GIFT OF 
 SEELEY W. MUDD 
 
 and 
 
 GEORGE I. COCHRAN MEYER ELSASSER 
 DR. JOHN R. HAYNES WILLIAM L. HONNOLD 
 JAM ES R. MARTIN MRS. JOSEPH F. SARTORI 
 
 to the 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SOUTHERN BRANCH 
 
 JOHN FISKE
 
 This book is 
 
 is DUE on the last date stamped b.l< 
 
 Essnys, r 
 ~ana~~a9cTie s s e s . 
 
 Southern Branch 
 of the 
 
 University of California 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 Form L
 
 ESSAYS, REVIEWS AND ADDRESSES.
 
 ESSAYS, REVIEWS, 
 
 ADDRESSES. 
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU, 
 
 HON. LL.D. HARV., S.T.D. LUGD. BAT., 
 D.D. EDIN., D.C.L. OXON. 
 
 SELECTED AND REVISED BY THE AUTHOR. 
 
 IV. 
 ACADEMICAL : RELIGIOUS. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK: 15, EAST 16 STREET 
 1891 
 
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 PRINTED BY WOODFALL AND KINDER, 
 
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 n 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE ruling purpose of the first half of this volume, as of 
 some preceding papers, is to retain Theology in its place 
 as an organon of cognizable truth, and protest against its 
 exclusion from the competence of Reason, and surrender to 
 the keeping of Imagination and Emotion. That both 
 Science, as with Comte, and Metaphysic, as with Kant, 
 should have been provoked, by the pretensions of ontolo- 
 gists, to declare the Intellect helpless for the apprehension 
 of more than phenomena, is not surprising. Some estimates 
 of their reasons will be found in the earlier volumes. It is 
 the paradox of the present age, that the same doctrine of 
 nescience is propounded by Literary interpreters of the 
 Prophets and intending ' defenders of the Faith ' ; who insist 
 on the disabilities of the Intellect for the discovery of any- 
 thing Divine, and tell the "Seekers after God" that they 
 will go astray unless they quit the tracks of rational thought. 
 A Being thus unverifiable by our intelligence, of whom we 
 can neither affirm nor deny any predicates, who is therefore 
 outside the category of True or False, becomes a mere Phan- 
 tom of ideality, whom it would be mania to trust and love. 
 'But is there not,' we are asked, 'warrant in the Scripture 
 pieties for owning that the Almighty is inscrutable, and ' His 
 ways past finding out ? ' Yes : but see the difference : you 
 mean and say, ' Whether there be a God, we can never 
 know; it is beyond our truth-finding faculty?' The 
 Psalmist goes to Him and exclaims, ' O Thou Unsearch- 
 able, whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain ! if what
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 Thou hast shown me of Thyself is so adorable, how must 
 the Infinitude beyond transcend the compass of my 
 thought ! ' The agnosticism of doubt is as far from the 
 agnosticism of devotion as blindness for want of Vision 
 from blindness through excess of Light. 
 
 Religion, thus discharged from its hold on reality and 
 reduced to the category of Symbol, is dislodged from its 
 seat as the supporting postulate of all the Sciences, and 
 takes its place among the Fine Arts to be treated, by 
 writers on the Belles Lettres, among the varieties of 
 rhetorical trope and metaphor and personification, the 
 literal base of which is always found in some abstraction 
 mentally distilled from concrete experience. Hence it is 
 that philosophers and critics who touch upon the subject 
 spend a curious ingenuity in substituting neuter abstracts 
 for the ancient personal names of " the Living God." To 
 them, the thing denoted is ' The Infinite,' ' The Eternal,' 
 ' The Unknowable,' ' The stream of Tendency,' ' The 
 aggregate of Unchangeable Law ' ; and no longer the 
 'Creator and Inspirer' of men, the Father in heaven,' 
 the ' Judge of all the earth,' the ' Holy One,' the ' Searcher of 
 hearts.' To me, I confess, Religion, in its very essence, 
 is a conscious relation between the human Personality and 
 the Divine : and had I, from change of conviction, to 
 relinquish this relation as imaginary, I should feel bound 
 to surrender the vocabulary of religion to those who 
 retained this essence, and to make the best I could of the 
 unsanctified Ethics that remained. Respect for the vera- 
 cities of language would forbid me, by misuse of terms, to 
 wear as a mask a cast of features no longer rendering the 
 expression of my own. The criticisms which are applied 
 to others in one or two of the following Addresses I 
 should feel that I had justly brought upon myself, if to 
 the dwarfed and altered thought I had tried to shrink the 
 grand old language. 
 
 Thankfully, however, do I take leave of all contentious 
 criticism in the middle of this volume, and pass from
 
 PREFACE. vii 
 
 religion in its intellectual approaches to religion in its 
 personal life and applications. The Sermon, written not 
 to be read in the library, but to be spoken in the house 
 of Prayer, addressed therefore, not to the fastidious 
 student, but to like-minded hearers of quick-responding 
 heart, spontaneously unlocks the spiritual contents of a 
 faith, and directs them upon the conscience ready to be 
 struck and the affections waiting to be kindled. And as, 
 in the course of years, it alights upon one after another of 
 the varying exigencies and sorrows of humanity, it tries the 
 resources at its disposal from many sides, and finds what 
 sacred guidance there may be for every emergency and 
 every opportunity, private or public. The preaching around 
 which the same listeners permanently gather, and the 
 prayers which truly breathe their wants and aspirations, 
 will ever be a better test of their religion as it is really is, 
 than the formulas of catechism and creed. In this sense, 
 the second part of this volume may perhaps preserve some 
 traces, absent from the first, of the changing modes of feel- 
 ing characteristic of its time. 
 
 THE POLCIIAR, AVIEMOKE, 
 August II, 1891.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 COLLEGE ADDRESSES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Scope of Mental and Moral Philosophy ..... 3 
 
 Plea for Philosophical Studies ...... 19 
 
 The Christian Student ........ 37 
 
 Plea for Biblical Studies and Something more ... 53 
 Factors of Spiritual Growth in Modern Society . . . -75 
 
 The Transient and the Permanent in Theology ... 93 
 
 Theology in relation to Progressive Knowledge .... 109 
 
 A Word for Scientific Theology ...... 125 
 
 Why Dissent ?.......... 147 
 
 Religion, as affected by Modern Materialism . . . 165 
 
 Modern Materialism, its Attitude towards Theology . . . 197 
 
 Ideal Substitutes for God ....... 269 
 
 Relation between Ethics and Religion ..... 293 
 
 Loss and Gain in recent Theology . . . . . 317 
 
 OCCASIONAL SERMONS, &<-. 
 
 Views of the World from Halley's Comet . . . . 341 
 
 Need of Culture for the Christian Ministry .... 357 
 
 The Outer and the Inner Temple . . . . . 37 1 
 
 The I'.ible and the Child 389 
 
 Ireland and her Famine ........ 409
 
 x CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Pause and Retrospect : an Address on the first-stone-laying of 
 
 Hope Street Church . . . . . . 425 
 
 The Watch-Night Lamps 445 
 
 The God of Revelation His own Interpreter .... 470 
 
 Life according to the Pattern in the Heavens .... 485 
 
 Owe no man anything ........ 497 
 
 Parting Words . . . . . . . . . .513 
 
 Worship in the Spirit ........ 529 
 
 Charge on Induction of the Rev. Alexander Gordon, at Hope 
 
 Street Church, Liverpool ...... 54 1 
 
 The God of the Living 555 
 
 Three Stages of Unitarian Theology ...... 567 
 
 Mind in Nature and Intuition in Man ..... 5^5
 
 COLLEGE ADDRESSES. 
 
 VOL. IV.
 
 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY.* 
 
 THE traditionary notices of ancient civilization, both in 
 India and in Greece, prove that the earliest curiosity of 
 human reason directs itself, not to the acquisition of the 
 detailed and concrete knowledge most within reach of 
 its infant power, but to the determination of vast questions, 
 lying altogether beyond the region of experience, and unap- 
 proachable except by the most practised faculties of thought. 
 In his first meditations, man appears to have conceived of 
 the outward universe and of himself, not as subjects of 
 analysis, but as two related wholes, and to have aspired 
 boldly and at once to ascertain their mutual position. The 
 dim consciousness that his nature is a meeting-point of Free- 
 will and Necessity, a power in itself, environed by more 
 tremendous powers ; the feeling that with his animal or 
 sentient life was united a diviner principle of thought ; 
 the spectacle of mechanical order in the material phenom- 
 ena of nature, and of moral order in the societies of men, 
 stimulated his spirit of speculation, and set before him the 
 great problems of life, its origin, its mystery, its destina- 
 tion. Wondering guesses, suggested by physical analogies, 
 at the contents of distant space and the events of a past 
 eternity ; methods of illustration, proposing to derive spirit 
 from matter, and the harmony of nature from the abstract 
 
 *' Inaugural. Opening of Manchester New College at Manchester, 
 October, 1840. 
 
 K 2
 
 4 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND 
 
 relations of number and form ; a reverential confusion 
 between the human and the divine ; with a profound senti- 
 ment of the sacredness of law and polity, were the first 
 results of the contemplative exercise of reason. 
 
 From this chaotic mass of thought, physical science 
 slowly disengaged itself in something like a distinct shape : 
 but with much more rapidity and clearness intellectual 
 science was evolved. The prevailing ingredients, indeed, in 
 all primitive philosophy are furnished by humanity, rather 
 than by the surrounding creation ; and its first earnest 
 efforts are an obscure and groping advance towards a science 
 of human nature. Nor can we wonder that, to the Greeks 
 at least, man appeared pre-eminently the most worthy object 
 to engage their meditations; for never, perhaps, was human 
 nature exhibited in so glorious a form, combining so much 
 physical beauty with vividness of perception and versatility 
 of mental power, as in Greece. Fair as was the climate 
 that land, man was yet the spectacle most admirable there ; 
 and for the same reason that Eve, when gazing on the lake 
 of Eden, saw nothing but her own loveliness, though all 
 Paradise was reflected from its bosom, did the human mind 
 in Greece, when bending over the depths of philosophy, 
 feel its eye arrested by the incomparable image of itself. 
 
 In the youthful mind of individuals, as of nations, the 
 same origin of the philosophical tendency may be traced. 
 A deep curiosity respecting the great problem of Free-will 
 is usually, I believe, the first symptom of speculative activity 
 of intellect ; a confident solution of it, the first triumphant 
 enterprise : a relapse into the consciousness of its mystery, 
 the first sign of a more comprehensive wisdom. Sir James 
 Mackintosh, describing the impression produced upon him 
 at the age of fourteen, by Bishop Burnet's commentary on 
 the i 7th article of the English church, that which regards 
 predestination, remarks, that " Theological controversy has 
 been the general inducement of individuals and nations to 
 engage in metaphysical speculation."* And it is easy to 
 * "Life of Mackintosh," vol. i. p. 4.
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 5 
 
 discover what were the particular questions in theology 
 which in Mackintosh's own case, excited the disposition to 
 metaphysical inquiry, when we learn that his constant 
 antagonist in argument, though brother in affection, was 
 Robert Hall ; and that the positions which they discussed 
 together, night after night, and month after month, were 
 furnished by Butler's Analogy, and Edwards on the Will.* 
 It is probable, that, in the secret history of every noble and 
 inquisitive mind, there is a passage darkened by the awful 
 shadow of this conception of Necessity ; and it is certain, 
 that, in the open conflict of debate, there is no question 
 which has so long served to train and sharpen the weapons 
 of dialectic skill. If it be true, as Dugald Stewart affirms, 
 that one who has never doubted the existence of matter, 
 may be assured that he has little capacity for purely meta- 
 physical investigation ; it is no less certain, that he who has 
 never been troubled by alarms for his free-will, can have 
 little aptitude for research, either speculative or moral. 
 
 These higher problems of life, however, though, from 
 their connection with our affections and our faith, they may 
 be the natural incentives, cannot be made the scientific 
 commencement, to a systematic philosophy of man. They 
 are not to be mastered by the rude and undisciplined 
 earnestness of a reason ignorant as yet of its own resources, 
 of the worth of its own methods, and the legitimate range 
 of its own powers. Experience, spreading out before us 
 the ontological discussions of the school-men, monuments 
 of wasted labour and futile ingenuity, warns us that if the 
 profounder perplexities of speculative reason are ever to be 
 resolved, it can only be by men thoroughly acquainted with 
 the facts and laws of their own intellectual and moral 
 being ; and that to expect any triumph of science over the 
 spiritual mysteries of nature by self-poised reasonings, 
 having no origin in psychological analysis and induction, is 
 as absurd as to look to the fancies of cosmogonists for a 
 discovery of the structure and dynamics of the heavens. 
 * ' Life of Mackintosh,'' p. 14. Note.
 
 6 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND 
 
 That the vital root of all philosophy lies in self-knowledge 
 is a truth which Socrates was the first to expound : a truth 
 suggested, indeed, by the inscription on the Delphic temple 
 " Know thyself," but, as conceived by him, imparting to 
 the words so new and profound a significance, as to justify 
 the oracle in pronouncing the interpreter the wisest of men. 
 " For a man to be unacquainted with himself, and in 
 matters in which he is ignorant to conjecture, and then 
 mistake his conjectures for information, Socrates/' we are 
 assured by one of his disciples, " conceived to be only one 
 remove from madness;"'* nor will any one think this con- 
 demnation too severe, who calls to mind the dreary contro- 
 versies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, battles 
 always of words, rarely of thoughts, sometimes of fists and 
 clubs, in which " angelic " or " irrefragable doctors " 
 engaged the cathedral schools and universities of Europe, 
 respecting qualities and quiddities, entities and haecceities, 
 chimeras in vacua, and angels on a needle's point. Wonder- 
 ful avidity of intellectual appetite, that could continue to 
 relish even this spurious fruit of the tree of knowledge, 
 turned thus into dry ashes to the taste ! It is singular that 
 the disciples of Aristotle should thus deplorably exemplify 
 the violation of the precepts of Socrates ; and that, in 
 passionate admiration of the pupil, they should fall so 
 directly under the rebuke of the masters oracle and 
 instructor. The frivolous subtleties of the scholastic age 
 would never have exposed philosophy to contempt, if the 
 rule of the Athenian sage had been comprehended and 
 applied, if it had been remembered that the mind is the 
 instrument by which all reasonings and judgments are per- 
 formed, and that, till its capacities are investigated and 
 determined, no quest after truth can be well-ordered. Who 
 will venture to say how many vain disputes have arisen from 
 confounding abstract ideas with objective realities ; in other 
 words, from mistaking that which is in the mind, for some- 
 thing out of it ? Nor can this error safely be despised as 
 * Xcn. Mem. III. ix. 6.
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 7 
 
 the obsolete folly of an unenlightened age, a remnant of 
 Platonism which, at least since Bishop Berkeley's time, may 
 be regarded as a mere historical curiosity. It is the belief 
 of some of the most profound thinkers of our own day, 
 that this very error, monstrous as it appears when we look 
 back upon it in the schoolmen, is habitually committed 
 still : and within the last few weeks an English Philosopher, 
 whom it would be ridiculous to describe as a visionary, has 
 published a work* upon the principles of physical science, 
 founded on the doctrine, long universal in Germany, that 
 space and time have no absolute existence external to the 
 mind, but are internal forms of thought ; mere relative 
 conditions which our constitution imposes upon all our 
 conceptions. More self-knowledge, it would appear, is yet 
 required, if we are still unable to draw the line between the 
 contents of our nature, and the foreign domain of the 
 universe beyond. 
 
 To trace the boundary, really separating the nature with- 
 in from nature without, is one office of mental philosophy, 
 which is, indeed, but another name for the Socratic self- 
 knowledge. Without special introspection, every one has a 
 vague and confused knowledge of the processes of his own 
 mind, and of certain differences which prevail among them : 
 the images of his dreams, and the experiences of his 
 waking hours, the impressions of sense, and the ideas of 
 memory, the operations of judgment, and the emotion of 
 grief, the assent to a mathematical proposition, and the 
 conviction of an empirical or moral truth, are separated 
 from each other by such plain distinctions, that the common 
 feeling and common language of mankind cannot fail to 
 keep them apart. These distinctions are like the broad and 
 ineffaceable characteristics which, to the mere natural eye, 
 distribute the material creation at once into various 
 provinces ; locally, into heavens and earth : palpably, 
 into solid, liquid, and air ; structurally into mineral, vege- 
 table, and animal. But he who stops here, has only the 
 
 * Professor Whewell's "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. '
 
 8 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND 
 
 most obscure and indistinct mental picture of the system 
 of which he forms a part : the series of physiological 
 relations, which, commencing on the confines of the 
 inanimate world, range all organized beings along an ascend- 
 ing scale of natural types ; the chemical laws which deter- 
 mine the state of all the materials of the globe, and make 
 their massive or fluid conditions interchangeable ; the celes- 
 tial architecture and mechanics, which, with wonderful pre- 
 cision, refer to its place at every moment each member 
 of the vast group of visible worlds, and exhibit to us in 
 plan and section the fair vestibule of infinity amid which 
 we stand ; all this remains hidden from the mere surface- 
 view of the common observer, and reveals itself only to the 
 disciplined eye of science, which, by analytic insight di- 
 rected upon the parts, has gained the point of synthetic 
 survey that commands the whole. 
 
 The difference between the ordinary visual gaze upon the 
 external universe, and the interpreting glance of science, is 
 felt by every cultivated understanding to be immeasurable ; 
 and the contrast is not less between that dull sense of 
 what passes within him, which is forced upon a man by 
 mere practical experience, and the exact consciousness, the 
 discriminative perception, the easy comprehension of his 
 own (and, so far as they are expressed by faithful symbols, 
 of others') states and affections, possessed by the patient 
 analyst of thought and emotion, and careful collector of 
 their laws. The mighty mass of human achievement and 
 human failure, in intellectual research, in moral endeavour, 
 in social economy and government, lapses into order before 
 him, and distributes itself among the provinces of deter- 
 minate law. The structure of a child's perplexity, and the 
 fallacies of the most ambitious hypothesis, lie open to him 
 as readily, as to the artizan a flaw in the fabric of his own 
 craft. The creations of art fall before him into their 
 elements ; and, dissolving away their constituent matter, 
 which is an accident of their age, leave upon his mind 
 their permanent form of beauty, as his guide to a true and
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 9 
 
 noble criticism. The progress and the aberrations of human 
 reason, in its quest of truth, are as clearly appreciated by him, 
 as the passages of happy skill or ignorant roving in some 
 voyage of discovery, when the outlines and relations of the 
 sphere on which it is made become fully known. Dis- 
 cerning distinctly the different kinds of evidence appropriate 
 to different departments of truth, and weighing the 
 scientific value of every idea and method of thought, he is 
 not at the mercy of each superficial impression and obtrusive 
 phase, presented to him by the subjects of his contempla- 
 tion ; but he attains a certain rational tact and graduated 
 feeling of certainty in abstract matters of opinion, by 
 which he escapes alike the miseries of undefined doubt, 
 and the passions of unqualified dogmatism. In short, the 
 great idea of Science is applied by him to the complicated 
 workings of the mind of man ; interprets the activities of 
 his nature, and gives laws to the administration of his life ; 
 and, with wonderful analysis, investigates the properties, 
 and establishes the equation, of their most labyrinthine 
 curves. 
 
