the miracles. All rest 
 on the same evidence and must be accepted or 
 rejected together. If the testimony of an 
 evangelist to the apparition of the dead in 
 the streets of Jerusalem, or to the miracle of 
 the swine, is disallowed in those cases, the 
 testimony of the same evangelist to other 
 miracles cannot be received. 
 
 Jowett in his public writings would be re- 
 strained by his position as the clerical head of 
 a college as well as by his gentle unwillingness 
 to offend. But we now have his private letters. 
 In these it clearly appears that he had entirely 
 given up belief in miracles and did not ex- 
 pect it ever again to prevail. He prompts a 
 clerical friend, in addressing an ecclesiastical 
 audience, to disrate miracles, though in cautious 
 phraseology, classing them as religious difficul- 
 ties with the " immoralities of Scripture " and 
 with "humanly invented mysteries." 
 
 In disparagement of the historical evidence, 
 Jowett goes beyond anything said in these 
 essays. "How little," he says, "we know of 
 the life of Christ apparently derived from a 
 document no longer in existence and nothing 
 
ONE WORD MORE 275 
 
 more known than was known at the end of the 
 second century." 1 These words, though dis- 
 jointed, seem clearly to imply that the historical 
 books of the New Testament have no basis 
 except a single document of unknown author- 
 ship and now lost. This appears to be the 
 extreme of scepticism. The fourth Gospel 
 must apparently have had an independent 
 source. There is, besides, the evidence of 
 Paul, who beyond doubt had conversed with 
 two of the apostles, and in whose pages the 
 reflection of Christ's character and of his 
 ethical teaching coincides generally with the 
 portraiture in the Gospels, however much of 
 dogmatic addition or perversion there may be. 
 Paul has, moreover, a circumstantial account of 
 the Last Supper. On his writings is impressed 
 distinct and definite belief in a personal Christ. 
 It seems hardly possible to doubt that there 
 was at the source of Christendom a great per- 
 sonality, with a character the imitation of 
 which has been the Christian life. 
 
 Geocentric is an ungainly word, to which 
 
 1 The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, by Evelyn 
 Abbott and Lewis Campbell, II., 387. 
 
276 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 critics may fairly object. Unhappily the Nor- 
 man Conquest, by disorganizing our language 
 and depriving it of its power of forming 
 compounds, has reduced us, especially in phi- 
 losophy and science, to these barbarous importa- 
 tions from the Greek. But it cannot be denied 
 that the Gospel history is adjusted physically 
 and theologically to the mistaken idea that the 
 earth is the centre of the universe. Nor can 
 it be denied that the appearance of the star at 
 the Nativity involves astronomical misconcep- 
 tion and superstition. Is it imaginable that the 
 descent of the Deity to earth for the salvation 
 of mankind should have been accommodated 
 to the cosmography and astronomy of an un- 
 scientific era? 
 
 There is a strong disposition on the part of 
 the Liberal Orthodox school, as might have 
 been expected, to refine away the Atonement 
 or Redemption, which they feel to be a moral 
 stumbling-block, and to represent Christ as 
 having merely effected a " reconciliation " of 
 man to God. If the Fall of Man is mythical, 
 what was there to call for reconciliation? 
 Why, if necessary, could not reconciliation 
 
ONE WORD MORE 277 
 
 have been effected otherwise than by cruci- 
 fixion ? Bishop Butler understood the Chris- 
 tian dispensation well, and he considers it 
 pertinent in connection with the death of 
 Christ elaborately to vindicate the doctrine of 
 " vicarious punishment." He quotes the Script- 
 ures which say that "we are sanctified through 
 the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for 
 all," that " Christ was once offered to bear the 
 sins of many," that "he suffered for sins, the 
 just for the unjust," that "he gave his life a 
 ransom for many," that "he redeemed us with 
 his blood." 1 Is it possible to explain away 
 the obvious meaning of such a passage as " He 
 that spared not his own son, but delivered him 
 up for us all, how shall he not with him freely 
 give us all things?" (Rom. viii. 32). Bishop 
 Pearson, in his work upon the Creed, has accu- 
 mulated passages to the same effect. There 
 surely can be no doubt as to the belief of the 
 orthodox churches upon this point. It per- 
 
 1 See also John xi. 49-52 ; Rom. iii. 25, 26 ; Rom. v. 
 8-10 ; Rom. viii. 3 ; 1 Cor. xv. 3 ; Heb. ix. 11-15, 22, 
 26, 28 ; Heb. x. 10, 11, 14, 19, 20 ; 1 John i. 7 ; 1 John ii. 
 2 ; 1 Peter i. 19. 
 
278 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 vades their articles and confessions, their 
 eucharistic ritual, their hymnal. Renounce it 
 you may on moral grounds. To glide out of 
 it or divest it of its awful character is hopeless. 
 Without it there is no significance in the typi- 
 cal imagery of the Epistle to the Hebrews ; 
 there is in truth no significance in the Cruci- 
 fixion. 
 
 In the Resurrection Orthodox Liberal writers 
 still profess their unshaken faith. But they 
 show a tendency to shift the basis of proof 
 from direct historical testimony to prevalent 
 belief. Prevalent belief in such an age and 
 among people so capable of illusion, and with 
 so little to correct it, is hardly a sure founda- 
 tion. There was a prevalent belief in the 
 speedy second coming of Christ. 
 
 If we look into ourselves we shall probably 
 find that the really operative influences have 
 been those of the Character and the Words, not 
 those of miracle or dogma. What we cannot 
 possibly understand, we cannot possibly believe. 
 That which we cannot believe, however often 
 repeated, can produce no effect on our conduct. 
 The first disciples were drawn to Jesus, not by 
 
ONE WORD MORE 279 
 
 miracles, which it does not appear that they had 
 seen, nor by dogma, of which they had never 
 heard, but by the Character and the Words. 
 Why should not our relations to the Teacher 
 be as theirs ? " And Jesus, walking by the sea 
 of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called 
 Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net 
 into the sea: for they were fishers. And he 
 saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make 
 you fishers of men. And they straightway left 
 their nets, and followed him. And going on 
 from thence, he saw other two brethren, James 
 the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a 
 ship with Zebedee their father, mending their 
 nets; and he called them. And they imme- 
 diately left the ship and their father, and fol- 
 lowed him." Why, if the Character and the 
 Words come home to our convictions and our 
 hearts, should we not do the same ? 
 
 On no subject would an answer to the doubts 
 expressed in the essays have been more welcome 
 or more gladly recorded than on that of the 
 immortality of the soul. But either no answer 
 has been found, or the answer is for the present 
 
280 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 withheld. Something has been said of an in- 
 nate instinct of immortality. There would be 
 no more reason for rejecting the evidence of an 
 innate instinct, if its existence could be substan- 
 tiated, than for rejecting the evidence of sense. 
 But to substantiate the existence of an innate 
 instinct is very difficult. It has become more 
 difficult than ever since the discovery of the 
 origin of the human species, which seems to 
 repel the belief of any peculiar inspiration 
 infused into the primeval man. There is ap- 
 parently no instinct of immortality in the 
 Chinese or Japanese. There was none in the 
 Epicurean. There is none in the modern phi- 
 losophers who have ceased, as some modern 
 philosophers unquestionably have, to believe 
 in immortality. Can we be sure that this 
 instinct is anything more than a craving for 
 life, combined with the mental difficulty which 
 we feel in thinking of ourselves as no longer 
 existing, and of the world of which we are 
 now a part as continuing to exist without us ? 
 The indications noted in the essay on a future 
 life, such as the spiritual value of character, its 
 possible affinity to supreme goodness, and the 
 
ONE WORD MORE 281 
 
 sense of responsibility at the end of life, faint 
 as they may be, and merely tentative as must 
 be any speculation founded on them, are indica- 
 tions not of supposed instinct but of reason, and 
 are capable at least of being laid in the scale of 
 rational investigation. 
 
 The genesis of our personal consciousness is 
 a mystery which science perhaps may never 
 solve. But consciousness can hardly be a 
 pledge of immortality, since it is manifestly 
 shared by brutes and is capable of physical 
 suspension by sleep, by concussion of the brain, 
 and by anaesthetics. 
 
 To death we resign ourselves, in spite of our 
 love of life, because death, we see, is necessary 
 to the renewal and progress of the species, 
 though it is idle to pretend that it is not sad 
 to pass away from all our interests, all our 
 enjoyments, all we love. 
 
 " In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, 
 I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay 
 my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. 
 I am not content to pass away * like a weaver's shuttle.' 
 Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpala- 
 table draught of mortality. I care not to be carried 
 with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity ; 
 
282 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in 
 love with this green earth ; the face of town and country ; 
 the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of 
 streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am con- 
 tent to stand still at the age to which I am arrived ; I, 
 and my friends ; to be no younger, no richer, no hand- 
 somer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, 
 like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave." 1 
 
 This is the general voice of nature, though 
 varied sometimes by the note of weariness or 
 despair. Yet Charles Lamb fails to mark the 
 dearest tie to life, which is that of affection. 
 