 Having endeavoured to furnish a General Idea of that 
 half of Philosophy which it will be my duty to expound, I 
 will now divide the whole science into the several compart- 
 ments, through which I hope to lead you during the next 
 five years. Our first object must undoubtedly be, to 
 ascertain what there is in the mind, a task, let me observe, 
 by no means so easy as may at first be supposed. We 
 have, it is true, one advantage over other sciences of 
 observation, that the mind, which is the object of atten- 
 tion, is always with us ; but this avails little, if this same 
 mind, which is also both observer and observer's instrument, 
 is hard to train to such refinement of perception, and 
 precision of measurement, as the phenomena require. 
 Indeed our permanent presence with ourselves no more 
 proves that practical psychology is a simple matter, than 
 the everlasting spectacle of the sky removes the difficulties 
 of practical astronomy. The regi<>n of phenomena may
 
 io SCOPE OF MENTAL AND 
 
 be constant, but what more evanescent than the phenomena 
 themselves ? If, with every instrumental aid, it requires a 
 nice eye to note the intersection of a star by the meridional 
 wire, and a quick ear to single out the very beat of the 
 pendulum on which the transit struck, it is an exercise of 
 attention no less delicate to seize the instant when a 
 thought occupies the centre of the field of consciousness ; 
 especially as it is not, like the star, an insulated object, 
 seen in the solitude of an undistracting darkness, but a 
 point immersed in a cluster similar to itself, or a scarce 
 distinguishable member of some fugitive train of ideas 
 ever gliding over the line of momentary perception. And 
 this peculiarity of the mental, as compared' with the 
 physical objects of contemplation, imposes upon us a fresh 
 task beyond the mere notice of the individual phenomenon ; 
 for if the idea which we contemplate be an element in a 
 group, and never presents itself apart, the group must be 
 analysed, and the particulars of its composite structure 
 exhibited in their simplicity. If, on the other hand, we are 
 studying a point, not in a simultaneous cluster, but in a 
 successive train, the antecedent which introduces it, and 
 the consequent appended to it, must be observed and 
 registered. Moreover, the life of beings progressive as our- 
 selves, unlike the periods of the incorruptible heavens, is 
 characterized by an order of development ; all its states have 
 points of ascertainable commencement ; its phenomena 
 have had their first appearance, and its later affections are 
 the complex and ever-enlarging results of previous con- 
 ditions, each contributing some determinate increment 
 towards their production. Hence, another part of our duty 
 will be, to investigate the natural history of the mind's 
 growth ; to trace the steps by which, in the reciprocal 
 action between the universe and man, the unshapen con- 
 sciousness of infancy ripens into the comprehension of a 
 Bacon, the creations of a Shakspere, the sanctity of a 
 Pascal, or the virtues of a Howard. And then, since all 
 analysis, brought to a philosophical completeness, must
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. n 
 
 have its corresponding and co-extensive synthesis, the whole 
 of these processes of investigation do but prepare us to 
 estimate the range and assign the limits of our mental 
 faculties, to define the real sources of human knowledge, 
 and the attainable objects of human pursuit ; and must 
 result in the establishment of a universal logic for all the 
 sciences, and aesthetic rules for every form of art. 
 
 In this statement of the work which lies before us for the 
 next two years, "we have, in brief, the idea of a MENTAL 
 PHILOSOPHY, whose office it is to note and register, accord- 
 ing to some natural order, all the phenomena of the mind ; 
 to detect the occasions of their first appearance ; to analyse 
 their composition ; to determine the laws of their succession ; 
 to estimate the value and proper direction of the several 
 faculties, as instruments for the discovery of truth, the 
 invention of beauty, and the increase of happiness. These 
 are the contents, when the human mind is selected as the 
 object of science, of that " Interpretation of Nature," in 
 which all philosophy consists. 
 
 Among the notions which must fall under the examination 
 of the mental philosopher, none stands in so important a 
 relation to our whole life as the idea of right and wrong ; 
 and the analysis and scientific valuation of this must deter- 
 mine whether there is any illusion lurking in it ; whether 
 it is only a disguised form of some other feeling, or whether 
 it is an ultimate and irresolvable, or, at all events, a true 
 and reliable distinction of our being, having reference to 
 positive differences in the objects which it contemplates : 
 whether, in short, there exists in human nature any real 
 foundation for moral obligation. Assuming that such 
 foundation may be discovered, then, in addition to the 
 question previously examined '" What is our human nature ? '' 
 there arises another, " What ought to be our human 
 nature?'' In order to render an answer, we must furnish 
 ourselves with some principles of ethical criticism, some 
 method of rational judgment, by which the moral worth, 
 not only of every act of direct volition, but of every affection
 
 indirectly controllable by the will, may be ascertained. 
 Such principles once selected, and every fallacious or 
 inadequate criterion reviewed and discarded, they must be 
 applied to make separation between the fitting objects of 
 approval and of disapproval, leading us to treat, primarily, 
 of subjective morality, or the occupation of the mind with 
 right sentiments ; and, secondarily, of objective morality, or 
 the adjustment and application in the life of these senti- 
 ments to the various external relations which call the 
 individual man into action. This development of the con- 
 ception of Duty, this delineation of \\\z Ideal Q{ the human 
 character, constitutes MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Objective morality does not fulfil its end till it has con- 
 templated the human being in every position which the 
 conditions of his nature and his lot may assign to him. 
 The primary and simplest relations are those which subsist 
 between individual and individual ; and so long as we are 
 engaged in ascertaining the rights and duties incident to 
 these, we are still within the limits of simple ethics, and are 
 prosecuting the doctrine of Natural Law ; but when one, 
 at least, of the two related parties is not an individual, but 
 a society, or when they both exist within the limits of some 
 community interested in their mutual relation, and claiming 
 a voice in enforcing its obligations, there arises a new order 
 of rights and duties, so vast, so complicated, so involved 
 with the whole history of civilized man, as to merit separ- 
 ation from the general theory of morals, and, under the 
 head of POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, to become the object of a 
 distinct investigation. The advance into this portion of 
 the science of man will put to the severest test the principles 
 adopted as the clue through all previous perplexities. It is 
 like the step in physics, from the elementary doctrine of 
 mechanics to the problem of the three bodies ; exhibiting a 
 combination of forces, intricate at every moment, and 
 varying with every period in the cycle of our world. It 
 is no easy task to abstract from our idea of society, the 
 casual peculiarities of that particular form of community in
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 13 
 
 the midst of which we live ; to comprehend the types of 
 human character and national association most widely 
 removed from our own ; to penetrate the culture, the habits, 
 the religion of tribes and ages, occupying the opposite 
 hemisphere of civilization : and, yet, without this, no social 
 philosophy can exist, no interpretation be found for the 
 past vicissitudes of humanity, nor any just vaticinations be 
 formed of its future development ; but only some narrow 
 notions of polity, as little meriting to be called a science, 
 as a county court to adjudicate for the world. We must 
 endeavour to elevate ourselves above our own local and 
 historical position, to determine the essential conditions 
 and states of character under which alone society can exist, 
 to enumerate the permanent exigencies of every human 
 community, to compute the natural moral forces most 
 available in meeting these exigencies, and to compare the 
 modes of organizing them into an engine of compact 
 authority ; to define the rights and duties consequent on 
 the relations between citizen and citizen, between state and 
 subject, between nation and nation ; in short, to mark the 
 limits, to fix the principles of Positive Law, both national 
 and international. 
 
 When we look at the mental changes which society 
 develops in man, there is one which attracts our special 
 attention, by its moral singularity, and the scale of its 
 effects. It is this ; that his primitive want of food and 
 shelter, meeting in his mind with various qualifying faculties 
 and feelings, with the social affections and the love of dis- 
 tinction, with invention and forethought, with the perception 
 of order and beauty, undergoes a total transformation, 
 and expands itself into the Desire for Wealth. This 
 universal passion first creates the institution of property ; 
 and then, proceeding upon this fixed basis, produces the 
 most gigantic results in every human community, giving an 
 impulse of incalculable force and determinate direction to 
 its internal character, and almost constructing the whole
 
 I 4 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND 
 
 edifice of its outward civilization. This passion induces 
 new combinations of men, and methods of co-operation 
 peculiar to itself ; it establishes relations of the most com- 
 plicated kind, greatly modifying the purely moral phenomena 
 of nations ; it distributes the population, regulates the 
 industry, arranges the ranks, dictates the enterprises and 
 alliances of states. It would be no wonder, then, if this 
 single desire were withdrawn from the general mass of 
 social elements, and a line thrown around it to secure for 
 it a separate survey at the hands of science. Even this, 
 however, is found to enclose too much ; and a mere section 
 of the field proves large enough to furnish another science 
 of itself. That science is POLITICAL ECONOMY ; which 
 leaves out of view a great part of the effects arising from 
 the love of property, and is content to trace and reduce to 
 general laws the operation of this feeling on the production 
 and distribution of wealth. 
 
 I have thus endeavoured to exhibit, in one articulated 
 series before you, the successive portions of our great chain 
 of moral sciences ; which, like the vertebrae of a living 
 organism, are all penetrated by one vital cord, the 
 psychology of man, however different the relations which 
 they hold in detail to the functions and movements of his 
 being. With the exception of political economy, the whole 
 succession of subjects has been for ages under the survey 
 of human reason. The genius of not a few among the 
 great minds of every country possessing a dignified place in 
 history, has laboured, with the best instruments of thought 
 existing at the time, to lay open the contents and settle the 
 boundaries of this vast field. We must not be guilty of the 
 presumption which has unhappily led many votaries of 
 speculative and moral science to neglect the methods and 
 opinions of their predecessors ; to begin the whole work de 
 novo, and impatiently to exclaim, with Hegel, " How long 
 must we continue to drag along with us, as ballast, this 
 trash of learning ! Wonderful men must those ancients
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 15 
 
 have been, to busy themselves with something so entirely 
 different from that which seems important to us ! "* Surely 
 this very circumstance, this different point of view occupied 
 by other schools of thinkers, is the one conclusive reason 
 for a careful study of their procedure and results. Taking 
 their station differently from ourselves, raising their watch- 
 tower of contemplation on a remote part of the great plain 
 beneath us, they must have discerned, if not something 
 more, at least something else, than we have descried. If 
 there is one department of knowledge more than another 
 in which a contemptuous disregard of the meditations and 
 theories of distant periods and nations is misplaced, it is in 
 the philosophy of man, which can have no adequate 
 breadth of basis till it reposes on the consciousness and 
 covers the mental experience of the universal race ; and to 
 construct which out of purely personal materials, is like 
 attempting to lay down the curves and finish the theory of 
 terrestrial magnetism on the strength of a few closet experi- 
 ments. No man, however large-thoughted and composite 
 his mind, can accept of himself as the type of universal 
 human nature. It will even be a great and rare endow- 
 ment, if, with every aid of exact learning and unwearying 
 patience, he is able to penetrate the atmosphere of others' 
 understanding, and to observe the forms and colours which 
 the objects of contemplation assume, when beheld through 
 this peculiar medium. Simply to avail one's self of the 
 experience of mankind, and know what it has really been, 
 demands no little scope of imagination and versatility of 
 intellectual sympathy. When these qualities are so deficient 
 in a thinker that he cannot well achieve this knowledge, it 
 is a great misfortune to his philosophy ; when the want is 
 such that he does not even desire it, it amounts to an 
 absolute disqualification. Without, therefore, pledging our- 
 selves to the eclectic principles which prevail in the present 
 * Yorlcsungen iiber die Geschichte tier Philosophic, as quoted by 
 Kilter, Gesch. dcr Fhilos. Yorredc, p. 3.
 
 16 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND 
 
 school of philosophy in France, we must beware of the 
 intolerant dogmatism of Bentham in England, sanctioned, 
 as we have seen, by one of the masters of the antagonist 
 metaphysics in Germany. Indeed, it will be a chief pur- 
 pose of all my lectures to enable you to profit by the light 
 of other minds : in every province of the vast region which 
 we shall explore together, to indicate the paths which they 
 have traversed before, nor ever to turn away from their 
 points of discovery, without raising some rude monument 
 at least of honest and commemorative praise. To introduce 
 you to the works, to interpret the difficulties, to do honour 
 to the labours, to review the opinions, of the great masters 
 of speculative thought in every age and in many lands, will 
 be an indispensable portion of my duty ; a task most 
 arduous indeed, but than which none can be more grateful 
 to one who loves to trace, through all their affinities, the 
 indestructible types of truth and beauty in the human 
 mind ; and to mark the natural laws, connecting together 
 the most opposite continents and climes of thought, as 
 parts, successively colonized and cultivated, of one great 
 intellectual world. But in addition to the study of the 
 several classes of psychological and moral doctrine as they 
 present themselves in the order of science, it will be impor- 
 tant to spread out the literature of philosophy before us in 
 the order of time : to gain an insight into the natural 
 development of successive modes of thought on speculative 
 subjects ; to notice the action and re-action of philosophy 
 and practical life ; to ascertain whether opinion on these 
 abstract matters really advances into knowledge and has 
 any determinate progression, or whether it oscillates for 
 ever on either side of some fixed idea, or line of mental 
 gravitation. In short, having surveyed our subject system- 
 atically, we shall go over it again chronologically ; and call 
 upon philosophy, when it has recited its creed, and revealed 
 its wisdom, to finish all by writing its history. 
 
 In conclusion, I am not ignorant of the prejudices which
 
 MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 17 
 
 a certain class of minds entertain against metaphysical 
 studies, and to which the national character of England, 
 so intent on the early production of practical and palpable 
 fruits from every branch of human culture, gives in this 
 country a peculiar intensity. Complaints are often made 
 of the uncertain and shadowy results from all speculative 
 science : and certainly it will construct no docks ; lay down 
 no railways ; weave no cotton ; and, if civilization is to be 
 measured exclusively by the scale and grandeur of its 
 material elements, we can claim for our subject no large 
 operation on human improvement. To use the words of 
 Novalis (whose "Philosophy" included religion, natural 
 and revealed) in one of his full and suggestive sentences, 
 " Philosophy can bake no bread ; but it can procure for us 
 God, freedom, and immortality. Which, now, is more 
 practical, philosophy or economy?"* Indeed, a mere 
 superficial glance over the course and eras of the history 
 of man is enough to convince us, that there must be some- 
 thing wrong in the low estimate frequently made of the 
 bearing of the higher speculation upon human life. It has 
 always flourished, not in the most barren, but precisely in 
 the most productive periods of every nation's development. 
 And if its visible acquisitions of certain knowledge are few, 
 it yet seems to have stimulated the activity and nurtured 
 the creative faculties of the human mind to an extent which 
 it is difficult to appreciate. What periods could be least 
 well spared from the progress of civilization ? Surely, the 
 golden ages of philosophy in Greece, and its revival in 
 modern England, France, and Germany. What are the 
 names, whose loss from the annals of our race would intro- 
 duce the most terrible and dreary changes in its subsequent 
 advance ? Those of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient 
 world ; of Bacon, Locke and Kant in more recent times : 
 and it is surely easier to conceive what we should have 
 been without Homer, than without Socrates. History, 
 
 * Novalis Schriften, herausgegeLen von. L. Tieck und Fr. Schlegel. 
 2r. Th. p. 124. 
 
 VOL. IV. C
 
 i8 SCOPE OF MENTAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 in every part, disowns this narrow-minded objection 
 against the science of man, and scarcely acknowledges any 
 exaggeration in that ancient praise which called it, " Philo- 
 sophiam, illam matrem omnium benefactorum, beneque 
 diet or urn."
 
 II. 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES.* 
 
 IT has been thought proper that the opening of a new 
 department of instruction within these walls should be 
 marked by a few words, addressed less to the students who 
 will statedly assemble in the class-room, than to the friends 
 of the two institutions which are happily united under this 
 roof. The late period at which this duty is devolved upon 
 me, renders it unseasonable for me to speak of the auspices 
 and hopes with which Manchester New College, as a whole, 
 has commenced its metropolitan existence. Concurring in 
 every sentiment uttered upon this subject on a more 
 important occasion, and adding only a hearty congratulation 
 on the encouraging experience of the last three months, I 
 retire at once into the particular province assigned me, and 
 will endeavour to explain the relations it bears in a compre- 
 hensive scheme of intellectual culture. In doing so, I shall 
 be on my guard against the temptation, which besets every 
 teacher, not from any vain self-exaggeration, but from the 
 deep persuasions of a limited experience, to over-estimate 
 his own special field of study. Indeed, there is nothing 
 here to challenge such a tendency into action. Elsewhere, 
 there are persons with whom it is a traditional habit to 
 disbelieve all mental and moral science. Others, in the zeal 
 of a new conversion, see in the metaphysician only the 
 
 * On taking the chair of Philosophy, Manchester New College, 
 London, February, 1854. 
 
 C 2
 
 20 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 lingering ghost of an age found dead upon the shore of 
 time ; and assure us that when the pious care of M. Comte 
 has scattered sand enough upon the corpse, the spectre will 
 vanish by the Stygian way. Had I to address judgments 
 thus pre-occupied, I might be betrayed into too strenuous 
 a vindication of a favourite pursuit. But I meet here those 
 with whom a respect for philosophy is an inheritance and a 
 necessity ; who cannot but honour a study conquered for 
 them by the sagacious genius and illustrated by the noble 
 truthfulness of Locke ; whose earnest meditations, both of 
 thought and piety, have been in the companionship of the 
 pure-minded Hartley ; who are not less conscious than I am 
 myself of unspeakable obligations to the versatile, compre- 
 hensive and guileless Priestley ; and on whose shelves you 
 rarely miss the acute and thoughtful volumes of Price. 
 When I remember how largely the divinity of Dr. John 
 Taylor, of Norwich, was affected by the studies which 
 belonged to him as Ethical Tutor at Warrington, and how 
 closely the name of Enfield is preserved in conjunction 
 with that of Brucker, and, in general, how much our freer 
 theology owes to the just balance of critical research and 
 speculative reflection, I feel that there are pledges in the 
 past for a worthy appreciation here of philosophical pursuits, 
 and am resolved not to endanger that wholesome predis- 
 position by immoderate and untenable claims. At the same 
 time, there is danger as well as honour in belonging to a class 
 rich in noble antecedents ; danger of mistaking the heritage 
 committed to our trust ; of cherishing with faithful pride 
 the particular judgments delivered to us from the past, and 
 letting slip the habits of severe activity, the fresh hopes of 
 truth, the resolve to take a master's measure of the time, 
 which saved our predecessors from merely repeating the 
 symbols of an earlier age. Unless thought perpetually 
 renews its youth and lifts a seeking eye afresh to the living 
 light, decrepitude and waste befall whatever it has achieved ; 
 for the world's effective wealth is not so much in any deposit 
 of hoarded truths on which the key of preservation can be
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 21 
 
 turned, as in the circulation of immediate thought, based, 
 no doubt, upon that ancient store, but bringing into com- 
 parison the products and values of the hour. This is the 
 great difference observable between physical and moral 
 knowledge. The former, once gained, is capable of being 
 embodied in practical arts, and handed over in its uses and 
 applications to men and times quite unequal to its original 
 apprehension ; the latter remains all through absolutely 
 dependent on the minds that deal with it, lives with their 
 life, dies with their death, and though surviving as a habit 
 or a formula, sinks, among the superficial and the unfaithful, 
 from an inspiration to an inertia. You might set up the 
 electric telegraph among theNew-Zealanders, and train them 
 to its use ; and the Indians and Chinese are said to have 
 command of many mechanical rules and astronomical 
 methods, the grounds of which they have for ages ceased to 
 understand. A people thus the depositary of a transmitted 
 skill may continue, amid stagnation or decline, to send 
 their messages and construct their almanacs with curious 
 precision, and may profit by the science of the past. But 
 the higher truths of morals and religion have another abode 
 than in posts and wires, and cannot be laid down in cables 
 through the sea ; no equation can contain or usage work 
 them. They subsist only for him who discerns them freshly 
 out of himself; they are realized in so far as they are appre- 
 hended ; and their very use and application being at the 
 heart instead of the surface of our nature, their function is 
 extinct when they cease to be re-discovered and re-believed, 
 and are only remembered and preserved. In other words, 
 it is the thirst for fresh truth that alone can retain the old : 
 and the intellect, not less than the character, will fail even to 
 hold its own when it ceases to pray and to aspire. It is the 
 peculiar office of philosophy to sustain this unexhausted 
 energy of hope, this search after a deeper and more com- 
 prehensive conception of things. Other pursuits may do 
 more to increase the stock of positive and definite know- 
 ledge ; but without this to furnish impulse and interpretation,
 
 22 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 their zeal is unspeakably lowered, and their results are but a 
 barren sand-heap of particulars. That in stating this I make 
 no arbitrary assertion, and point not even to any accidental 
 fact, but to a necessary and universal law, may, I think, be 
 made manifest to any moderately reflecting person. 
 
 All knowledge, it is evident, is a relative apprehension of 
 things, a plurality of which it is necessary to constitute 
 every cognitive act. It involves in every case a process of 
 comparison, resulting in a perception of resemblance and 
 difference. Nothing can be put, as it were, into a mental 
 vacuum, and known in and by itself; but even the simplest 
 affirmation you can make about it, assigns to it a character 
 by which you discriminate it from what it else would be. 
 Say it is red, and you pick it out from the other colours ; 
 say it is round, and you shut the door on the remaining 
 forms : say it is one, and you imply that it might have been 
 more. The expressed term, whatever it be, which you 
 employ, is significant only with reference to another which 
 is suppressed and held behind it ; and your assertion may, 
 with equal propriety, or at least with identical result, be 
 regarded as an affirmation performed upon the one or a 
 negation upon the other. The negative sphere, however, 
 being indefinite, and required for the moment only as a 
 background to throw out the positive image, is apt to elude 
 attention and perform its function quite secretly ; so that 
 many persons may even be unaware of this necessary 
 dualism of thought. Yet it is certain that, if we never look 
 at our background, the objects in front will not show right ; 
 and illusion is just as possible by error in the mind's neutral 
 tint, as by a false laying on of the pure colour. A relation 
 cannot be rightly apprehended till you can take your stand 
 at either end to contemplate the other at will, till you are 
 equally familiar with both its terms ; and that which remains 
 negative to the unreflecting, may, in its turn, become positive 
 to you. That this ability to shift the mental station, and 
 deal freely with the two sides of a relation, is the genuine 
 mark of human intelligence as distinguished from animal
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 23 
 
 sagacity, will hardly be denied. A dog recognizes his master 
 by certain characteristics, the absence or disguise of which 
 would baulk his instinct, and so far his intelligence avails 
 itself of the same guidance as ours ; but I do not suppose that 
 he gives any account to himself of his grounds of judgment, 
 or can set forth the signs which he observes over against the 
 others from which they are differenced. If you say that he 
 knows the person, at all events he does not know how he 
 knows. The same character of immediate, in opposition to 
 reflective apprehension, belongs to all the lower grades of 
 human intelligence. The craftsman who can perform some 
 act of manual skill, he cannot tell you how, the shrewd 
 observer who reads off a posture of affairs by happy guess, 
 the arbitrator who reaches a right decision by a path he 
 is unable to explain, may all of them indeed possess great 
 force of understanding, giving them vast advantage over 
 weaker men who, with more ability to say what they are 
 doing, have nothing half so well worth telling : but it would 
 assuredly be better for themselves and for the world, could 
 the road of their thought be traced on the permanent map 
 of human existence, and did they move over it with open 
 eye, instead of being carried to their destination in a trance. 
 The utmost attainment reached by this practical class of 
 men, is the accidental possession of correct conceptions, 
 unsecured by any mastery of their grounds, and unqualified 
 by any sense of the merits which other opinions may possess. 
 This itself, even should they never make a mistake, falls far 
 short of that view of things which distinguishes a scientific 
 intellect : it is an intrusion of brute instinct into a region 
 beyond its proper range : it has all the unsocial, isolating 
 character of a power that can neither teach nor learn, and 
 which, accordingly, the possessor has all to himself; and 
 misses the genial tendency of that broad human intelligence 
 which, relying on its own like workings in every mind, looks 
 out for mutual communion, exchanges interrogation and 
 reply, learns to confess itself and ask for help, and feels 
 itself in sympathy with the life of the universe and the
 
 24 PLEA I- OR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 thought of God. Hence it is that men of intuitive sagacity, 
 unsoftened by a large speculative discipline, are usually 
 dogmatical and overbearing ; announcing their judgment, 
 but scarcely knowing how they formed it ; content, when 
 asked to defend it, with announcing it over again ; or else 
 pouring out a torrent of pretended reasons, turbid in itself, 
 and often remarkable for washing their conclusion right 
 away. Indeed, dogmatism, so far as it has its seat in the 
 intellectual habits, rather than in a culpable self-will, seems 
 to consist precisely in this, that you apprehend your object 
 as immediately given, carrying straight on to it your own 
 preconceptions and forms of thinking, and letting your 
 mind work upon it instinctively and unwatched ; and, never 
 dreaming of any possible speck upon your glass, and 
 borrowing another to try again, you insist that the reality is 
 and must be what you see. In such a state of feeling, the 
 circle of relations in which the object is discerned is too 
 narrow, and in each instance is too much contemplated 
 from one end to give scope for that sentiment of wonder 
 and reverence which Plato pronounces to be the beginning 
 of wisdom, or that sense of the largeness of truth, which is 
 as water to the root of intellectual modesty. 
 
 Each of the great departments of knowledge engages 
 itself with its own peculiar system of relations. 'Y\\e physical 
 sciences, which investigate nature, the litene humaniores, 
 which study society and its products, theology, which seeks 
 for God, severally occupy themselves with comparisons 
 and groupings exclusively within their respective provinces. 
 Under the first, the discrimination of types among integral 
 individuals constitutes, e.g., natural history; the primary 
 attributes of the body yield the quantitative sciences ; the 
 secondary, those of quality. Under the second, the lan- 
 guages, the literature, the politics, the individual lives, the 
 national histories of men, are brought into a circle and 
 made to strike the lights of mutual analogy and contrast. 
 Under the third, some positive religion (Christianity, for 
 instance) is passed through the series of possible schemes,
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 25 
 
 till it reveals their essence and its own. In every instance 
 the same truth holds good, that your knowledge consists 
 in the perception of relations ; is extensive in proportion 
 as they are numerous ; and profound, according as you are 
 familiar with each relation both ways or only one. You 
 understand a particular kind of animated being, when 
 looking inwards you see how its parts constitute a system, 
 and again, looking outwards and around, how this system 
 stands with regard to other types of organized existence. 
 You are acquainted with a literature, when the character- 
 istic of its poets, its historians, its philosophers, co-exist in 
 your conception, and, as the collective expression of the 
 genius of a people, the whole can be assigned to its place 
 among the products of the human mind. And you under- 
 stand Christianity as a divine agency in history, when amid 
 its versatile manifestations you can trace the fibres of a 
 common spiritual life pervading all, and can group around 
 it its analogues and contrasts in the series of faiths and 
 philosophies. 
 
 But besides these special relations proper to each sort of 
 knowledge, there is one which is co-extensive with know- 
 ledge itself and is constitutive of its very nature ; viz., the 
 relation between the knowing faculty and the known 
 object, be it what it may ; between the power that thinks 
 and the reality that is thought. Plant the mind where you 
 please on the field of existence, it will carry ffci^* thither, 
 will look out of its own window, and see nature through 
 the framework of its own limits and the shade of its own 
 colour. What it perceives must be contingent not less on 
 its own constitution than on the constitution of the object. 
 Whether there is any rescue for us from this dependence, 
 whether we can ever pretend to reach things as they are, or 
 must be content with them as they appear, it is needless 
 now to inquire. It is plain, at all events, that we make no 
 approach to such rescue by studying more, and ever more, 
 of mere external matters ; for should there be illusion at 
 all lurking in the form of thought, it does but multiply itself
 
 26 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 with our intellectual action, and is only more monstrous in 
 the learned than in the nescient. If there be hope at all, it 
 must be sought in the inverse direction, by turning round 
 upon the inner side of knowledge, and scrutinizing the 
 mind's act instead of the mind's object ; by ascertaining 
 what sort of business this is that goes on in our person, 
 when we perceive and judge and think and will. Certain 
 it is, that it is an affair \vhich is conducted sometimes 
 better, sometimes worse ; and if we can only find out 
 where the difference lies, and learn to detect the admitted 
 signs of perversion when we see them, we shall at least get 
 rid of all artificial incumbrance of error, and strip the 
 faculties bare to their native configuration, and watch the un- 
 disguised play of their natural action. Is it too much to say, 
 that, all knowledge being relative, it only half exists till you 
 are familiar with the home-term of the foreign relation ? 
 that, while you remain fixed upon the foreign one, you may 
 have indeed correct apprehension, but no finished in- 
 sight ? This perhaps is the ultimate meaning of the 
 Socratic dictum, that Self-knowledge is at once the con- 
 dition and the complement of all other ; twin-birth of the 
 same instant, placed by kindly nature in the same incu- 
 nabula, and intended to advance pari passu to maturity. 
 Socrates felt that there had been a fatal separation between 
 physical and moral studies, between the quest of nature 
 and the interrogation of thought ; and by making it his 
 art to probe the rational consciousness and bring ideas to 
 the birth, he intended not to set up any rival knowledge, 
 so much as to penetrate to the ground of all knowledge. 
 Nor is it less true now than it was then, that a profound 
 introspection, a systematic psychological vigilance, is needed 
 as a running commentary on the cyclopedia of external fact 
 and history. I will not say that you may not be a good 
 geometer without appreciating the logical nature of axioms 
 and definitions ; or an excellent astronomer without 
 troubling yourself with controversies respecting force and 
 causality ; for each science is at liberty to build upon its
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 27 
 
 own foundation, as ready-made and given, and has only to 
 state its own first principles, and not to ground them. But 
 though, under these conditions, you may possess yourself of 
 the contents of many sciences, you will understand the 
 rationale of none ; and with ever so perfect an apprehension 
 of the nexus among the parts, the validity of the whole will 
 float in the mist of insecure hypothesis. This state of things 
 is, in the long run, exceedingly hurtful to soundness and 
 largeness of judgment ; and when the time comes for dis- 
 cussion to pass out beyond the professional circle of facts 
 and laws into wider relations, embracing many sciences or 
 transcending all, none are so apt to be bewildered and with- 
 out a clue, swaying by unsteady impulse into credulity or 
 scepticism, as those who have been imprisoned in a par- 
 ticular province, and have cramped their mental aptitudes 
 to the shape of its special logic. 
 
 We are constantly told, indeed, by those who imagine 
 the new Organon to have superseded the old, that false 
 metaphysics are the sure parent of false science. But they 
 forget that <?-metaphysics are sure to be false. For what 
 are they ? Their negative name is a delusive mask ; and 
 no man can reason on these matters at all, no man can even 
 rail at metaphysics, without a metaphysic hypothesis at heart ; 
 and the only question is, whether he will reverently seek it 
 by wide and patient toil, and consciously possessed of it, 
 call it by its name, or whether he will pick it up among the 
 accidents of another quest, and have it about him without 
 knowing what it is. Nothing is more common than to see 
 maxims, which are unexceptionable as the assumptions of 
 particular sciences, coerced into the service of a universal 
 philosophy, and so turned into instruments of mischief and 
 distortion. That " we can know nothing but phenomena,'' 
 that "causation is simply constant priority/' that "men 
 are governed invariably by their interests," are examples 
 of rules allowable as dominant hypotheses in physics or 
 political economy, but exercising a desolating tyranny when 
 thrust on to the throne of universal empire. He who seizes
 
 28 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 upon these and similar maxims and carries them in triumph 
 on his banner, may boast of his escape from the uncertain- 
 ties of metaphysics, but is himself all the while the uncon- 
 scious victim of their very vulgarest deception, and does 
 but chase the mirage which they always create when their 
 atmosphere is putrescent with materialism and moral decay. 
 And surely the longer you make the catalogue of offences 
 charged against false philosophy, the more do you complete 
 the argument for the study and the search of true, as the 
 only possible or even conceivable corrective ; for it is 
 needless to say, you cannot exclude the ideal theory by 
 chemistry, or encounter Spinoza with geologic laws, and 
 clear the field of David Hume with the widest sweep of 
 comparative grammar. The very mischief and perversions 
 of human judgment which you deplore, and which occupy 
 so large a place in the history of civilized nations, cannot be 
 appreciated except by a mind sensitive to logical distinctions, 
 and able to see its way amid the shades of deep reflection. 
 
 The most serious and solemn expression in which the 
 feeling and character of other ages have embodied them- 
 selves, I mean the mythologies and theologies of ancient 
 heathen and Christian nations, must present a melancholy 
 aspect of absurdity and logomachy to one who has no key 
 of metaphysic fellow-feeling wherewith to enter into thei 
 inner significance ; he must remain stranger to the best 
 intellectual feature of the present time, the disposition to 
 study the past developments of humanity in the mood of 
 sympathy rather than of alienation, and to distrust every 
 judgment which has nothing genial in it to abate its scorn ; 
 and must keep his place among those harsh critics who, 
 scrape as they may at the outside of error and evil, can 
 never find its heart. Speaking to the supporters of a theo- 
 logical institution, I ask, what can any one make of the 
 Nicene controversy and the whole growth of the Trinitarian 
 doctrine, who takes it merely from the modern English 
 point of view, and does not bring to it a mind steeped 
 in that Hellenic philosophy for whose conceptions it
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 29 
 
 endeavoured to find evangelic expression ? or how, without 
 an inner acquaintance with the scholastic realism, can any 
 sense be extracted from the discussions respecting the 
 Eucharist ? Or, again, who can in the least appreciate the 
 Pelagian struggle, and measure the grand figure of Augus- 
 tine and his shadow stretched upon us still, that shrinks, 
 from the great argument of our moral nature, and esteems 
 the discussion of Fate and Free-will the proper business 
 only of revolted spirits? Nay, did we even teach our 
 young divines no history at all, were we content to throw 
 them, with only modern outfit, upon the world of to-day, 
 the case would scarcely be improved. Of one of them the 
 lot is cast, we will suppose, in a district of manufacturing 
 activity ; and on the other side of the street to his little 
 chapel stands the hall of local Secularism, where the doctrine 
 of circumstances and the constitution of man are ex- 
 pounded, and the basis of Theism is disputed, and mild 
 proposals are entertained for perfecting the State by super- 
 annuating the Church. Another, perhaps, is settled with a 
 society where one or two of the most intelligent members, 
 with habits of thought trained exclusively in the medical 
 lecture-room or the engineer's college, have been reading 
 Comte, and learned to look upon the pulpit as a mediaeval 
 relic. A third, in the walks of a London pastorate, finds 
 himself among some generous youths, driven by the meaner 
 aspects of competition, or inspired by Alton Locke, to grasp 
 at Socialistic dreams. A fourth, placed on the Committee 
 of a Mechanics' Institution, meets with associates afflicted 
 with the Carlylian phrenitis, and given to strong declaiming 
 on the subject of the " Jenseits " and the " personal God." 
 A fifth finds a pleasant and thoughtful neighbour in the 
 young Independent minister, who has found in Coleridge 
 and Maurice a blessed emancipation from the rigours of 
 dogma once oppressive, and images of terror once unrelieved. 
 These, I need hardly insist, are not exceptional pheno- 
 mena which it is arbitrary and far fetched to imagine. 
 They are the marking facts, the living characteristics, of our
 
 30 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 time, the actual present out of which the morrow will be 
 made. And with these aspects of belief and tendency no 
 one is qualified to deal who is not supplied with some philo- 
 sophic apparatus of thought, and has not faculties trained by a 
 philosophical gymnastic. If the problems of the time are 
 not to pass us by, if we are to share in the intellectual and 
 moral enterprises on which they are bound, the step must 
 not be reluctant, and the energy must not be slow, with 
 which we resolve to overtake their march. Theoretic 
 studies stand, in our day, among the first of practical 
 necessities. To lament the fact, is useless ; to change it, is 
 impossible ; there is wisdom only in adopting it. The 
 greatest adversary of " German mysticism " and German 
 dialectic cannot distrust more thoroughly than I do the 
 soundness, not only of the system which on the continent 
 is ascendant for the hour, but of all the vast schemes for 
 replacing faith in the "Absolute" \y^ knowledge thereof; 
 and it is with deliberate conviction that I profess adherence 
 to the English psychological method, and build all my hope 
 for philosophy on accurate self-knowledge. But this very 
 position can no longer be quietly assumed and supposed to 
 be in our possession ; it has been lost by our want of vigi- 
 lance, as compared with the intense activity of that foreign 
 speculation which now invades us ; and it must be won by 
 a polemic resting on new points of support, and not 
 ignorant of the dispositions with which it has to deal. The 
 metaphysic foe, however barbarous and even pagan you 
 may pronounce him, will not quit his entrenchments for 
 ever so much scolding : you may have his camp if you 
 will ; but then you must go and take it ; and for this end 
 some equipment will be needful. 
 
 I trust that I have guarded myself sufficiently against any 
 suspicion of one-sided vindication of my particular depart- 
 ment. To preclude, however, the possibility of mis- 
 apprehension, I would add that, if external and historical 
 studies require philosophy for their interpreter and soul, 
 philosophy no less requires them for its body and means of
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 31 
 
 balance. It might seem at first as if, for self-knowledge, 
 the mind would be its own sufficient company, and, shut up 
 in its own communion, would learn the laws by which its 
 faculties exist and act. It will be found, however, that only 
 before the mirror of other minds can our nature truly see 
 itself. By a rule of mutual dependence, we are awakened 
 to self-consciousness by the life of others, whom again we 
 rouse to inward discovery by our own. It is not only that 
 we see in them new facts which enlarge our view of human 
 nature as an object of outward observation, but they reveal 
 us more profoundly to ourselves, by touching springs within 
 us that had slept before; and of the whole compass of our 
 being the greater part remains latent and unexplored till 
 the light of a kindred experience bursts into it and spreads 
 throughout its depths. Without a large association with 
 the different forms of thought and passion, especially with- 
 out a studious communion with the genius and wisdom of 
 ages other than our own, mere introspection would be but 
 a barren thing, for there would be little in ourselves of that 
 which it is worthiest to know. The more we mingle with 
 the noble crowd of poets, historians, statesmen and 
 philosophers, who, in various dialect and under con- 
 trasted civilizations, have uttered the enduring wants and 
 sentiments of humanity, so much the more (provided always 
 we admire and love before we criticize) does the circum- 
 ference of our nature expand, and answer in its dimensions 
 to the great world assigned us to understand. But the 
 value of such learning is contingent on its really coming 
 home to you, and finding out in you the very seats of feeling 
 and conception from which it sprung ; till it does this, and 
 you are conscious that in knowing more of mankind you 
 know more of yourself, it remains little else than an assort- 
 ment of archreologic lumber, and makes you hcaricr, but 
 not larger. The efficacy of all erudite attainment is not 
 realized till it carries you to the genesis of the human 
 phenomena with which it brings you into contact, and you 
 apprehend them as the form and development of an inner
 
 32 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 
 
 life. The true principle of a perfect mental culture is 
 perhaps this ; to preserve an accurate balance between 
 the studies which carry the mind out of itself and those 
 which recall it home again, between attention to matter 
 given it, and reflection on its own processes and laws. 
 The several departments of knowledge, prosecuted singly 
 and exclusively, fulfil this condition in very different 
 degrees. Speaking generally of the three great divisions, 
 we may say, that the physical sciences violate it at trie one 
 extremity, by giving overwhelming preponderance to out- 
 ward observation and induction of necessary laws ; that 
 theology and metaphysics violate it at the other extremity, 
 by giving too much substance to the forms of inner thought 
 and feeling, and encouraging the student to coerce nature 
 into the arrangements of a speculative framework ; while 
 literary pursuits, engaging us as they do with men's affairs, 
 the human with the human, occupy the middle place, 
 and afford us objects, to know which is to lose a portion of 
 our self-ignorance. 
 