 To death, however, we resign ourselves. We 
 do not resign ourselves to annihilation. Nor, 
 if annihilation is the end, can we understand 
 how justice and benevolence, such justice and 
 benevolence, at all events, as are intelligible to 
 us, can be the attributes of the supreme power. 
 Myriads of human beings, through no fault of 
 their own, have lived in misery, perhaps in 
 cruel slavery, and died in pain, not a few in 
 agony. Myriads have been born to primeval 
 savagery, without hope of moral civilization. 
 The lot of myriads has been cast in such 
 
 i C. Lamb, Essays: "New Year's Eve." 
 
ONE WORD MORE 283 
 
 periods as that of the fall of the Roman Em- 
 pire or the Thirty Years' War. If for these 
 there is no compensation, how can we believe 
 in a just and benevolent administration of the 
 universe? Dogmatic and historical Christianity 
 is far from relieving us of the difficulty, since it 
 places all the generations before Christ, and the 
 whole heathen world down to this day, out of 
 the pale at least of covenanted salvation. 
 
 We are ever confronted also by the mystery 
 of suffering among helpless and guiltless brutes. 
 Dr. Nansen's dogs do their cruel duty with 
 touching faithfulness, and are killed as their 
 reward. Is it not conceivable that to a power 
 placed infinitely above them and their master 
 they as well as he may be objects of interest ? 
 Animals suffer, not only in their bodies, but in 
 their humble affections, by the loss of their 
 mates and of their young. Beasts of prey 
 must feed on other beasts ; this is in the fixed 
 order of things. 
 
 Failing proof of personal life beyond the 
 grave, the least repulsive idea of death seems 
 to be re-union with the life of the universe ; 
 a re-union which our revolting system of coffin 
 
284 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 burial studies to defer by protracting the pro- 
 cess of decay. But it is our personal existence 
 with its mental life and affections the continu- 
 ance of which we crave and which we cannot 
 without a pang resign. ' Rest in the grave ' is 
 a soothing phrase, but annihilation, once more, 
 is not rest. 
 
 Excellence in us is the fruit of effort. If we 
 try to picture to ourselves an angel, perfectly 
 virtuous without effort, insipidity is the result. 
 Pain and suffering, so long as they can be said 
 to stimulate moral effort, are capable of ex- 
 planation. But there are cases innumerable 
 in which they can have no such tendency. 
 There are cases innumerable in which moral 
 effort and its fruits are wrecked by that which, 
 so far as we can see, is the blind havoc of 
 nature. 
 
 Of the theistic hypothesis the difficulty, it 
 must be owned, is not less in conception than 
 in demonstration. What idea can we form of 
 God? Is he external to the universe, or does 
 he pervade it ? The difficulty of either con- 
 ception seems insuperable. When we try to 
 
ONE WORD MORE 285 
 
 think of God as a person, we are unable to 
 clear our minds of anthropomorphism, which 
 nevertheless reason discards. Perhaps in this 
 respect our imaginations are still somewhat 
 enslaved by the notions of the Jews, who 
 fancied that God walked in a garden, made 
 garments for our first parents, and broke bread 
 under the tent of Abraham. On English 
 readers these notions have been impressed, 
 while they have been dignified, by Milton. In 
 the Roman Stoics we perceive something like 
 consciousness of a divine presence and govern- 
 ment, in which virtue finds its support and 
 assurance without the idea of a personal Deity. 
 But in striving to conceive Deity without 
 anthropomorphism, our intellect faints, as it 
 faints in the attempt to conceive infinity and 
 eternity, as it faints in brooding over the im- 
 penetrable mystery of existence. 
 
 Is there anything to suggest a key to the 
 nature and operations of the power which en- 
 ters the universe other than the consciousness 
 of upward effort in ourselves? In what we 
 see there appears to be a general " travailing " 
 and a struggling towards perfection, as though 
 
286 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 something like effort and not fiat were the law. 
 From an atomic nebula without form and void 
 our earth has come to be what it is. Man has 
 risen from the level of the brute and is rising 
 still. The effort is in him, yet the force and 
 direction must have been supplied. 
 