 And among these central studies, it is easy to see why 
 language occupies the very focal place, and has been justly 
 recognized as supplying the faculties with their most effec- 
 tive discipline. For here the equipoise between external 
 attention and internal reflection is maintained more perfectly 
 than is possible elsewhere. Who can say whether language 
 is an outer or an inner fact ? It is evidently both. As a 
 realized object of sense, transmitted from point to point of 
 space, and recorded from age to age of time, it is manifestly 
 external, and spreads its relations visibly before the eye, and 
 lies open, like any material product of physical nature, to 
 the simultaneous notice of innumerable observers. On the 
 other hand, as the mere passage of thought and feeling out 
 of silence, the direct outcome of our intellectual and 
 spiritual life, it is a primary function of the inner mind, the 
 mere incarnation (so to speak) of our highest energy. 
 Accordingly, it has no significance, it is not an object of 
 study at all, except on condition of self-knowledge ; its
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 33 
 
 distinctions, its classifications, its shades of relation, its 
 forms of structure, are the very distinctions, and classifica- 
 tions, and relations, and architecture, of thought itself; 
 and whoever engages himself with them, does but see his 
 own intelligence externalized. Dealing with a fact of 
 physical nature, you have to collect or guess its place and 
 meaning in the system of things from its grouping or its 
 look ; but in handling the phenomena of language, you 
 invert the proceeding, and carry into it from your own 
 consciousness the idea that gives it shape ; having the 
 essence at home, you interpret by it the foreign form. I 
 believe it is this necessary action and reaction of acute 
 observation and thoughtful reflection, to which a philo- 
 logical discipline owes its peculiar advantage for training 
 the faculties with less distortion than any other single 
 pursuit. But the desired end is gained in a much higher 
 degree by a plurality of studies ; and especially, if an addi- 
 tion be made on the mathematical and physical side to 
 the grammatical centre of gravity, it is important to annex 
 on the other side the counterpoise of psychological and 
 ethical philosophy. Even in the teaching and manage- 
 ment of each of these separate departments, much may be 
 done to maintain the equlibrium of mental exercise ; and 
 as the historical studies of this place are conducted, I well 
 know, with constant reference to philosophical truth, and 
 penetrated with a profound philosophical insight, so will 
 it be my endeavour perpetually to check and test philo- 
 sophical theory by regard to historical fact, and construct it 
 less on the narrow base of egoistical reflection, than on the 
 broad area presented by the recorded consciousness of man- 
 kind. 
 
 To the pursuits which I am appointed to represent, I can 
 scarcely anticipate that the objection will here be made that 
 is sometimes advanced against them, that they deal with 
 problems which an express Revelation has settled ; into 
 which it was indeed inevitable that Reason should look, 
 when no better guidance was at hand ; but the further dis- 
 
 VOL. IV. D
 
 34 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES, 
 
 cussion of which is superseded for Christians. The objec- 
 tion, it is plain, even when limited to Ethics, mistakes the 
 nature both of moral science and of revealed religion. 
 Upon no theory that I ever heard of, is the thing revealed 
 the same that our science wants to know ; nor does Revela- 
 tion, even upon its own ground, in any way interfere with 
 the simultaneous aspirations of Philosophy. Whatever 
 truths, whatever duties, are first opened to us by Christianity, 
 are either authoritatively announced, or brought out by the 
 silent and continuous operation of its spirit upon the soul. 
 If they are simple oracular deliveries, they are presented 
 without their grounds, and those grounds remain yet to 
 seek ; and though implicit obedience may be due and may 
 be given in any case, whether we succeed or not, there is 
 surely an additional consent, and (may we not say?) an 
 additional beauty before the eye of God, in a service ren- 
 dered no longer by a blind docility, but with brightened 
 look and full power of the undivided and understanding 
 soul. And if there be any provision in Christianity for the 
 growing evolution of divine truth and human discernment, 
 then does this very process constitute a new fact in the 
 history and experience of humanity, a fact whose law and 
 whose moral traces it is the business of a reverential 
 philosophy to follow. Indeed, Christianity, it is plain, does 
 not come to us as to godless and irresponsible animals, but 
 presupposes the faculties by which we attain to faith in God 
 and a sense of duty, and addresses us as beings to whom 
 sin and sorrow, prayer and trust, are not unknown. To 
 justify these faiths which revelation assumes, to interpret 
 this conscience to which it appeals, remain therefore, in 
 any case, offices in attempting which philosophy does not 
 pass the forecourt of our religion. And even then, what- 
 ever we learn beyond this, is still, if it be truth, something 
 having reality in the universe, something that cannot, 
 therefore, be without its trace and its manifold rela- 
 tions ; and, once knowing it, we may recognize its look 
 where else we had not suspected it, and may hope, by its
 
 PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 35 
 
 light, to read off the significance of the world and of our 
 life more profoundly than before. To do this, is in exact 
 accordance with the aim of moral research. In truth, the 
 larger the universe of our faith, the more copious are the 
 phenomena delivered to our philosophy. So that Chris- 
 tianity, far from contracting the compass of our science, 
 rather expands it to its own sublime proportions. 
 
 D 2
 
 III. 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT.* 
 
 GENTLEMEN, In obedience to the wish of the College 
 authorities, it devolves upon me to give you public greeting 
 at the commencement of another session, and to say a few 
 words respecting the duties in which it is about to engage 
 us. If I rightly interpret the spirit of my task, these 
 opening Addresses are designed at once to attune our own 
 minds aright, by striking the true key-note of our studies 
 here, and to invite and justify the sympathy of friends who 
 for the moment may cease to be outside spectators of our 
 work, and permit us to open what glimpses we can into the 
 interior. To some of you this week begins an untried 
 career ; to all of us it offers a fresh stage : and while the 
 space before us is yet clear and free, pledged to no folly 
 and ready for all worth, it is the fitting hour for tracing the 
 right path across it, and gathering up our forces to tread it 
 firmly to the end. Not without reason have men in every 
 age deemed it impious to float idly through the gates of new 
 possibility ; have felt a sacredness to hang around the be- 
 ginnings of things ; and made a thoughtful pause upon the 
 threshold of each enterprise, in order to possess themselves 
 of its whole spirit ere they set a foot upon its ground. For 
 it is in effect only the first steps in any trust that are truly 
 ours. Faithfulness and wisdom exercised at that crisis 
 
 * To the Students of Manchester New College, London. Opening 
 of Session, October, 1856. 
 
 01
 
 38 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 have in them a self-continuing power : but the false path is 
 often impossible to retrace ; the over-vehement speed brings 
 the penalty of exhaustion and the shame of violated resolve ; 
 the idle start entails the idler mood, and as the race is 
 harder, the force grows less. It is well, then, for us who 
 here engage in a common work, to re-seek its primary in- 
 spiration before we become again entangled in its details, 
 to catch once more " the great Taskmaster's eye," and read 
 there the full meaning of the charge committed to us. And 
 if in our meditations we can at all bring out into view the 
 essential idea of your life as Christian students, the whole 
 organism of your appointed studies will receive its inter- 
 pretation, and its several constituents answer for themselves 
 to the criticisms of external observer. I am far indeed 
 from pretending, on behalf of the conductors and professors 
 of this Institution, that its intellectual discipline is perfect 
 in its shape and distribution, or invariably happy in its 
 results. But I believe that in proportion as its critics, 
 rising above the impatient tastes and partial standards of 
 the hour, apprehend the permanent conditions of the 
 Christian ministry in the world, they will find the more 
 reason to respect its aims and plan, and (with us) to seek 
 improvement mainly by bringing its realization nearer to 
 its idea. 
 
 The single end for which this Institution exists, and by 
 reference to which all its methods and spirit must be judged, 
 is the training of a body of men devoted to the advancement 
 of the Christian life. If the Christian life were not our 
 divine and authoritative ideal, by which we are bound to 
 try all human things, or if its nature did not allow the 
 service of any class of special labourers, or if its standard 
 of perfection were simply something given and stationary, 
 to be held stiffly aloft, without any provision for movement 
 with the moving host of men, there would be no ground 
 on which to rest the claims of this College. It springs 
 from those who believe in a " Kingdom of Heaven " as the 
 secret life and final issue of human probation, who look
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 39 
 
 upon the Church of Christ as its incipient embodiment and 
 perpetual symbol, who find in that Church functions of 
 teaching and guidance which should be committed only to 
 qualified and disciplined minds, and who so trust the ex- 
 pansiveness of God's spirit within this sacred Institute, 
 that they will not bind themselves to any of its customary 
 forms of dogma or of usage, but hold themselves not less 
 free towards the types of the future than reverential towards 
 those of the past. This last feature it is, of an open 
 theology, by which we are here distinguished from other 
 Christian schools, a feature to which I trust we shall ever 
 remain faithful, without which we should represent a very 
 limited history, instead of a very vast hope, which, far 
 from presenting a merely negative principle, is an expres- 
 sion of positive faith and confiding piety above the range 
 of party and the atmosphere of doubt, and which assuredly 
 does but preserve the prospective attitude of mind induced 
 by Divine Revelation, all the more thankful for the " elder 
 prophets " that they set us looking for ever fresh " consola- 
 tions to Israel." In parting from the world, Christ " had 
 yet many things to say" to his disciples, but "they could 
 not bear them " then. Some of them, no doubt, have found 
 their utterance in the ages that have since elapsed ; but if 
 the "Comforter" that tells them to the heart "abides with 
 us for ever," who shall forbid our prayer for deeper insight, 
 or reproach us with scepticism in the present because our 
 eye is yet open towards the future ? When the founders of 
 our institutions refuse to involve them in the contingencies 
 of doctrinal definition, it is from no want of clear and fer- 
 vent faith for their own life ; it is because, in their view, 
 God has more light than is needed for guiding than, and 
 the Church of Christ is no completed thing, but a perpetual 
 protest against evil never vanquished, and a pressure towards 
 a Kingdom of Heaven never reached. 
 
 What, then, is that " Christian life " to the advancement 
 of which we devote a spiritual order of men ? Wherein 
 does its essence consist, by which it is separated from
 
 40 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 other types of human thought and character, and shews us 
 the falsehoods and dangers we are to withstand ? If it is 
 the life conformed to Christ's, what else can it be than the 
 entire abnegation of self out of pure surrender to a God 
 holy, affectionate and infinite ? If there be any words that 
 can express in brief the very kernel of the heart of 
 Christendom, they are surely these, " the living sacrifice.' 
 This thought it is that makes the crucifix sublime, that 
 gives its calm and sad intensity to Christian Art, that 
 sings in the Agnus Dei, and fills the interval between the 
 heroic and the saintly mind. It is not, indeed, that sacrifice 
 of selfish desires has ever been unknown among men, 
 and can be claimed as a novelty in the ethics of the gospel. 
 Our spiritual nature is and ever was a theatre of conflicting 
 impulses, where, under even the darkest conditions, the 
 higher has often prevailed. But the difference is this, 
 that the Pagan self-conquest has been a self-assertion ; the 
 Christian, a self-surrender. The one has presented itself 
 as a preference of reason to passion, of honour to mean- 
 ness, of generosity to unworthy ease ; the other, as a 
 relinquishment of personal will to diviner guidance, a free 
 passing into the living hand of God. The one has re- 
 cognized nothing but human morality in the august forms 
 of the Good and Right ; the other has seen veiled within 
 them the Holiest of all. This conscious identification of 
 God with whatever is felt to be claiming us, this over- 
 shadowing sense of His communion with us in every higher 
 trust and admiration, this investiture of the whole moral 
 life with a sacramental value, is the distinctive charac- 
 teristic of the Christian temper. The ideal it sets before 
 us seeks its realization by other means than self-culture ; 
 rather by passing out of the personal centre, and per- 
 mitting the will to drop away in faith and prayer. The 
 peculiar humility and reverence which tinge the minds 
 most deeply baptized in our religion, are but the natural 
 light of this inner trust looking upward and shining 
 through. To keep alive this Christ-like spirit, by becoming
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 41 
 
 its organs and conveying it into the world of human affairs, 
 is the proper function of the sacred ministry. 
 
 But how is it possible to train men for an office like 
 this ? How bring the preparation under rule and system ? 
 Is it not rather a thing of heavenly gift than of human 
 acquisition ? If the native inspiration be not there, is 
 it not a vain attempt even to make the poet 1 and to 
 make t\\& prophet a vainer still ? And if the living call be 
 there, will it not make itself effectual without our aid ? or, 
 at least, without that elaborate and protracted culture on 
 which we here insist ? 
 
 Most assuredly there are higher conditions needed for 
 this work than the wisest educators can command. If 
 there be not some heavenly temper in the clay, rendering 
 it mellower than the coarser stuff of our humanity, no 
 hand of ours can mould it into vessels worthy of the 
 temple, with the sacred emblems sharply cut. And our 
 first duty unquestionably is, to select and destine to the 
 service of our churches those only in whom there is some 
 dawn of God's prophetic spirit, some clearness and depth 
 of conscience, some tender lights of affection, some glow 
 of young enthusiasm, giving fair promise of the coming 
 day. Let it be freely admitted that the presence of a 
 student, after reasonable probation, within this College, 
 ought to afford a presumption of some peculiar gifts ; not 
 of that knowledge only which anyone may acquire, or that 
 moral faithfulness which can be dispensed with in none ; 
 but of lively sympathy, of ready self-forgetfulness, of quick 
 recoil from evil, and heart open to reverence and devotion. 
 It were greatly to be desired that the destination of young 
 men to the ministry among us were determined much less 
 than it is by external accidents and conditions, and more 
 by intrinsic aptitudes, irrespective of condition. Could we 
 but draw to this office all in whom the fitting graces lie 
 ready though unconfessed, its whole aspect and character 
 would rapidly change ; the neutral natures and inferior 
 aptitudes would desert it of themselves ; it would become
 
 42 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 a power of the first magnitude, and achieve again a work in 
 society which there is still no other agency to perform. 
 Shall it for ever remain the exclusive glory of Roman 
 Catholicism, that she needs no secular bribes to bring to 
 her altar the service of every outward and inward rank, 
 not of laborious mediocrity alone, but of capacity, of 
 opulence, of genius ? 
 
 When once the right selection of persons has been 
 made, the problem is, " for the given aptitudes to find 
 the fitting discipline." A portion, a most momentous 
 portion, of the student's preparation here must consist in 
 his simply following out the impulses that brought him 
 hither, in living out his self-dedication, and giving per- 
 petual and healthy exercise to the holy and human 
 affections in which he has recognized the calling Word 
 of God. It is a dangerous thing to let any noble inspira- 
 tion pine and die for want of genial air and free movement 
 in its proper field ; and most imperfect and unnatural 
 would be a training for the Christian Ministry, in which no 
 room was left for the practical gymnastic of benevolence 
 and piety. If the whole soul is not sustained in equal 
 action, if during the years when the intellectual character 
 sets and ripens, the spiritual roots of the character feed 
 only on the sap of thought, no vigorous and hardy growth 
 will ever be possible. To the young, as to the mature, 
 books and life are the correctives and interpreters of each 
 other ; and the receptive understanding needs the in- 
 vigorating balance of the productive conscience. For my 
 own part, I can never look with jealousy on the Sunday, 
 school, the Domestic Mission, the village preaching, as 
 injurious competitors for the attention of the student of 
 divinity ; but rather regard them as friendly allies, furnish- 
 ing a needful supplement to the work of the class-room 
 and the common hall. I have no fear that the young 
 divine who seeks, in the humility of Christian service, some 
 foretaste of his future experience, and tests his theological 
 progress by intercourse with the poor, the suffering or
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 43 
 
 the child, will relax the nerve of study and reduce his 
 thirst for truth. On the contrary, he will lose the fatal 
 lassitude of weak affections, and the caprices of a morbid 
 will ; and the busy brain will often find less refreshment 
 from passive intermission than from acts of conscience that 
 bring the peace of God. Hence the way should be left 
 open, as indeed it is, for a due mingling of kindly self- 
 sacrifice and deeper spiritual experience with the studious 
 pursuits characteristic of this place. But, after all, this 
 higher discipline of character must ever remain an affair 
 rather of private faithfulness than of public provision. 
 And even without going beyond the range of your imme- 
 diate studies, you have a noble problem to attack. You 
 have to see that the divine life within you is not over- 
 grown and stifled by the intellectual ; to keep the running 
 waters pure and fresh under that rich growth. There is 
 no necessary sanctity in the mere mental discipline of 
 theology ; and to expect any wiser or holier mood by 
 simply stepping out of heathen into ecclesiastic literature, 
 and transferring your critical eye from the page of Aristotle 
 to that of St. Paul, would be a vain reliance. Throughout 
 your course, the studies which engage you, be their subject 
 sacred as it may, will stand related to you as your secular 
 business ; will bring the temptations inseparable from every 
 human pursuit ; and must be prevailed over and con- 
 secrated by a living spirit of earnest and aspiring devotion. 
 Once depart from simple, truthful openness to heavenly 
 things, and your knowledge will but terminate in that sad 
 spectacle, the connoisseur in religion, who knows all about 
 it except itself; who has mastered every theory respecting 
 God, but not yielded himself to the Infinite Reality. 
 
 So great is the persuasive power of intense conviction 
 and personal devotion, that there are those who depre- 
 ciate everything else, and who especially evince an im- 
 patience of the elaborate complexity and range of our 
 educational training for the ministry. They look at the 
 fewness and simplicity of the great Christian truths,
 
 44 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 which may be taught to a child in the catechism, and have 
 been condensed by the wise into compendious creeds ; 
 and they ask why these, after due comparison with 
 Scripture, cannot be carried straight into life and applied 
 to the duties and beliefs of men. Or they are struck, 
 perhaps, by the contrast between the inartificial gifts of the 
 earliest missionaries and the vast outfit of the modern 
 divine; and fancy that by stripping off the intellectual 
 incumbrance, we should get the apostles back again. But 
 the scope of mental culture proper for the sacred office in 
 one age, cannot be determined either by the wants of 
 another, or by the absolute and permanent contents of 
 Christian doctrine. A far other rule must be appealed to, 
 which yields a very different reply. Be the life of a people 
 or a period what it may, its religion must be equal to the 
 whole of it, covering and pervading and penetrating every 
 interest of action or of thought. There is nothing in 
 which Christian Faith is to be denied its voice ; and it 
 goes freely, as to its own, into every field that bears the 
 footprints of humanity. It is vain for the secular and the 
 spiritual powers of the world to negotiate a division of 
 territory by which each shall bar out the other ; no treaty, 
 no award, can trace a boundary-line, any more than a 
 mountain chain or trending coast can keep out the 
 Almighty Maker of them both. The Kingdom of Heaven 
 is in its very essence a universal theocracy ; and God exist- 
 ing, nothing is at heart the same as if He existed not. It 
 is a fatal thing to let any province of life constitute itself 
 outside of the religious realm, and, under plea of being no 
 insurgent land, excuse itself from consecration. So long as 
 the national ideas were as simple and limited as those of 
 the Hebrew race in the first century, so long the gospel 
 needed more the intensity of God's spirit than its breadth ; 
 its possessor had an answer for every question, and neither 
 slurred nor scorned any genuine want. But no sooner did 
 it find itself in the midst of an Hellenic and a Roman 
 civilization, than it had to deal with new problems, and
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 45 
 
 penetrate to other seats of thought and consciousness in 
 the human soul ; and it expanded to the full capacity of 
 those fresh demands, and obtained representatives who 
 could use up the truth of Plato, and put a living fire into 
 the ethics of Cicero. Well would it have been if no 
 meaner interests had ever checked this adaptive genius in 
 our religion, and made it seem unequal to the exigencies of 
 advancing time. But there are two ways of seeking harmony 
 between its spirit and the general course of the human 
 mind, and preventing either from overlapping the province 
 of the other ; by taking all new knowledge in, or by shutting 
 all new knowledge out ; by keeping open the capacity of 
 faith, or keeping closed the limits of discovery. And for 
 ages past the ancient Church of Christendom, having un- 
 happily consecrated its cast-iron measure of doctrine, will 
 not allow the universe to be bigger than that can reach : and 
 hence, religion having become fixed, advancing culture 
 becomes "profane;" and proceeds without a blessing, 
 rather than not proceed at all. One after another, sciences 
 have emerged and constituted themselves, tastes and habits 
 have acquired social power, for which the Church, called 
 universal, has no greeting or recognition, which her 
 philosophy pronounces to be nescience, and her casuistry 
 condemns as godless. In the vain attempt to maintain 
 against enlargement the narrow frontier of an earlier time, 
 her empire over the human mind is gone ; and the Church, 
 unequal to her ever-expanding trust, drops behind and 
 becomes historical. 
 
 Nor has Protestantism hitherto been much wiser ; it has 
 let the problem slip in another way. The old Christianity 
 grasps at universality by holding its ancient confines, and 
 resolutely denying that what lies beyond is really in the 
 universe at all. The reformed Christianity surrenders the 
 pretention to universality, releases the revolted provinces of 
 knowledge from their allegiance, and proclaims them free ; 
 hoping by this prudent concession to retain the parent land 
 unaffected by the giant growths it has disengaged. In
 
 46 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 virtue of this treaty of peace, intellectual research in every 
 direction asserts its right to be purely secular, and to pro- 
 ceed as if it stood in no relation at all to faith ; it studiously 
 weeds out of its language and modes of thought every 
 vestige of a religious idea, and assumes that reason might 
 live upon the very same terms in a divine or an atheistic 
 universe. Ingenuity is exhausted to invent for every truth 
 neutral and abstract expressions which may serve equally 
 in either way ; and a sublime affectation of indifference 
 becomes part of the established etiquette of scientific 
 diplomacy. The understanding seems to be, " If you will 
 not meddle with our geology (for instance), we will behave 
 politely to your divinity." And yet the radical insincerity 
 of this mutual neutrality is evident through so thin a veil. 
 It is not true that the two lines of thought are separately 
 pursued ; on the contrary, the traveller on each feels an 
 intense interest, be it of sympathy or of antipathy, in the 
 procedure on the other ; and often derives his chief impulse 
 from the secret bearing of his doctrine on beliefs to which 
 he never refers. Bold and logical minds are thus frequently 
 brought into conscious self-variance, having their esoteric 
 and their exoteric professions. Less complete and compact 
 thinkers often remain at the stage of unconscious self- 
 variance, and honestly but uneasily believe each doctrine 
 in turn ; with Lyell to-day, with Moses to-morrow ; Positivist 
 at the Royal Society, and Christian at Westminster Abbey. 
 Such persons have a kind of double consciousness, and 
 pass through two unreconciled lives : their scientific thought 
 proceeds upon one path, their religious conceptions move 
 or stay upon another : they are alternately here and there ; 
 but can give no account of the intervening space between 
 their knowledge and their faith, and can rise to no higher 
 point from which both are seen together. Having at 
 different periods passed through different and quite inde- 
 pendent developments, they end with two creeds, two orders 
 of taste and affection ; and whenever the time comes for 
 border questions to arise, they cross helplessly to and fro,
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 47 
 
 with the feeble intercession of good-will, but without the 
 common language and intelligence of effective mediation. 
 All this want of inner harmony between faith and know- 
 ledge, be it confessed or unconfessed, is the natural result 
 of falsely dividing off the secular and the spiritual, as if 
 they were different things, instead of different thoughts aboiit 
 the same thing ; and so permitting each method to run off 
 indefinitely upon its own abstractions, till neither can find 
 its way back, or look any whole living reality in the face. 
 If Christian theology cannot prevent these evils, still more 
 if it favours and promotes them, it abdicates its intellectual 
 function of universal supervision and reconciliation of 
 human pursuits, and descends to poor antagonisms on the 
 very scene that should lie tranquil under its survey. 
 Indifference and neglect towards new forms of thought and 
 fields of research will bring a most certain retribution, fos- 
 tering the growth of wild pretensions and " Arab " sciences, 
 that follow their own rule, and remain outlaws and strangers 
 to the realm of reverential reason. No legitimate direction 
 of human activity, speculative or social, ought to be foreign 
 to the sympathy of the Christian divine ; and sympathy 
 requires knowledge and insight. His own particular stock 
 of truths may be a very simple series ; but the range of 
 their application, and the need of their modifying presence, 
 are nothing less than universal ; so that he of all men wants 
 the largest and most generous training, and scarcely com- 
 pletes his qualifications till he is furnished with a key to 
 every compartment of human life and thought. 
 
 What, indeed, is true theology ? It is the knowledge of 
 God. By its very definition, therefore, it must be co- 
 extensive with the field of his manifestations, and have 
 something to learn and report wherever his trace has been 
 left. What more need be said to shew its encyclopedic 
 character ? For there is no region where he does not make 
 his sign. He is Agent and Disposer in outward Nature. 
 He communes with the inmost individual Soul. He is the 
 Providence of collective Humanity, and unfolds his thought
 
 48 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 in the process of history, both the general history of the 
 race, and the special history of the times and people to 
 whom and through whom he has made himself super- 
 naturally known. And whoever is at a loss where and 
 how to recognize him in these several fields, is, just so far 
 as his perplexity goes, no theologian. 
 
 In the first, we are called upon to find the religious 
 interpretation of the physical sciences. To conceive aright 
 the meaning of " Natural Laws ; " to determine how they 
 stand related to His causality ; to reconcile the alleged 
 action of " necessary forces '"' with the movement and lord- 
 ship of His free thought ; to adjudicate between the opposite 
 doctrines of progressive development from low beginnings 
 into improving forms of being, and of creation out of a 
 perfect preconception into an imperfect realization ; these 
 are but a few of the points at which, in the survey of 
 nature, the roads divaricate, and we need a good Sa//iwi> to 
 keep us from divergence into godless wilds. It is a helpless 
 thing for a divine to be unable to cope with such questions, 
 or to present to the mind a picture of the outer world and 
 its history which shall fall into place in the gallery of faith. 
 Socrates describes, in one of Plato's happiest passages of 
 dialogue, the shock his religious feeling experienced when 
 he first read a treatise on animal mechanics and the or- 
 ganism of nature, and found everything explained on mere 
 physical principles and without any reference to an In- 
 dwelling Mind. From that day to the present, the same 
 experience has been repeated, and the relations continue 
 uneasy between the natural sciences and religious faith. 
 Socrates was led by it to relinquish physical pursuits, and 
 resort to moral studies in hope of better light ; and doubt- 
 less he went to the true source for apprehension of divine 
 things. But, once in clear possession of his faith derived 
 thence, he returned with it upon the subjects dark before, 
 and transfigured them with its illumination. Ho\v much 
 more should we, who have not our faith to seek in the first 
 instance, resolve to conquer by it the difficulties and
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 49 
 
 repugnances of natural science, and bid the interpreted 
 sky of Newton, not less than the mysterious Hebrew 
 heavens, declare the glory of God, and the morning stars 
 sing together ! The least we can ask from the divine is, 
 that as material studies are perpetually troubling the con- 
 ceptions of faith with a fatalistic shadow, he should be 
 qualified to shew how little there is any real eclipse, and 
 how completely the darkness is flung by phantasms of 
 imagination. For this purpose he must gain entrance into 
 the interior of the natural sciences, grow familiar with their 
 logical processes, and discriminate between the mere fictions 
 of method and the eternal fact of things. 
 
 In the second realm of divine manifestation, the in- 
 dividual soul, problems still more immediately involved 
 in all Christian teaching urge themselves upon our atten- 
 tion. Need I do more than pronounce the words " Holy 
 Spirit," to indicate the point at which our religion comes 
 into immediate contact with psychology and morals and 
 the whole procedure of reflective self-knowledge ? If there 
 be any one characteristic of Christian revelation more 
 assured than all the rest, it is this faith, that the most 
 intimate relations subsist between the human spirit and the 
 Divine, that neither sits solitary in respect to the other, 
 that they do somehow meet upon the same field of con- 
 sciousness, and in their personal life continually exercise 
 opposing or concurrent or reciprocating action. To con- 
 ceive aright of this mutual attitude is a prime necessity not 
 only for all speculative thinkers on religious doctrine, but 
 for the hourly experience of every meditative Christian. 
 For a man not to know himself from his God, his Tempter 
 from his Inspirer, is to remain blind to the first conditions 
 of his responsible existence, and close the shutters of his 
 moral reason. It is too late to put men off with vague 
 phrases, once perhaps sufficient for the undeveloped con- 
 sciousness of believers, but now only raising questions to 
 leave them in the dark. After ages of fermenting doctrine, 
 you cannot go back to the unmixed elements, but must 
 
 VOL. IV. E
 
 50 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 work forward to the clear and finished product. Does not 
 the central truth on this matter encounter perpetual contra- 
 diction at both ends ? On the one hand, is not all Divine 
 action in the soul explained away into the self-action of her 
 own laws ? And, on the other, is not the free human per- 
 sonality flung into the sweeping tides of Pantheistic 
 power ? And shall the Church be able to speak no 
 mediating word ? To do so with any effect, her ministers 
 must be furnished with some coherent theory of human 
 nature, and know what they mean when they speak of the 
 Will, the Conscience, the Reason, the Affections ; the 
 promptings of God's spirit and the working of their own. 
 Scarcely can they engage in a single act of prayer, without 
 an implicit belief on this whole system of relations ; and 
 they cannot, if need be, defend the act as accordant with 
 the highest reason, without rendering their belief explicit. 
 
 In the third field of divine manifestation, the provi- 
 dential training of the human race, we encounter the 
 questions which more immediately concern us as believers 
 in historical revelation. Elsewhere, we are engaged in 
 settling the conditions and drawing out the essence of all 
 religion, and securing it from being lost amid the other and 
 lower activities of our nature. Here, we disentangle the 
 essence of the Christian religion, by comparing its charac- 
 teristics, as a divine element in human affairs, with the 
 other means by which God has left his witness in the 
 courses of history. On this side we obtain a correction to 
 the excessive individualism of Protestant piety, seques- 
 tering the private mind with God, and abandoning Society 
 and States to the secular expediencies ; and are lifted to 
 the higher view which the Catholic theology contains but 
 the Catholic hierarchy corrupts, that our humanity is one 
 vast organism, at once the object and the medium of a 
 Divine and holy purpose ; that the flow of peoples, the 
 consanguinities of language, the order of colonization, the 
 diversities of indigenous genius, the blossoming and fall of 
 literatures, the consolidation and dissolution of polities, are
 
 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 51 
 
 but modes and pulsations of a continuous Divine Thought, 
 passing through time and giving it greater fulness as it 
 goes. The more reverential spirit which this conception 
 carries into historical studies is so far from impairing, that 
 it incalculably enhances, our spiritual trust in the gospel of 
 Christ. Christianity, as it has come down to us, is in any 
 case the confluence of many currents in our humanity. 
 You cannot detach it, as an insulated divineness, from 
 relations with the surrounding space. It did not fall as a 
 shooting star upon our world ; it cannot hang suspended 
 and apart in the air above us ; it was a heavenly dawn for 
 which the gliding earth had been long preparing ; and it is 
 appointed to shine more and more towards a perfect day. 
 How, then, are we to regard the tributaries that from the 
 first have passed into it from the life and thought of men, 
 the Hebrew types of conception, the Hellenic elements 
 of speculative faith, the Roman grasp of objective condi- 
 tions, the Teutonic depth of subjective experience ? Are 
 we to fling these out as foreign intrusions, and treat them 
 as corruptions, simply because they are human ? Whoever 
 begins the process of weeding on this principle, will soon 
 find his hand among the deepest roots, and plucking up 
 the fairest flowers, till he scarcely knows his Eden from a 
 fallow-field. But if God lives and acts through the human 
 as well as beyond it, then may divine elements enter by 
 that channel as well as by another ; and that which flows 
 in from the fields of history is not on that account to be 
 dried off again as an impurity. If between Christianity as 
 a divine revelation and the other types of human thought 
 and character there is not mere antagonism and mutual 
 exclusion, but a prepared and Providential relation, as of 
 mutual supplements in one comprehensive scheme, neither 
 the human nor the superhuman suffers from the alliance, 
 but both acquire a dignity auguster than before. At all 
 events, the Church which it is given us to teach and guide 
 as we best may, is delivered to us from the past, and has 
 again to be delivered by us into the future, as the 
 
 E 2
 
 52 THE CHRISTIAN STUDENT. 
 
 depository of an historical religion ; and the conditions of 
 our trust cannot be understood and fulfilled without careful 
 study of all its antecedents, its Divine sources and its 
 human vicissitudes. Thus only will its true ideal become 
 clear to us ; and we shall acquire the spiritual tact to 
 separate whatever is heterogeneous or accidental, whether 
 in the teachings of others or in hereditary formulas of our 
 own. Historical theology pre-supposes, no doubt, the 
 philosophical and moral, and in that sense is subject to 
 their conditions. But, on the other hand, it constitutes 
 the great field of their application, the text given for their 
 interpretation, the living Kingdom of God, whose laws they 
 proclaim and of which their vaticinations are spoken ; and 
 in this sense it is the crown and completion of them all. 
 
 If these remarks seem to sweep over too wide a field, 
 and not to assign with sufficient minuteness the proper 
 place to the specific parts of theological discipline, it is 
 because I am chiefly anxious to insist on the all-comprehen- 
 sive character of Christian education. The grand function 
 of pure religion (if I read it right) is to preserve the whole- 
 ness of our living relations, and penetrate them throughout 
 with the spirit of devout faith ; to watch against the 
 encroachment of habits and thoughts out of harmony with 
 it ; to decline a mere place as one among many know- 
 ledges and tastes, and maintain itself as a spirit among all. 
 If there is any class of Christian teachers free to assume 
 this panoptic position, and bound by their antecedents to 
 aim at the hearty and complete reconciliation of philo- 
 sophic thought and holy faith, assuredly it is the represen- 
 tatives of a body which has never imposed a creed and 
 never feared a truth. And did we but read the signs of 
 the times with an eye of faithful insight, I believe we 
 should look with a moment's shame at our past negligence, 
 and devote ourselves with life-long hope and courage to do 
 our providential part.
 
 IV. 
 
 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES AND SOME- 
 THING MORE.* 
 
 SINCE we were last assembled in this Hall, an event has 
 occurred which, though remote from the immediate action 
 of this Institution, belongs to its domestic history, and by 
 a sad memorial divides its present from its past. That 
 venerable man whose name has been on the lips of its 
 alumni since the first years of the present century, and to 
 whom it owes almost all its theological honours, has laid 
 his burthen down and been called to the Christian's rest.f 
 It is a gentle sorrow with which a life of four-score years 
 and ten, a life full of graces as of time, is seen to fade 
 away ; and even by the nearest in affection the farewell, so 
 mercifully delayed, may be said in tones trembling with 
 tenderness rather than with grief. But still, these final 
 partings, soften them as we may, have a significance for us 
 that belongs to nothing else ; and those of us who have 
 been pupils of Mr. Wellbeloved would ill deserve the 
 privilege, could we see his name erased from the list of 
 the living without a pause of reverential thought. Permit 
 me, then, before speaking the words required from me as 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1858. 
 
 t Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, Theological Tutor and Head of 
 the College during its York period from 1803 to 1840, died August 
 29, in the Qoth year of his age and the 6yth of his ministry in York.
 
 54 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 a teacher in this College, to fall back for a moment into 
 the position of a student, to recall the priceless memories 
 of that eager and thirsting time, and once more turn a 
 grateful look to the benignant form now sinking into the 
 shadows of the past. Well do I remember the respectful 
 wonder with which we saw, as our course advanced, vein 
 after vein of various learning modestly opened out ; the 
 pride with which we felt that we had a Lightfoot, a Jere- 
 miah Jones, and an Eichhorn all in one, yet no mere 
 theologian after all, but scarcely less a naturalist and an 
 archaeologist as well; the impatience with which, out of 
 very homage to his wisdom, we almost resented his im- 
 partial love of truth in giving us the most careful epitome 
 of other opinions with scarce the suggestion of his own. 
 Many of us have found the notes taken in his lecture-room 
 our best Cyclopaedia of divinity during the first years of 
 our active ministry, when books were forced aside by other 
 claims ; and when at last some leisure for independent 
 study has been won, and the entrance of the theological 
 sciences upon new phases has taken us into untried fields, 
 then most of all, if I may generalize my own experience, 
 have we been thankful for our training under a master of 
 the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and 
 thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, 
 but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth. What- 
 ever might become of the particular conclusions which he 
 favoured, he never justified a prejudice ; he never mis- 
 directed our admiration ; he never hurt an innocent feeling 
 or overbore a serious judgment ; and he set up within us 
 a standard of Christian scholarship to which it must ever 
 exalt us to aspire. The generation in whom his memory 
 lives is no longer large : but if we are a "faithful few," we 
 shall see to it, that his name shall go down among our 
 sacred traditions. 
 
 It is an old lament that the men who are found most 
 worthy of enduring veneration often pass without recogni- 
 tion, or in the midst of opposition, through their own
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 55 
 
 times. This may be true of great Reformers born for 
 conflict, or charged with some unique ideal, and granted 
 to the chief crises of the world. But for periods of tranquil 
 progress, a happier adjustment may be observed between 
 the laws of the single and those of the social mind. Side 
 by side with the slow and steady rate of change which 
 alone can be given to humanity en masse, moves the indi- 
 vidual thinker, at first with the rapid spring of youthful 
 courage, at last with the quiet steps, the frequent rests, the 
 placid retrospect of age. The sympathies which perhaps 
 he outstrips in the beginning have time to come up with 
 him before the end, and as the seasons chill upon his heart, 
 close round him with warmer appreciation. If for a while 
 he parts from his comrades and has to toil on alone, it is 
 when he is strong to bear it ; and when the feet grow weary 
 and the spirit faints, he finds the world all reconciled and 
 dies in peace. The almost patriarchal years of our friend 
 just gone gave him this compensation for so long a time, 
 that it needs an effort to remember that it was not always 
 so. To the younger generation, who have grown familiar 
 with the admitted honours of his name, who have been 
 taught to regard it as a tower of strength to a purely con- 
 servative theology, it will scarcely be credible that he had 
 once the repute of unsound and dangerous innovation : but 
 my seniors and companions do not forget the mysterious 
 alarms that invested a certain heresy called " Cappism," 
 not so much actively inculcated as supposed to be esoteri- 
 cally held by our revered and too retiring tutor. Nor did 
 any previous public teacher venture, so far as I know, to 
 withdraw from the system of Christian evidences the 
 argument from Hebrew prediction, and set the Messianic 
 prophecies in the full and exclusive light of contemporary 
 history. Such startling steps of thought could be taken 
 only by one who had courage to contemplate organic 
 changes in theologic science, and whose conscious fidelity 
 could support him in a position almost solitary among 
 his contemporaries and not generally shared even by his
 
 56 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 students. The example, from a Christian so humble and 
 a scholar so profound, may well console those who, follow- 
 ing him at a vast distance, repeat the same experience in 
 far slighter wanderings from the beaten track. 
 