 Mind, morality, and sentiment, however 
 generated, exist. Supposing them to have 
 been evolved from matter, they are something 
 different from it ; and we can hardly imagine 
 that in the whole universe they are ours alone. 
 
 The thing of which we appear to be certain 
 is our own insignificance, mites as we are on 
 a globe which itself is immeasurably less than 
 a speck in infinity. The thought may even pre- 
 sent itself that the comic element in us, with 
 the significance of which philosophers in general 
 have failed to deal, though Swift in his Day 
 of Judgment has not failed, may point to truth, 
 and that what seems to us of overwhelming 
 importance may, in reality, be less serious than 
 it seems. The universe is inconceivable and 
 unimaginable. Will man's relation to it ever 
 be known ? 
 
ONE WORD MORE 287 
 
 Pending the reconstruction of theism at all 
 events, a philosophy to guide and regulate 
 human conduct, independently of the theistic 
 hypothesis, is the need of the hour. 
 
 Morality, to be effective, must have a motive 
 power. A philosophical or mathematical defini- 
 tion, such as "the fitness of things," is not a 
 motive power, at all events for any but the 
 philosophers or mathematicians. Moral taste 
 is a motive power for none but cultivated men 
 like Shaftesbury, who in truth seems to have 
 been aware that he wrote not for the vulgar 
 herd. The conscience, which is Butler's motive 
 power, is in his system manifestly the oracle of 
 God, so that its authority must depend on the 
 proofs of theism. The will of God, with reward 
 or punishment annexed, is plainly stated to be 
 the motive power of the system of Paley. Any 
 transcendental sanction of duty, such as Kant's 
 categorical imperative, implies an extra-human 
 authority, which, in fact, is the authority of God. 
 Even Comtism, although anti-theistic, must rest 
 on -a transcendental authority of some kind, con- 
 straining us to the service of humanity, which a 
 man of thoroughly selfish nature might other- 
 
288 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 wise decline. Necessarianism practically ac- 
 cepted would extinguish effort ; so apparently 
 would pantheism ; neither of them, at all 
 events, can supply a motive power. Hobbes 
 would indeed supply a motive power, but it 
 would be that of mutual fear, an idea sug- 
 gested by the disturbances of the writer's time. 
 Utilitarianism has a motive power, and we have 
 only to extend it to the whole man, domestic 
 and social as well as individual, moral and 
 spiritual as well as material, in order to make it 
 what we require. 
 
 Apart from theism, a practical system of 
 morality, or perhaps we should rather say of 
 humanity, will appeal to the natural needs and 
 desires of man, for the supply and satisfaction 
 of which it will point out the right way, and 
 frame the code of necessary conditions. It 
 will give rules for the attainment of health 
 and full development, bodily, intellectual, and 
 aesthetic ; for the practice of industry by which 
 a man has to make his bread ; for marriage and 
 the family life in which he gratifies his domestic 
 affections ; for the social intercourse through 
 which, complying with social rules, he may 
 
ONE WORD MORE 289 
 
 enjoy the good-will and confidence of his fel- 
 lows ; for the political union which is neces- 
 sary to his safety and his general well-being. 
 Throughout it will act on him with a sufficient 
 motive power. It will teach him the necessity 
 of respecting for his own sake the interest and 
 feelings of his fellows ; and against anti-social 
 passion or self-assertion will appeal to the force 
 of social opinion, in the last resort to that 
 of penal law. Widely scattered, even among 
 works of fiction of the better class, there is 
 much material of which a manual of human life 
 may avail itself. The sciences which deal with 
 humanity in all its phases and relations are 
 making way with ever accumulating power. 
 
 In a practical system of morality such as 
 this, the ethical teachings of Jesus, as ratified 
 by experience, personal and that of Chris- 
 tendom at large, would be preserved, though 
 without their theistic basis. But there would 
 be no more rigorous insistence on an un- 
 attainable ideal, the presentation of which 
 fails of practical impression with ordinary 
 men. The moralist, instead of telling us, as 
 the preacher has been wont to do, that we 
 