 In fact, so long as there are different rates of mental 
 change for different parts of the same community, there 
 must be some in every generation on whom the repute of 
 heterodoxy falls. The grand conservative power in the 
 world is the tenacity of habitual ideas in the great mass of 
 busy men, who have to live upon the store with which they 
 set out on their career. The grand provision for progressive 
 thought is in the studies of men devoted to some special 
 research, or able to follow its course under the conduct of 
 its great masters. Between these two tendencies a certain 
 conflict is inevitable in every age ; and is in itself so little 
 to be deprecated that it is the very condition of our escape 
 from a fatal stagnation, and has no other evil in it than it 
 artificially contracts from our infirmities and sins. The 
 student who at all keeps up with the intellectual movement 
 of his time, who is quickened with any living learning 
 instead of being buried with the dead, is carried, by irre- 
 sistible necessity, to new mental stations, and is compelled 
 to revise his judgments, and recompute his place. But let 
 him not deem it a strange thing that no longer is the dear 
 old world all with him where he stands ; that others stay 
 where they are more at home, till he has made their transit 
 to him clear and safe, and the region round him genial 
 and fruitful. There is an element of faithfulness in their 
 reluctance which he must recognize and respect. And the 
 burthen which it imposes on him is wholesome to bear : 
 for there is scarcely a better discipline for the lonely thinker 
 than the unwelcome plunge from the silent order of his 
 contemplative world into the ferment of the agora, than 
 the encounter with the tangle of human feeling and opinion, 
 and the necessity of tracing a way into the light by the 
 circuitous tact of patient sympathy instead of the curt 
 methods of a supercilious logic. This difficulty (I con-
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 57 
 
 fidently speak for my friend and colleague as for myself) 
 awakens in us no complaint and no despair. As teachers 
 of those who are to guide the next generation, we are 
 indeed bound not to lag behind the standard of our own, 
 nay, to keep as near as we can to the front ranks of 
 advancing research in our respective fields : did we not 
 make this our aim, we should have studied to little purpose 
 the examples of such predecessors as a Wellbeloved and a 
 Kenrick, should be faithless to the most honourable tradi- 
 tions and distinctive opportunities of our religious body, 
 and drop out of our natural relation to the Church of 
 the Future. But as our march is still in the same service 
 and in simple allegiance to the same Divine Master, as 
 the heart of the Past beats strong within us both, and we 
 break with no one guiding faith or reverence, we do not 
 hesitate to claim the old companionship, to expect a 
 generous trust, and to believe that, however scattered for 
 awhile by diversities of track or speed, both the hasting 
 and the lingering feet will be found in the evening, when 
 all is over, resting on the same field. 
 
 The problem of this College has always been to reconcile 
 the interests of free learning with the practical training for 
 the Christian ministry. That these two ends should be 
 incompatible, is a suspicion which its supporters have been 
 too noble-minded to indulge. Sympathy with foremost 
 scholarship, and administration of popular religion, they 
 have steadfastly believed might go together and help each 
 other. It is an honourable fact that this faith, combining 
 conditions which in the eye of sceptic fear would appear 
 mutually destructive, has been maintained, not by the will 
 of some eccentric and enthusiastic Founder, imposing a 
 personal fancy on the Institution, but under a form of 
 government singularly open and popular. Where, in the 
 whole range of ecclesiastical history, can we find a parallel 
 case, that a large body of men, with strong and definite 
 convictions on divine things, have declined, by deliberate 
 verdict, to take any security for the perpetuation of their
 
 58 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 own opinions, beyond the constant revision and testing of 
 them by the best attainable instruments of knowledge ? 
 and have further declared it an essential qualification for 
 Christian Preaching that the minister, far from simply 
 echoing the doctrines of an earlier time and becoming the 
 mere organ of his people's state of mind, should be able to 
 speak from a higher position, and prepare the world around 
 him for the next hour that is to strike ? A principle so 
 wisely bold cannot fail now and then to be put to a severe 
 trial : and it may be admitted that precisely the present 
 stage of theological knowledge is especially critical for it. 
 That it will be found equal to the utmost strain which will 
 be put upon it, I do not for a moment doubt ; pro- 
 vided we are prepared, with suitable pliancy, to accept the 
 altered conditions of our time. Now that a generation has 
 visibly passed away, it may not be unseasonable to note 
 and register the most essential changes in the aspect of our 
 educational problem, and compute their bearing on the 
 right classification and apportionment of studies. 
 
 The impulse given by the Reformation to clerical erudi- 
 tion is mainly due, I need hardly say, to the new position 
 into which the Scriptures were then raised. At the earliest 
 stage of the revolt from Rome, resistance was confined to 
 the comparatively recent Dominican abuses, without dis- 
 turbance to the authority of the Church, expressed in its 
 older councils and the writings of the Fathers. It was so 
 embarrassing a task, however, to defend the validity of an 
 arbitrary chronological limit, that the line was inevitably 
 pushed further and further back, till nothing was left behind 
 it but the Sacred Writings and the Apostolic Age : and 
 there at last Protestantism took its stand : there alone was 
 the Word of God, to the test of which every question of 
 belief and duty must be brought. The Scriptures thus 
 succeeded to the place previously held by the Creeds and 
 dogmatic Decrees of the Christian hierarchy ; and were 
 required to discharge the same function, and be ready with 
 an answer to whatever doubts were brought to them. It
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 59 
 
 was impossible to consult them with such an object, with- 
 out instantly feeling how different they are from the short, 
 sharp, systematic definitions in which the Church had pro- 
 nounced her judgment and handed it down ready-made ; 
 how much harder it is to win a response from them ; over 
 how wide a field of history and law, of poetry and prophecy, 
 of proverb and epistle, the divine truth is distributed, and 
 that, too, not with the mechanical order and precision of 
 the Letter, but with the trackless freedom of the Spirit. A 
 cold and critical age would have been thrown into despair 
 by the difficulty of using such a collection as the Bible in 
 substitute for the- compendia and canons of the Church ; 
 but at a time when the Book of books had freshly opened 
 the deepest fountains of men's hearts, it was invoked for 
 every purpose, and the difficulties it brought were as nothing 
 before the energy which it kindled. More than once it 
 was some happy moment of contact with the unspoiled 
 phrase of Holy Writ, that had dissipated the darkest clouds 
 of Luther's own mind : and he himself describes the sudden 
 light of joy that flashed upon him, when in place of the 
 " panitentia " of the Roman Church (reduced to an out- 
 ward "penance" of expiation) the Greek ^erdvoia carried its 
 pure meaning to his heart, of an inward and spiritual 
 change. The whole religion, which had become worn down 
 to an arid dust by the grinding of the Latin routine, broke 
 into freshness again and sprinkled its very soul upon the 
 Reformers, when opening upon them through its native 
 speech. An insatiable thirst carried them to the well- 
 spring of the untranslated word, and gave a charm to the 
 severest grammatical labours that promised to bring them a 
 step nearer to their place of rest. The incredible difficulties 
 through which Reuchlin struggled into a mastery of the 
 Hebrew, and sent forth Melancthon to propagate the " new 
 learning," by his personal instructions at Wittenberg and 
 by the publication of Greek and Hebrew manuals, the 
 rapidity with which an immense apparatus of Biblical 
 studies was created, the marvellous approach to exactitude
 
 60 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 which the new philology attained, may well fill us with 
 admiration, and reproach our more effeminate and less 
 modest scholarship. The zeal for learning derived all its 
 inspiration from a religious source, the desire and need of 
 conversing with the original oracles of God. The Re- 
 formers, having refused to bind themselves by the recognized 
 decisions of the Church,had to begin again the organization 
 of dogma and ritual ; and for that end to make themselves 
 and their clergy masters of the sacred materials out of 
 which the structure must be raised. The education for the 
 Christian ministry was thus suddenly expanded, from the 
 narrow drill of a few half ecclesiastical, half Aristotelian 
 manuals, to the dimensions of the whole Bible in its own 
 languages. True it is, that when once the new symbolical 
 books were produced and invested with authority, a partial 
 return to the old intellectual apathy ensued ; the work was 
 considered to be done ; the essence of Holy Writ to have 
 been extracted ; and the future was closed against the 
 excitement of discovery. In the Lutheran Church, where 
 the authority of the new Confessions was most stringently 
 imposed, this paralysing reaction was powerfully felt. In 
 those of the Genevan type, however rigid the inward 
 organism of their vast logical system, there was less out- 
 ward restraint upon a free development, and a wider 
 exposure to varieties of national temperament : and accord- 
 ingly they remained far truer to their original Scripturalism, 
 and continued to produce a Biblical literature, and to 
 maintain among the people the habit of reading the Bible, 
 when the Saxon churches had in these respects become 
 degenerate. Where the function of secondary Creeds was 
 at the lowest, the continued need of the primitive Scripture 
 was at the highest. Hence, what is true of the Calvinists 
 in general as compared with the Lutherans, holds of the 
 English Presbyterians in particular as compared with other 
 branches of the Swiss stock. The trials of conscience 
 through which they passed in the latter half of the seven- 
 teenth century having brought them to peculiar sensitive-
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 61 
 
 ness on the subject of subscription, they fell back with all 
 the more absolute repose on Scripture. They were not 
 content with its use by a Church as a source of doctrines 
 to be thence imposed, in second-hand epitomes, on the 
 members one by one ; but required that it should be left to 
 stand alone, in separate and first-hand contact with each 
 individual believer's mind, and be permitted to speak for 
 itself. This was the freedom, not (if I may say so) a 
 freedom from Scripture, but a freedom to Scripture, on 
 which our forerunners so strenuously insisted. In its 
 original idea it undoubtedly involved the most absolute 
 and infallible authority for every part of the letter of the 
 Bible; a belief which in 1648 had even embodied itself in 
 a penal law, visiting with the punishment of death any one 
 who should call in question the authenticity of any book of 
 either the Old or the New Testament. This belief it was 
 which became stereotyped in the phrases, " the Sufficiency 
 of Scripture" and "the Scriptures the rule of faith and 
 practice : " the former expressing only its negative side, 
 excluding all that lay beyond the Scriptures : the latter 
 expressing the positive side, admitting all that lay within 
 them. Taken together, they turn the key upon you with 
 the sharpest precision, and shut you up in the most rigor- 
 ous logical incarceration. If you believe any moral or 
 spiritual truth on extra-biblical grounds, you cannot use the 
 first : if you hesitate about any proposition whatsoever in 
 the Bible, you cannot use the second. The effect of the 
 two is to present the Scriptures, the whole Scriptures, and 
 nothing but the Scriptures, as the depositories of divine 
 truth ; and to concentrate the qualifications of the Christian 
 ministry upon one point the exposition of these oracles of 
 Heaven. Enable him to find their meaning and to express 
 it clearly to others, and his work as an ambassador of God 
 is done. 
 
 Such was the theory which occasioned the demand for a 
 learned ministry, and gave their constitution and usages to 
 the Nonconformist academies. The organization of studies
 
 62 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 which would shape itself around this determining idea it is 
 not difficult to trace. 
 
 (i.) The first thing must be to effect the necessary in- 
 sulation of 'the Scriptures, and detach them, by marks of 
 exclusive divineness, from the mass of human literature : 
 and this accordingly was the aim of all investigations into 
 the Jewish and Christian CANON, with the external history 
 of the several books. 
 
 (2.) Next, the line being drawn which excludes all 
 human writings and encloses all divine, precaution must be 
 taken against any interior adulteration of the latter, impair- 
 ing their absolute identity : the purity of their TEXT must 
 be tried by every available criterion, and emendation, 
 systematized into an art, be applied to every remediable 
 blemish ; and hence the vast Apparatus Criticus which has 
 been accumulated, and the mere description of which forms 
 so considerable a part of the work of a Theological Pro- 
 fessor. 
 
 (3.) Lastly, the books being at length as perfect as may 
 be in our hands, it is time to read and understand them : 
 resorting, for that purpose, not only to all available 
 philological aids, but to the illustrative help of History and 
 Antiquities, the reciprocal lights of comparable passages, 
 and the whole scheme of EXEGETICAL resource. In accom- 
 plishing this final part of the work, the teacher's method 
 is altogether at the mercy of the hypothesis respecting 
 Scripture which he carries into it. Does he assume the 
 whole to be alike the word of God ? then he levels all its 
 varieties as unessential, and, treating it as throughout the 
 expression of One unerring Mind, takes it as homogeneous 
 and absolutely self-consistent in every part ; and, for eluci- 
 dation of obscurities in fact or doctrine, overleaps the lines 
 of time and authorship, and applies the same standard to 
 the whole. Hence the Interpreter passes into the HAR- 
 MONIST : who undertakes to weave apparently discrepant 
 narratives into one continuous history, and to construct ap- 
 parently successive beliefs into one system of absolute truth.
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 63 
 
 This then is the series of studies on which it has become 
 traditional in our Academies to throw the stress of the 
 Theologic work : Establishment of the Canon, critical 
 History and Emendation of the Text, Interpretation of the 
 Language, Harmonizing of the Matter. A proficient in 
 these, it was thought, had mastered his stewardship of the 
 word ; and as there was " sufficiency " in the " Scriptures," 
 so was there in the Education which gave him possession 
 of them. Whatever you might superadd to these was to be 
 regarded as subsidiary ; expedient perhaps for secular 
 ornament and scholarly repute, but not indispensable to the 
 furniture of the Christian divine. In concession, however, 
 to these less imperative claims, the main acts of theological 
 education were introduced by a philosophical Prologue, and 
 followed by an historical Epilogue. Before entering the 
 proper sphere of his Biblical pursuits, the student was 
 invited to survey the truths of Natural Religion and the 
 doctrines of the Heathen World. And after emerging from 
 his sacred studies, he was conducted through the chief 
 periods of Ecclesiastical History and controversy. These, 
 however, were kept in a kind of subordination to the 
 intermediate work which affected not only their extent, but 
 their spirit : they were mere human wings of a Divine 
 centre, and were oppressed and quenched by the light that 
 towered above them; and were chiefly looked at, accordingly, 
 as foils to set off the ideal glory they embraced. The religions 
 of Nature and the Heathen world were reviewed chiefly 
 with intent to prove the " need of a Revelation ;" and the 
 History of the Church was read with the preconception of 
 a model purity and unity in the apostolic age, from which it 
 was one protracted decline into corruption. Where 
 the pras-christian ages of the world are cited to prove how 
 little man can find the truth, and the post-christian how 
 little he can keep it, they are inevitably examined chiefly on 
 their negative side, and it is vain to expect any genial 
 historical appreciation. The whole tendency of this 
 intellectual point of view is to draw into one absolute focus
 
 64 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 all the divineness of our human world ; to concentrate 
 attention upon it as the only glory ; and to glance at the 
 life on either side only to expose the depth of its darkness 
 or the worthlessness of its light. We cannot wonder at the 
 narrow and slighting estimate, long inherited from Puri- 
 tanism, of all except Biblical studies ; for to speak of 
 the " sufficiency of Scripture," what is it but to pronounce all 
 else superfluous ? 
 
 Many concessions in detail have long been made to more 
 comprehensive ideas, not only in our own Institution, but 
 in others where they might be less expected. But they 
 have entered incidentally under the plea and on the side of 
 secular knowledge, without affecting the main program as 
 originally conceived ; which still probably holds its ground, 
 on the tenure of unrevised habit, in many minds no longer 
 possessed by its fundamental principle. A desire yet 
 lingers to keep both philosophy and history at a distance 
 and in a merely ancillary position, to prevent their mixing 
 themselves with proper theology, to preserve the separate 
 integrity of Biblical studies as having an organism of their 
 own, and to make the interpretation of the sacred records 
 the final act of the student's career. If the meaning of 
 those writings, once ascertained, is really held to be decisive 
 and without appeal on every matter of which they speak, 
 nothing can be more natural than this desire. I recently 
 heard it most consistently expressed from the pulpit of a 
 neighbouring cathedral by one of the most eminent of our 
 living divines, who laid down the following positions :*that 
 our Lord by reading out of the prophet Isaiah in the 
 synagogue of Nazareth, demonstrated for us the infallible 
 inspiration of the Old Testament : that the commission 
 and powers he gave to his apostles assure us, directly or 
 indirectly, of the infallibility of all the New : that we are 
 bound to trust this testimony of his and all that it carries 
 with it, let appearances be what they may : that if the 
 
 * The cathedral was Westminster Abbey ; the divine, Rev. Dr. 
 Wordsworth.
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 65 
 
 naturalist, the astronomer, the geologist, the investigator 
 of primaeval history, are staggered by the picture of nature 
 and the spread of nations in the book of Genesis, or by the 
 reported miracles of Joshua and Jonah, they have nothing 
 to do but unreservedly submit their human knowledge to 
 the higher certainty of the Divine Word : that if our moral 
 sense revolts from any sentiment or act sanctioned by a 
 sacred writer, we must conform our conscience to his : 
 that demoniacal possession is a divinely authenticated fact 
 which no pretended law of nature is to be permitted to 
 dispute : that we are to dismiss as optical illusions of our 
 own minds every apparent discrepancy of reported fact or 
 error of expectation : that Philosophy and Criticism have 
 no office within Holy Writ except to remove its difficulties 
 and establish its harmony, assuming all its propositions to 
 be unconditionally true. In this view, certainly there can 
 be nothing ulterior to the question, " What saith the 
 Word ? " 
 
 From this position, however, we have been gradually but 
 irresistibly borne away. Within the last generation, Natural 
 Science, Comparative Philology, Historical Criticism, have 
 compelled a revision of many judgments previously unchal- 
 lenged by the boldest divines. When the first part of Mr. 
 W'ellbeloved's Translation of the Bible was published, it 
 was as yet too early to disturb the traditions of the origin 
 of mankind from a single pair, of the universal Deluge, of 
 the dispersion of races, and original unity of language. 
 Geologists were adducing fossil evidence of the flood : and 
 in our College class-rooms, where the teaching was never 
 behind the highest standard of the day, proofs w y ere 
 still adduced of the soundness of the Mosaic chronology 
 of the human race. Need I do more than name Mr. Ken- 
 rick's admirable " Essay on Primaeval History," in order to 
 furnish a landmark for the tides of opinion, and measure 
 the amount of change ? Nor is it more possible, within 
 the limits of the Christian records, longer to take our stand 
 on the absolutism of the letter. A recent pamphlet by a 
 
 VOL. IV. F
 
 66 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 member of the Church of England,* a pamphlet written 
 in a spirit not less reverential than intelligent, enumerates 
 some of the chief results of modern criticism, in order to 
 rouse attention to the new exigencies of theology, and saves 
 me the necessity of any statement of my own. He reminds 
 us that we must recognize an ascending progress of the 
 Hebrew religion, traceable throughout its records, taking a 
 new and sublimer start from the Advent of Christ, visibly 
 proceeding still through the Apostolic age, and probably 
 not to be arrested to the end of time : that the Evangelical 
 narratives cannot be received as infallible records of fact or 
 of discourse, in the face of the lesser discrepancies among 
 the Synoptical Gospels and the greater between them and 
 the remaining Gospel : that the " Apostolic Epistles are not 
 free from errors " of expectation, of interpretation, and of 
 reasoning : and, above all, that among the New-Testament 
 writers are found not simply different personal characteris- 
 tics in their expression of the same faith, but types of 
 doctrine materially different respecting the person and work 
 of Christ, and the scope and conditions of his religion. 
 These things, stated by a lay member of one of the most 
 stationary of Christian churches, may perhaps receive the 
 attention they require, as by no means the speculations of 
 a few extreme theologians, but the well-established results 
 of the most sober and conservative criticism that retains 
 any pretension to be criticism at all. As if to prepare for 
 this new era, we have long accustomed ourselves to an 
 alteration in our traditional phraseology ; speaking of Scrip- 
 ture not as ''the rule of faith and practice/' but as "con- 
 taining a record of divine Revelation," not necessarily 
 therefore to the exclusion of other things. 
 
 Consider then what is involved in this change. If divine 
 and human elements lie mixed in Scripture, mere textual 
 interpretation cannot ensure to us the pure object of our 
 
 * "Free Theological Inquiry the Duty of the Lnity." By a Lay 
 Member of the Church of England. Williams and Xorgate. London. 
 1858.
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 67 
 
 quest, and be the final act of our work : there is yet an 
 ulterior discrimination to be effected before the Sacred 
 Truth stands clear. It is not enough to reach the meaning 
 of the words : the critique, if it is to yield any guiding 
 result, must advance into the thought itself, and draw forth 
 the imperishable essence from the transitory accidents. The 
 end towards which all Christian theology presses forward is 
 still the same, the Person of Jesus Christ, as the organ of 
 Divine manifestation in our Humanity : but which is the 
 true view of his Person ? that of Matthew ? that of Paul ? 
 or that of John ? Are we to find the essence of his religion 
 in the humanities of the parables and the ethical depth of 
 the Sermon on the Mount, or in the mystic spirituality of 
 the discourses in the fourth Gospel ? These, with a host 
 of similar questions, remain over for reply, after the Inter- 
 preter has removed the last obscurity and given us all that 
 the writers meant. We need him as much as ever : we can 
 dispense with no part of the system of Biblical studies 
 which closed with him : but when he has played his part, 
 the curtain must not yet drop ; for he leaves us in the very 
 crisis of suspense, with the knot of the whole matter still 
 unresolved. The Scriptures which he has unfolded to us 
 contain indeed what is authoritatively above us, and is given 
 for the homage of natures better than our best ; but also 
 what we have left behind us, and cannot without deteriora- 
 tion mistake for the permanently holy and divine. They 
 open in the future a heavenly promise everlastingly true to 
 the human mind and heart; but they mingle with it 
 anticipations which have already missed their realization. 
 To exhibit this mixture and then leave the matter there, 
 still more to oscillate evasively between the old high ground 
 of scriptural finality and the liberal concessions which 
 utterly undermine it, is to make express provision for doubt 
 and uncertainty, by stopping short of the clearness of know- 
 ledge and the firmness of faith. Something more is needed, 
 if we are not to trifle with the problem of problems, and 
 make no attempt to relieve the divine and indestructible 
 
 F 2
 
 68 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 truth from its human and perishable associations. A critique 
 must be found for the Matter of Scripture, in addition to 
 the interpretation of its Words. 
 
 Is this then a thing impossible or presumptuous ? It 
 has not proved so in the case of the Mosaic Cosmogony, 
 which has yielded to the advance of the Natural Sciences, 
 leaving with us its sublime Theism unharmed : or in the 
 case of the Israelite atrocities, which our Moral Sense has 
 learned to charge on the passions of an unreclaimed 
 humanity instead of the inspiration of approving Heaven : 
 or in the case of the doctrine of the Logos, to which, though 
 it tinctures the whole meaning of our deepest gospel and 
 penetrates the very words of Christ, we are able to assign a 
 human growth by clear and intelligible steps. In these 
 palpable and admitted examples, what are the instruments 
 of our critique, which we apply as criteria to the very sub- 
 stance of the sacred writings ? They are the Sciences of 
 Nature, the verdicts of Conscience, the indications of 
 History : and if we press our question further, and ask, not 
 about the origin, but about the inherent truth of the doctrine 
 of the Logos, we have to seek all the grounds of the discussion 
 in the speculative Metaphysics of religion. In other words, 
 each kind of matter laid before us in Scripture comes into the 
 court of the faculty proper for its appreciation, and affects 
 us differently according as it is in harmony or discord with 
 the essential conditions of intellectual, moral, and spiritual 
 response. But these essential conditions are defined in two 
 ways : by historical investigation, so far as they are induc- 
 tively gathered from the phenomena and analogies of human 
 experience : by philosophical research, so far as their traces 
 lie in the inner constitution and limits of human nature. 
 It is determined, therefore, by the very nature of things, 
 which no arbitrary choice can alter, that historical and 
 philosophical knowledge has a regulative function with 
 respect to the theology of the letter ; and that the concep- 
 tion of an unconditional Biblical theology cannot be realized. 
 And no organization of studies can be so truly conservative
 
 AND SOMETHING MOKE. 69 
 
 as one which, attempting no strain upon facts as they arise, 
 shapes itself in sympathy with the real and natural springs 
 of faith and self-devotion. 
 
 If with the Divine element of Scripture we are brought, 
 in the present day, more freely to recognize the human ; on 
 the other hand, from the human world beyond the range of 
 Scripture we are less eager to exclude the Divine. The 
 fatal assumption that Heathendom and the first Christen- 
 dom were opposed to one another as unguided Reason and 
 unmixed Revelation, as bare Nature and exclusive Grace, 
 precluded formerly more than a timid and reluctant 
 sympathy with the true and noble elements of Pagan life. 
 I well remember (perhaps it is only a personal confession 
 which I make) the half-guilty feeling with which, in young 
 and fervent days, I found myself surprised into passionate 
 admiration by the story of Socrates, and taken captive by 
 words that seemed to me of unspeakable religious depth in 
 Plato, or even in Cicero and Seneca. I accused myself of 
 an unchristian perversity, a want of evangelical simplicity 
 and humbleness, because often Greek and Roman history 
 stirred the tides within me more than the image of Galilean 
 apostles, because the struggle for Hellenic freedom 
 appeared more sacred than the conquest of idolatrous 
 Canaan, and Leonidas nobler than Gideon, because, read 
 what I might in favour of a general resurrection in the body, 
 the Phaedon tempted me to hope rather for the immortality 
 of the soul. Every beauty and good that fastened wonder 
 or reverence on a world reputed alien from God, was felt to 
 detract from the glories of his chosen sphere, and to weaken 
 that contrast between a profane and a sacred realm on 
 which everything was staked. The time is surely come 
 when these artificial anxieties may disappear. It would be 
 a strange gospel, we now acknowledge, that should find 
 its interest and support in disparaging any gleams of truth 
 and goodness in the life of men ; and a poor sign of the 
 Holiest Spirit, that it should have no sympathy for what is 
 kindred to itself and springs from the very depths within us
 
 70 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 where it loves to dwell. The difference between the Chris- 
 tian and the Heathen we can no longer imagine to be, that 
 the one has, and the other has not, the Divine guide ; but 
 rather that the one knows Him, while the other does not, 
 a difference which does not hinder the unconscious grace 
 from being often intenser and higher than the conscious. 
 And so, the bondage is taken from our hearts : with the 
 more thoughful of the early Fathers of the church, we can 
 give a joyful recognition to God's ever-living Spirit in our 
 humanity wherever it ripens any fruit ; even should it look 
 as fair in Attica or Latium as in Antioch or Alexandria. 
 His preparing .Presence -with both the great races of the 
 ancient spiritual world, the Hellenic and the Hebrew, 
 with philosophers as with prophets, is so far from 
 diminishing that it rather doubles the magnitude of Christ's 
 function : making him truly " the desire of all nations : " 
 the supernatural focus towards which the separated paths 
 of rays converged and in which they blended : his Per- 
 sonality embodying the whole essence of their truth and 
 good : his self-sacrificing Death dropping whatever was in- 
 strumental and temporary : and his Risen Life lifting a per- 
 fected humanity into an object of eternal aspiration. 
 
 The general result of the whole survey is this : that while, 
 on the one hand, Historical Criticism has to take the place 
 of mechanical Harmonizing, and along with Moral and 
 Philosophical principles of appreciation to enter the in- 
 terior of Scripture ; on the other, a consecration passes out 
 upon knowledge once " profane," and draws all history 
 into the drama of Divine Revelation. There is no tendency 
 whatever in the present stage of theology to abate anything 
 of the old thoroughness of Biblical studies ; but there is an 
 imperative need to take them up as part of a wider system 
 and bring them into more genial relations with the whole 
 circle of mental culture, and especially with the other modes 
 by which human thought seeks an apprehension of the 
 Divine. 
 
 What no\v is to be the fruit of all our pains and toil ?
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 71 
 
 Be they ever so successful, we look for only a very simple, 
 yet surely not a trivial result. When all is done, we hope 
 to surrender back the student's mind to the pure and child- 
 like trusts, the self-forgetting love, the joyful zeal, which, 
 in proportion as his call is real, dedicated him to this 
 service at first. But then, it is one thing to have these 
 elementary pieties as native impulses, untouched by thought, 
 untempted by sophistic contradiction, and with no tenure 
 but momentary occupation. It is quite another, to hold 
 them by firm anchorage on their conscious grounds ; to 
 know all their bearings ; to have put the strain on all that 
 is least strong in them, and believe them still ; to be ready, 
 not only for their unhesitating utterance, but for their 
 deliberate and comprehensive defence ; and to place at the 
 disposal of their power, not a raw undisciplined nature, 
 but a mind rich in the long heritage of human thought, 
 and deep in experience of its own. I do not deny the 
 greatness of even blind affection turned on truly heavenly 
 things, or the contagion of its mighty fervour; but though 
 it may be better to have blind leaders of the blind than 
 that all should go astray, yet it is the glory of Christian 
 guidance that it demands open-eyed vision, and seeks God 
 in the day-light of reality, not within the closed lids of 
 ignorance or of ccstacy. I am aware it is sometimes said, 
 that too much learning dries up the inner springs of spiritual 
 life, or drains them off into some mere intellectual recep- 
 tacle : and it is an old way of explaining the want of glow 
 in an educated preacher, to suppose that his books have 
 damped out his native fire. If any one will show me a 
 single instance in which an original enthusiasm has been 
 quenched by culture, and one who might have been the 
 prophet has turned into the pedant, I will listen to the 
 plea. The fervours of an early piety I have seen die 
 down for want of the ventilating winds of labour and of 
 prayer ; or lie as spent ashes on the hearth of a nature 
 grown selfish ; or thickened into the smoke of party-passion 
 and fanatic fear : but never dimmed, like mere watch-fires
 
 72 PLEA FOR BIBLICAL STUDIES 
 
 of the night, by any rising dawn or spreading horizon of 
 the mind. Preaching, where it is not a routine or a pre- 
 tence, (perhaps likewise where it is), is eminently an ex- 
 pression of the whole man : Religion spares no part of him, 
 any more than God omits himself from here or there in the 
 universe of life : the larger therefore his faculties and the 
 wider his range of insight and sympathy, the more nume- 
 rous are the keys on which the Divine touch may strike, 
 and the fuller the chords through which the Word will peal. 
 And if, under the practical difficulties of our problem, we 
 cannot expect, any more than other bodies of Christians, 
 to escape our proportion of temperaments too quiet for 
 their work, still, even at the worst we can suppose, who can 
 deny that, among dry men also, the educated is more 
 tolerable than the dunce ? He will at least teach you 
 something, though he may not stir you ; and by preserving 
 the alliance of the religion of Christ with cultivated sense 
 and pure taste and moral worth, save it from every taint of 
 degradation. 
 
 While it is our united and earnest desire to send forth 
 effective preachers, as well as faithful representatives, of 
 Christ's holy gospel, and while we shrink from none of the 
 fair responsibilities of our trust, we would deprecate a 
 weak dependence on the resources of any mere teaching 
 or discipline in this respect. The limit is soon reached 
 beyond which training for the pulpit cannot go. The func- 
 tion of such training is simply critical, not dynamic ; it can 
 restrain, correct, and purify ; it cannot empower and in- 
 spire. It may free the inner feeling from some of the 
 stiffness of its outward instrument, and help it to a more 
 pliant medium of expression ; but that inward spring itself, 
 on which all but the whole depends, is beyond our world, 
 and remains with the grace of God and the fidelity of the 
 private conscience. The discipline of life, which makes 
 the student forget himself, will do more than all our in- 
 structions that oblige him to study himself. When the 
 growth of faith and affection within is strong enough to
 
 AND SOMETHING MORE. 73 
 
 burst and fling away the husk of selfish fear, it is surprising 
 how the powers of expression expand, and hang out unex- 
 pected leaves and blossoms to the light. Only the warmth 
 of a living experience is adequate to this : contact with 
 sorrowful realities ; occasions of genial sympathy and stren- 
 uous duty ; a transition from the communion of silent ideas 
 to the many-toned voices of humanity. So far as this dis- 
 cipline is opened by labours in the Mission-house and the 
 School, our students have ever shown themselves spon- 
 taneously eager to embrace it. So long as they continue 
 to do their part in keeping the just balance between the 
 critical exercises of the lecture-room and the practical ac- 
 tivities of religious faith and love, we shall not despair of 
 realizing the hopes of our churches ; and for ourselves, of 
 leaving behind the monument most worthy of a Christian 
 ambition, a generation of successors greater in every 
 spiritual dimension than ourselves.
 
 V. 
 
 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH IN 
 MODERN SOCIETY.* 
 
 IN entering upon a new term of academic work, our 
 thought and feeling spontaneously look forward, and a 
 fresh spring of hope urges us into a welcome future. A 
 natural light of joy rests upon every open opportunity : 
 clear as yet from the shadow of disappointment or unfaith- 
 fulness, it awakens in the young the thirst for an untried 
 experience ; in the good, the zeal for unspoiled duty ; and 
 even in the ripest age, the irrepressible faith that the errors 
 of the past may be repaired, and every worthy conception 
 pressed nearer to its accomplishment. Yet, while sharing 
 to the full the thankful and elastic spirit of such a time, I 
 cannot pass the threshold of this Anniversary without 
 remembering the various experiences from which we meet 
 upon it here, and which, unless vicissitude is to go without 
 its wisdom, may well give a deeper and more earnest tone 
 to our joint pursuits. To not a few of us the colouring of 
 life has been changed and mellowed otherwise than by the 
 lapse of months ; and the studies awaiting us are guarded 
 by gentle images of sorrow or sobered hopes of joy. And 
 while our ranks, which, ere we parted, sickness had so 
 thinned, are now happily filled in and even recruited with 
 unusual force, we have but to look back over the year to 
 see how large a promise for the future is needed, to com- 
 pensate the public losses of the past. Since our last open- 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1860.
 
 76 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 ing day many a faithful labourer, whose name was as a 
 household word among us, has laid his burthen and his 
 honours down : the broad popular eloquence of George 
 Harris has handed over its marvels to tradition ; the pure 
 simplicity, the assiduous fidelity, the apostolic piety of 
 Benjamin Carpenter are lost to us, except in the healthy- 
 fruits with which they covered his field of toil ; and, in 
 more direct bereavement of our Alma Mater, the voice has 
 been silenced of one of her eldest and dearest sons ; a 
 voice so sweet and tender, so charged with gracious wis- 
 dom, so full-toned in its humanity, so trustful in its devo- 
 tion, that to those who had felt its power, the name of 
 Joseph Hutton must for ever represent the very soul of 
 Pity, Charity, and Faith. And if, in reckoning up the 
 buried treasures of the year, we suffer the natural affinities 
 of love and admiration to carry us beyond the rigid lines of 
 country or of system, how can we forget that sad Flo- 
 rentine grave which has quenched the light of so much 
 nobleness ? or help feeling that, in the loss of Theodore 
 Parker, the nerve of natural piety, the arm of righteous 
 reform, the courage of every generous hope, are enfeebled 
 not for his world alone but for ours too ? In days like 
 ours, when religious faith has lost its hold alike of the base 
 and of the intellectual summit of society, when the life of 
 the hour has grown foreign to the creeds of ancient cen- 
 turies, and free access to men's hearts is choked by a barri- 
 cade of ecclesiastical traditions, days of temporizing in 
 the Church and of egotism in sects, when theology wins 
 its mental emancipation by moral casuistry, and Christian 
 zeal borrows its inspiration from party policy, we can ill 
 spare any one of those guileless and unselfish agencies. 
 But let us not repine at the successive transmission of 
 God's trust : let us rather take up the dropped torch of 
 their fidelity, that it may pass from hand to hand, and, fed 
 with a purer oil within each spirit, may shed a brighter 
 light and a more generous warmth from age to age. 
 
 The Institution whose work we resume to-day provides.
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 77 
 
 for the full Academic training of a permanent succession 
 of Nonconformist Ministers. Its very design, therefore, 
 assumes the perpetual need in Christian society of religious 
 guides and instructors ; the natural relation of their work 
 to the whole circle of human knowledge ; and the possi- 
 bility of a Scientific Theology where there is no bespoken 
 conformity. To these principles, and to the high estimate 
 which they imply of the Christian preacher's office, we 
 firmly adhere, in the face of social discouragement and of 
 philosophical disparagement. The accomplished Historian 
 of English Civilization propounds, indeed, a law which, if 
 it were established, would put the mark of impotency and 
 degradation on all such aims and labours as engage us 
 here.* The improvement of mankind, he tells us, is due 
 entirely, under similar physical conditions, to Intellectual 
 discovery, and is absolutely unaffected by Moral and 
 Religious causes: while the arts and sciences are "cumu- 
 lative " and put themselves out to interest from age to age, 
 greatness of character and purity of faith are but the talent 
 in the napkin, incapable of increase. The virtues and the 
 crimes cancel each other. The hero and the saint are 
 balanced by the traitor and the libertine, and leave no 
 residuary product for the world's heritage : the good and 
 evil, after temporary struggle, are alike absorbed, and the 
 permanent half-tide of human nature stands ever at the 
 same level. In spite of the seeming freedom and sublime 
 anticipations of conscience, the actions of mankind are 
 necessitated in their origin and impotent in their results. 
 Nay, it does not satisfy this theory to say that moral and 
 religious truth, from their stationary character, are indif- 
 ferent to the progress of our race ; they exist, it would 
 seem, chiefly in order to be denied ; and though inopera- 
 tive in themselves, they become negatively beneficent 
 when they stimulate the intellect to contradiction, and 
 introduce one of those ages of scepticism which are the 
 
 * " History of Civilization in England." By Henry Thomas Buckle. 
 Vol. I.
 
 78 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 highest landmarks of civilization. These paradoxes could 
 not have been more damping to the enthusiasm of the 
 Christian student and disciple, had they been expressly 
 designed for his humiliation. Are they true ? Then, in 
 dedicating himself to moral and religious labour, he is 
 addressing the human weakness instead of evolving the 
 divine strength of our nature, and missing the real hope 
 and glory of the world in ineffectual dreams of a " kingdom 
 of heaven." Are they true ? Then, in trusting the inner 
 voices of his humanity as the primary tones of an ethical 
 and spiritual philosophy, to be first revealed in their in- 
 terpretation and then verified by appeal to a wider con- 
 sciousness, he is but chasing his own echoes and fancying 
 them the music of the spheres. Are they true ? Then, in 
 studying the Religions of the Past, he is studying not the 
 living power, but only the dead sign, of its stage of 
 growth : the sacred literature which records the commun- 
 ings between the human and the Divine mind, and marks 
 the ascending course of faith and aspiration ; the poetry 
 which embodies the ideal admirations of mankind ; the 
 laws and manners which betray their sense of moral right ; 
 the memorials of doctrinal struggle and speculative belief, 
 the Dialogues of Plato, the Confessions of Augustine, 
 the Thoughts of Pascal ; all that most draws the Christian 
 scholar and best assuages his reverential thirst, must be 
 held of no account and eliminated from the dynamics of 
 history. The only grand result of a true survey of the Past 
 is, that it yields huge averages which swallow up the hopes 
 of individual effort, and drown the whispered appeals to 
 men's hearts, taken one by one. 
 