290 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 must be seraphic or be lost, would help each 
 of us to do the best he could. We should 
 hear no more of the corruption of human 
 nature ; we should hear only of its natural 
 infirmities, and of its need of guidance, regu- 
 lation, and support. Real incentives to right 
 action would not be excluded or disrated be- 
 cause they are not evangelical and belong not 
 to spiritual altitudes which common natures 
 do not attain. All natural desires of wealth 
 or other worldly goods, of affection, reputa- 
 tion, and the good-will of our fellows, would 
 be recognized as entitled to fulfilment in their 
 several degrees. We should cease to think, 
 or affect to think, of this world as evil, of 
 this life as worthless, or of the body as the 
 prison-house of the soul. In truth, the pulpit 
 is already beginning to take this turn, and 
 to treat with respect the body and our inter- 
 est in this life. It has been holding lan- 
 guage which would not be easily reconciled 
 with the hatred of this present world, and 
 the longing to be released from it, breathed 
 in the Gospels and by St. Paul. Lambeth 
 now takes up the labour question. Spiritual 
 
ONE WORD MORE 291 
 
 thaumaturgy of all kinds would of course 
 depart, as would all supposed means of attain- 
 ing perfection or improvement in character 
 otherwise than by moral effort with rational 
 assistance. There would be no more sacra- 
 mental regeneration, no more death-bed absolu- 
 tion, no more trust in supernatural conversion. 
 Such terms as duty and conscience would 
 change their transcendental for a practical 
 meaning, the first becoming the rule of life, the 
 second the internal record of our observance 
 of that rule. This would be a descent from 
 the angelic height, but we should at least be 
 on firm ground. 
 
 To all questions whether this life, so brief 
 and chequered, is worth living, the answer is 
 that it must be lived. This even Schopenhauer 
 admits, though the logical conclusion from his 
 premisses would be universal suicide. Opti- 
 mism and pessimism are equally futile. Our 
 world is what it is. Whether it could have 
 been other than it is we cannot tell. 
 
 Acceptance of a system the object of which 
 is to make the best of our mortal life, by no 
 means implies the renunciation of higher hopes 
 
292 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 or of effort to learn more than we now know 
 of man's estate, and obtain better proofs than 
 we now have of the existence of a supreme 
 being and of his care for man. Hume, the 
 great demolisher of theism and beliefs that 
 depend on it, was a man of first-rate intellect 
 and a most philosophic temper. But he was 
 not an earnest seeker after positive truth, at 
 least in the theological line. He enjoyed the 
 position of a sceptic, looking at it as the privi- 
 lege of cultivated intellect, and well content 
 that superstition should be the lot of the vulgar. 
 To him, as to his intellectual kinsman Gibbon, 
 it seemed that all religions were to the people 
 equally true, to the philosopher equally false, 
 to the statesman equally useful. He was cyn- 
 ical enough to advise a young freethinker to 
 take Anglican orders. The drama of humanity 
 would be a farce if this were the last word. 
 
 It may be that religious thought will com- 
 plete the course which it has been running 
 through the ages, from primeval nature-wor- 
 ship to our present idea of deity, and which it 
 is the fashion to call evolution. Our present 
 idea and the name which expresses it may in 
 
ONE WORD MORE 293 
 
 their turn depart. Prayer, as a petition, and 
 worship, so far as it is anthropomorphic, may 
 cease. Yet man will not rest content with 
 blank ignorance of the origin, law, and end of 
 his being ; nor will his religious emotions and 
 aspirations die. Possibly he may attain a higher 
 point of view and see what now he cannot see. 
 Darwin was not the first discoverer, nor is he 
 likely to be the last. Man has risen from the 
 ape, or something lower than the ape, to what 
 he is. If, as the physiologists say, his physical 
 frame is incapable of further development, the 
 limit of his spiritual development may not be 
 so fixed. Evolution of Revelation is a contra- 
 diction in terms and an absurdity. But pro- 
 gressive effort may be the law of religious, as 
 well as of scientific, thought. It is at all events 
 not yet to be assumed that, as M. Guyau thinks, 
 the future will be without religion or without 
 association for spiritual purposes. 
 
 Let us not be slaves to Evolution. It is 
 no doubt an immense discovery, and has pro- 
 foundly changed our conception not only of 
 the origin but of the estate of man. But let 
 
294 ONE WORD MORE 
 
 us not be slaves to it. It is a physical law, or 
 combination of laws. Its operation is no longer 
 traceable, at least has not yet been traced, be- 
 yond the point at which conscious effort begins. 
 Progress there is, and in science generally sus- 
 tained or connected progress, one discovery 
 leading on to another ; but progress it appears 
 to be, not evolution. In the aesthetic region we 
 may almost say that the wind bloweth where it 
 listeth. The great poets, artists, and musicians 
 have come largely in groups without any appar- 
 ent regularity of succession, though of course 
 not without relation to the temporary environ- 
 ment. Morality in its rudimentary form is un- 
 doubtedly seen in brutes, and in men as in 
 brutes it is the balance of desire with submis- 
 sion to the necessary limitations. Nevertheless 
 human morality is a very different thing from 
 that of brutes, and, unlike that of the brutes, is 
 always being advanced by conscious and upward 
 effort. Touched by religion or spiritual aspira- 
 tion, it has formed memorable types of char- 
 acter ; the Socratic, the Stoic, the Jewish, the 
 Buddhist, the Mahometan, and, far above all, 
 
ONE WORD MORE 295 
 
 the Christian ; limited, all of them, even Chris- 
 tianity, and one-sided, as selections tending to 
 exaggeration of some special virtue or group of 
 virtues, yet suggestive of an aim beyond our 
 present state and the uses of our existence here. 
 Of this our nature assures us, if it can assure 
 us of anything, that we are faithful servants of 
 God, if there is a god, and must be safe, so long 
 as we steadfastly adhere to the truth. 
 
WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
 THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 An Outline of Political History, 1492-1871. 
 With Map. Crown 8vo. $2.00. 
 
 " His survey of events is luminous, his estimate of character is singu- 
 larly keen and just, and his style is at once incisive, dignified, and scholarly. 
 . . . No one who takes up Mr. Goldwin Smith's volume will readily lay it 
 down before he has finished it; no one will lay it down without acknowledg- 
 ing the rare gifts of the writer." The Times. 
 
 " It is a literary masterpiece, as readable as a novel, remarkable for its 
 compression without dryness, and its brilliancy without any rhetorical effort 
 or display. What American could, with so broad a grasp and so perfect a 
 style, have rehearsed our political history from Columbus to Grant in 300 
 duodecimo pages of open type, or would have manifested greater candor in 
 his judgment of men and events in a period of four centuries? It is enough 
 to say that no one before Mr. Smith has attempted the feat, and that he has 
 the field to himself." The Nation. 
 
 ESSAYS ON QUESTIONS OF THE 
 DAY: 
 
 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. 
 
 By GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 
 
 NEW, REVISED, AND ENLARGED EDITION. 
 i2mo. Cloth. $2.25. 
 
 " These questions for, as will be seen, there are many comprised under 
 one head are all treated in Professor Smith's latest volume with the clear- 
 ness and force which belong to all his writings." Critic. 
 
 " The book is admirably concise in method, often epigrammatic in the 
 sweeping generalizations. The method is modern, moreover, in that it takes 
 account of social forms and prejudices, of popular thought, in short, as well 
 as of the political plans of the few so-called leaders of men." 
 
 HAMLIN GARLAND, in The Arena. 
 
 THE MACM1LLAN COMPANY, 
 
 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 
 
WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
 CANADA AND THE CANADIAN 
 QUESTION. 
 
 With Map. Demy 8vo. Cloth. $2.00. 
 
 THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN. 
 
 A Course of Lectures on the Political History of England. 
 
 I2H10. $1.50. 
 
 Contents. PYM; CROMWELL; PITT. 
 
 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 NEW AND REVISED EDITION. 
 iSmo. Cloth, gilt top. 75 cents. 
 
 "So delightful a cicerone as Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 proves himself in ' A Trip to England ' does not often 
 fall to the lot of the non-personally conducted. . . . 
 Meissonier-like in its diminutiveness, but also Meis- 
 sonier-like in its mastery." Critic. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 
 
 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 
 
WORKS BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH. 
 
 SPECIMENS OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 2 vols. i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25 each. 
 VOL. I., AESCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES; VOL. II., EURIPIDES. 
 
 BAY LEAVES. 
 
 Translations from the Latin Poets. 
 i6mo. Buckram, gilt top. $1.25. 
 
 " It has been given to but few to approach, and to none in our 
 estimation to surpass, the delicate perception and the exquisite grace 
 with which Professor Goldwin Smith has served up this glorious clas- 
 sic feast with choicest English and in faultless style." The Week. 
 
 OXFORD AND HER COLLEGES 
 
 A VIEW FROM RADCLIFFE LIBRARY. 
 By GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 
 
 With many full-page illustrations. 
 i8mo. Cloth, gilt top. $1.50. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 
 
 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NE 
 
THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS 
 
 WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN 
 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
 WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH 
 DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY 
 OVERDUE. 
 
 2lDec'48BW 
 
 LD 21-95w-7,'37 
 
YB 7141 
 
 .IBRARY