 This doctrine is the newest form of that old Nightmare 
 of Necessity which always returns to sit upon the breast of 
 every age whose spiritual powers are asleep. As often 
 happens with such spectres of the mind, it has an outline 
 shape of truth ; but it is empty, and the weight that seems 
 so oppressive is a delusion, which a spring of effort or a 
 start of feeling will suffice to dissipate. There is certainly
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 79 
 
 a sense in which the distinction may be justly drawn 
 between the intellectual part of our nature as progressive, 
 and the rest as constant. There is no assignable limit to 
 the new apprehensions of truth which we may gain ; while 
 from new forms of feeling and of will, new, that is, to our 
 humanity, we are no doubt precluded. It is always pos- 
 sible to discover an unsuspected law, to bring to light a 
 latent class of facts or relations ; but not to invent a novel 
 passion or open a hidden field of obligation. The human 
 reason accordingly, however uniform in its constitution 
 through all time, has a history of its own by which it traces 
 its course from age to age, and so multiplies its aspects as 
 almost to disguise its self-identity : the natural science of 
 one century may be obsolete in another ; and Thales, 
 Paracelsus, and Faraday, could we bring them together, 
 would be mutually unintelligible. The springs of action 
 and affection, on the other hand, are immortal and 
 unchangeable : the love and hate, the terror, the pity, the 
 sorrow, the crime, that are woven into the epic and drama 
 of a remote antiquity have their fibres still thrilling in the 
 heart of to-day ; the same deeds kindle us to scorn or 
 admiration ; the same incidents startle our laughter or our 
 tears ; and Homer and Sophocles, Shakspere and Schiller, 
 could they speak together, would find their separate tones 
 flow into a common harmony. It is precisely this persis- 
 tency in the fundamental bases of our nature that gives to 
 literature its unwithering charm, and that binds in one 
 great kindred the distant ages which the inequalities of 
 science would estrange. So far, then, we can go with Mr. 
 Buckle ; we unreservedly allow that, while the movement 
 of our humanity is chiefly traceable in shifting lines of 
 knowledge, its essential uniformity is most strikingly 
 evinced by the inextinguishable force of the same passions, 
 conscience and reverence. 
 
 But are we on this account to say, that the intellect 
 which is thus impelled to advance is also the impelling 
 power ? that, if it were there alone, its step would be as
 
 So FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 swift and strong? that the other elements of our nature 
 might abate or increase, sleep or wake, combine or clash as 
 they will, without affecting its competency as the agent of 
 civilization ? Far from it. The cognitive capacities of man 
 stir only at the bidding of his affective and voluntary facul- 
 ties : did his wants never quicken his perception, did his 
 resentments never plunge him into strife, did his pity never 
 press against his resources, did his wonder never set up its 
 fermentation in his thought, his rational existence would 
 remain a mere dormant possibility. The whole dynamics 
 of his life lie in his spontaneous impulses, his regulative 
 morals, his religious sentiments ; these it is that work his 
 understanding, dictating its ambition, determining its direc- 
 tion, sustaining its perseverance : and the historian who 
 disregards their condition in order to take account of the 
 arts and sciences alone, is like the meteorologist who 
 should observe only the clouds, and discharge from his 
 reckoning the winds that blow them. Call them, if you 
 please, unprogressive in themselves, they are at least the con- 
 ditions of all progress, the constants of our human world 
 that are the base of all its variables, the conservative 
 elements which give the continuity to times and nations, 
 and out of relation to which the contrasted phenomena of 
 change and revolution cannot be understood. As the 
 political life of a people results from the ever-swaying 
 balance of a principle of order on the one hand and of move- 
 ment on the other, and can never be interpreted under 
 severance of the two, so the civilization of the world is pro- 
 duced by imperishable affections operating under mutable 
 conditions, and, when described without reference to both, 
 becomes the subject of a mere party history. 
 
 The stationary aspect attributed to the moral elements of 
 life is not insisted on in so strict a sense as to exclude the 
 ebb and flow of character. Fluctuations are acknowledged, 
 but are said to cancel one another and be without aggre- 
 gate effect ; and the course of intellectual improvement is 
 supposed to go on independently and undisturbed through
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 81 
 
 the neap tide and the flood of good and evil. Surely such 
 assumption overlooks the prime conditions of all mental 
 action. Does it, then, make no difference to the Thought 
 from what source the Thinker's inspiration comes, 
 whether from the passions of a bad heart, or the love 
 and wonder of the good ? or whether he is torn in self- 
 conflict, or brings to his meditations the unbroken force of 
 an harmonious nature ? Are there no states of the Will 
 which drain off the whole intellectual force, or turn it into 
 a morbid instrument of delusion? Had moral causes nothing 
 to do with the rise, and nothing with the decay, of the 
 Hellenic and the Roman civilization ? Why, then, did the 
 Athens of Pericles sink, with all its accumulated accom- 
 plishments, philosophy and art, to the Athens of Herodes 
 Atticus ? and the city of the Scipios descend to deify a 
 Domitian and a Caracalla ? It was at the awakening call 
 of national danger that these great peoples consolidated 
 their social union, and becoming ennobled by the dis 
 cipline of sacrifice and rich in the traditions of virtue, 
 earned for themselves the materials, the energy, the 
 security, for intellectual advance. And it was when the 
 springs of the common faith and life were first weakened 
 by dissensions and then broken by overwhelming military 
 power, when private selfishness and licence, under the 
 shadow of public servitude, had assumed the monstrous 
 forms attested by Polybius and denounced by Juvenal, that 
 not only the mental power of the Present became enervated, 
 but the very genius and science of the Past seemed to vivify 
 and bless no more. Were the hoarded capital of thought 
 and knowledge the true measure and force of human pro- 
 gress, the Alexandria of the Ptolemies should rank higher 
 than the young Greece whose affluence she gathered and 
 appropriated : yet with what barren result were the rock- 
 streams of Helikon and Parnes diverted to the sands and 
 swamps of a mere observant nature ! The whole history of 
 Roman decline is but a protracted proof of the irrever- 
 sible dependence of social civilization on moral vitality. 
 
 VOL. IV. G
 
 82 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 Paganism, on the one hand, heir of all the culture of the past, 
 entrenched in every stronghold of the earth, commanding 
 boundless material power and the more formidable armoury 
 of opinion and of scorn, dignified by countless traditions of 
 heroism and devotion, and secured alike in the interests of 
 the great, the tastes of the learned, and the passions of the 
 people, was nevertheless unable to hold its own ; the con- 
 centrated intellect and resource of the world wasted away 
 from it through a mysterious inner dearth ; and with its 
 lips of proud and delicate speech, with its eye still brilliant 
 and its brow still clear, it pined with phthisis at the heart, 
 till the ivory sceptre dropped from its hand. And, con- 
 versely, Christianity, without a favouring alliance in the 
 present or the past, rude in utterance, provincial in garb, 
 inexpert in thought, passes from city to city, noiselessly 
 lifting the latch of private life, and after a word or two 
 entertained as an angel that had entered unawares ; and 
 soon, through no other power than that of a new trust and 
 the simple surprise of a divine love, it takes up whatever 
 Heathendom was laying down, stops with a breath of 
 purity the decay and desolation of the world, and begins 
 from inward centres that social organism which was to 
 substitute for universal empire an indivisible humanity. 
 The civilization which Intellect could not avail to keep, it 
 was reserved for Faith to win. 
 
 There is a marked difference, however, which I am quite 
 willing to admit, between intellectual and moral force in 
 their mode of transmission and their liability to waste and 
 die. Knowledge, by its very nature, grows in extent ; 
 character in depth: and hence the former is certainly 
 " cumulative " according to a method not predicable of the 
 latter. Truth, once discovered, may be put on record, 
 together with the evidence revealing it : or may be em- 
 bodied in some instrument and method of art, whose 
 rationale it supplies ; and, in either case, it is thenceforth 
 disengaged from all dependence on its discoverer and 
 becomes the impersonal heritage of mankind. Bradley's
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 83 
 
 paper on the aberration of light, Fourier's researches with 
 regard to heat, placed certain natural laws within human 
 cogni/ance, though no duplicates of their authors' genius 
 and skill ever should appear. The air-pump incorporates 
 the fact of atmospheric weight, the prism the law of refrac- 
 tion, the stereoscope the conditions of solid vision, though 
 the existence of Otto Guericke and Snell and Wheatstone 
 were unparalleled or forgotten. The positions thus secured 
 by the investigations of one age serve as the point of depar- 
 ture for the industry of the next ; Kepler's laws for the 
 celestial physics of Newton, the discoveries of Lavoisier and 
 Davy for the researches of Liebig, the observations of 
 Galileo and Huygens for the instrument of Foucault. By 
 such perpetual conversion of the qucesita of a prior period 
 into the data of a posterior, death seems to become in- 
 different to science ; and amid the fall of generations the 
 intellect of mankind remains apparently immortal. To 
 this, it must be admitted, there is nothing analogous in the 
 moral and religious history of the world. The Philosopher 
 may bequeath his discoveries ; but not the Hero his virtue, 
 or the Saint his sanctity. Character, religious insight, holy 
 faith, all the spiritual attributes which speak to the con- 
 science and awaken the devout trusts of our nature, are 
 direct personal emanations and cannot be detached from 
 the individual life of pure and lofty minds. The thoughts 
 they think, indeed, may shape themselves into language, 
 and go down to distant ages as the ethical wisdom or the 
 prophet's vision or the lyric hymn of those who were most 
 near to God; and from such words, written with the inmost 
 spirit's flame, the fire never wholly dies. But no literature is 
 able, like mathematical and physical exposition, to supersede 
 and replace the living personality of the writer, and so to 
 stand in his stead within the universal human intelligence, 
 that, if only his propositions remain, it would matter not 
 though he had never been. Science is the cold and neutral 
 speech of Nature to the watching mind through the acci- 
 dental organ of a man ; literature, especially in its voices 
 
 G 2
 
 84 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 of affection, conscience and faith, is the great confessional 
 of humanity, the appeal of the lonely to the universal heart, 
 the cry of deep to deep when the waves ride high and 
 hands are stretched towards the Eternal Rock : it is essen- 
 tially personal, our inner conference with one another, 
 addressing itself to the sympathies, and needing the per- 
 petual verification, of a common nature. Words and signs, 
 which are adequate as the record of material laws and 
 quantitative relations, are but an imperfect vehicle of this 
 subtler action of the free spirit ; and when divested of the 
 aid of living light from the eye and tones from the voice 
 and all the mysterious effluence of a kindling presence, 
 give but a cold and faint reflection of the struggling 
 thought within. And, were the expression ever so perfect, 
 it speaks only to a congenial apprehension ; to the inter- 
 preter without sympathy it has no meaning, but strikes 
 dead upon the ear, like the maxims of experience to the 
 child, or the music of sorrow to the heart stone-deaf. 
 Moral and spiritual truth cannot dispense with reproduc- 
 tion in every mind : it has no efficacy except so far as it 
 takes us up, one by one, and flnds for itself fresh ground 
 and response in each recipient : re-discovered as a real 
 divine presence in the consciousness of individuals, it 
 spreads by numerical multiplication rather than by quanti- 
 tative enlargement; and as its chief differences are in depth 
 and intensity, it defies the custody of language, and cannot, 
 by mere record, grow from age to age. What, then, is the 
 just inference from this distinction between natural and 
 spiritual truth, the one being cumulative in magnitude, 
 the other personal in its repetition ? Is it that the former 
 alone holds the key of civilization and claims our whole 
 attention ; while the latter, in its sameness, may be thrown 
 out of the account ? Not at all ; for the moral repetition 
 may be, and assuredly is, a not less indispensable condition 
 than the intellectual cumulation : but simply this ; that 
 while science has in itself a certain principle of self-preser- 
 vation, and, once embodied in a treatise or an instrument,
 
 AV MODERN SOCIETY. 85 
 
 may bear desertion for a while and tide over a period of 
 darkness, moral and religious influence cleaves to living 
 persons, spreads by the mutual understanding of affection 
 and reverence, and dies from the heart of a selfish and 
 corrupt age. That which books and arts can do for know- 
 ledge, must, in higher things, be committed to the 
 ministry of faithful and devout men : who, daring to yield 
 themselves up as organs of divine truth and love, may 
 awaken in other minds the echoes of righteousness and 
 holy trust, and carry the contagion of faith, hope and 
 charity, within the reach of each several soul. Suppose all 
 such agencies suspended ; let there be none to interpret 
 the handwriting of the Moral Law and the whispers of the 
 Spirit ; let the opaque curtains of the actual be drawn close 
 around us for a generation and shut out every unrealized 
 vision and darken the chamber of every seer ; and it will 
 soon be evident that, whether moral and religious truth can 
 increase or not, it assuredly can dwindle : as the folds of 
 appetite and interest grow thicker inwards, its sound is 
 stifled ; it shrinks to a mere potential point ; and has to be 
 recovered ab initio, when, through some shock of rescue, 
 its dumb and torpid age is gone. "That which is born of 
 the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the spirit is 
 spirit :'' low and selfish desires breed their own like in every 
 character around, till society swarms with their deformity, 
 and everything of fairer feature is forgotten and disbelieved; 
 and the living fires of goodness, in like manner, the 
 heavenly temper, the hidden sacrifice, the repose of sim- 
 plicity, the energy of utter trust, spread by proximity 
 from soul to soul, and grow numerous in answering recog- 
 nition, till multitudes are fused into unity of light and love. 
 If, then, intellect requires for its advance only antecedent 
 knowledge, though it be for ages dead ; if conscience and 
 faith, even to hold their own, need the presence and the 
 voice of living goodness and devotion ; it is clear that, 
 while the former has resources for ensuring itself, the latter 
 must have its personal propaganda, its prophets of the
 
 86 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 open word, its preachers by the silent life, in every 
 generation. 
 
 The distinction already drawn, that our intellectual range 
 has its advance in extent, our spiritual apprehension in 
 depth, enables us to estimate the frequent taunt, that, at 
 least within the circle of the Christian revelation, morals, 
 metaphysics and theology have disclosed and can disclose 
 no new truths. Suppose it were so ; the fact would still not 
 help us forward in our question, whether the disclosure of 
 new truths is the sole force of civilization, or whether the 
 deeper sense of old truths has not its essential influence as 
 well. So far as these provinces become fruitful of discovery, 
 they would themselves lie within the intellectual domain, 
 and could only swell the triumph of its proud power. The 
 real state of the case perhaps is this : human wonder 
 directs itself into two fields, related in reality, divided in 
 our apprehension ; viz. (i) the play and flow of phenomena, 
 by which, in this universe, the scenes are ever shifting 
 before the observing eye, and through which the detecting 
 intellect reads and registers a stated order of change ; and 
 (2) the eternal ground, the uncreated conditions, the self- 
 existing Cause, whence, as unchanging, the successions of 
 change all come. In the former field, we note what 
 evanescently happens : in the latter, what ever is. Both of 
 them make themselves a home within us through appro- 
 priate faculties of our nature ; the one opening communi- 
 cation with our perceptive and generalizing powers ; the 
 other with the pure Reason and Conscience. As the 
 objects of the first are the endless transients, of the second 
 the simple eternities, of the world, it is evident that, in 
 proportion as they both see truly, the cognition of the one 
 must move on and reckon anew ; while that of the other 
 must stand and only more deeply gaze ; and did this test 
 fail or shift, of discovery in Science, of constancy in Morals 
 and Religion, the essence of the two would be confounded, 
 and the pretensions of both upset. Is this distinction, 
 then, consonant as it is with the nature of the objects
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 7 
 
 known, any disparagement of the steady term ? Can it be 
 less important to the integrity and force of faculty whence 
 all civilizing impulse must come, that we should present 
 the open and sensitive eye to the patient infinitudes, than 
 that we should keep accurate account of the laws of passing 
 change ? If our foresight of the facts of life depends on 
 the right reading of its laws of natural succession, our 
 insight into its spirit depends on the interpretation of its 
 abiding and divine realities ; and though we cannot say 
 that, by truly construing the unchangeable Moral Law re- 
 flected in our nature and that eternal Mind where it is 
 self-luminous, we ever gain new material arts or wider 
 phenomenal vision, who can doubt that our whole tone of 
 sentiment and affection may be thus transformed, and our 
 entire personality be harmonized with the conditions amid 
 which we live ? Strange indeed would it be, if in a world 
 wherein God dwells, revealing Himself in the constitution 
 of its agents and on the field of its history, it could be 
 neutral to its civilization whether this master-key to its 
 whole meaning were reverently applied or absolutely 
 missed ! 
 
 In truth, the animating spring of all improvement, in 
 individuals and in societies, is not their knowledge of the 
 actual but their conception of the possible. To the 
 personal conscience there is ever present a higher than it 
 has reached, a light beyond which throws a perpetual 
 shadow on the track behind. And if the social reformer 
 who takes his vow against some public sin, successfully 
 defies the cold cautions of experience, it is because the 
 vision of a purified future steadies his eye and nerves his 
 arm. And when a nation, after being parcelled out and 
 crushed for generations beneath cruel and stupid tyrannies, 
 rises in an hour, shakes off not its fetters only, but its 
 jealousies, vindictiveness and lassitude, and proclaims its 
 genius to be one, generous and free, this is no mere 
 revulsion from a degraded past : it is that some noble 
 leader's dream of hope has fixed before the people's mind
 
 88 FACTORS OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 an image glorious in its simplicity, which is their guiding 
 star through the wilds and dangers they must pass. But for 
 this irrepressible idea, sleeping or waking at the heart of our 
 humanity, we should have no standard by which to try the 
 present and measure its deformities and sins ; and until it 
 emerges from an idea into a faith, till it stands with us not 
 for a prismatic semblance, but for the only real, not for a 
 dream of our own, but for a thought of God, it can only 
 breathe a sadness into life, and touch it with the flush of a 
 hectic beauty : it may shape itself into creations of Art ; it 
 may speak in tones of Poetry ; but it will lay no powerful 
 hold upon the springs of the Will, inspire no sacrifice, dare 
 no conflict. This is the very function of Morals and 
 Religion, this conversion of ideal thoughts into spiritual 
 realities and solemn duties ; and wherever there speaks to 
 us a true interpreter, able to withdraw the veil of our inmost 
 conscience, it is always to discover a divine substance 
 under the form of some human dream, to detect an ever- 
 lasting authority in some flitting surmise, to snatch us from 
 the idle pathos of our poetic soliloquies, and set us abashed 
 before them as tones from the living Word of God. So 
 completely is our nature constituted to answer such appeal, 
 that, till it reaches us, a sense of falsehood cleaves to every- 
 thing, and \ve have no content ; and few are burdened with 
 spirits more uncertain, tempers more corrosive, convictions 
 more precarious, than those who attempt to live only 
 within the walls and by the rules of visible experience. 
 Try to teach mankind by the mere maxims and expositions 
 of external prudence and rectitude ; offer them the whole 
 code of wisdom deduced from the ' ; natural laws ;" abate 
 every ideal claim, and ask them for nothing beyond their 
 immediate powers ; shew them that you have brought 
 everything down to their own terms, and made it rational, 
 easy and rewarding : and do you think you have found 
 your way to either their better reason or their hearts ? On 
 the contrary, they will turn from you flattened and dis- 
 pirited, thinking meanly of a life whose possibilities are so
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 89 
 
 soon exhausted and of a nature from which you dare 
 demand no more : they cannot bear this weary level ; they 
 feel the stirring of some restless wing that would show them 
 a deeper depth, a higher height ; they know themselves 
 made to sin upon a greater scale, and to be snatched into 
 a sublimer redemption, than your unimpeachable rules and 
 warnings contemplate. Humanity, left to itself, grows sick 
 of its own company, and gasps for the relief of a holier air ; 
 and duty, however clearly seen and owned, remains languid 
 and half done, except by the spirit that can rise beyond it. 
 Not till the conscience has caught the vision of a divine 
 perfection do the- small human graces shine with any light. 
 To this ideal constitution of our nature the Christian 
 revelation, need I say, perfectly corresponds. What does 
 its chief message set before us but a " kingdom of heaven," 
 where the inner meaning of this world shall at length be 
 realized, and man shall no longer disappoint the thought of 
 God in creating him ? And is not this hope presented to 
 us by One in whose own person it was realized, the 
 spiritual head of our humanity, whose immortal life shines 
 down upon us till it has drawn all men to its likeness ? 
 The whole appeal of Christianity is to secret and ideal 
 relations that transcend the sphere of inductive experience ; 
 to the unbreathed thoughts that lurk behind the act, the 
 tender purities that shrink from speech aloud ; to the faith 
 which " endures as seeing him who is invisible ; " to the 
 charity which keeps " from the left hand what the right hand 
 doeth ; '' to the hope " that is not seen ; " to the " mystery 
 that doth not yet appear;" to the spirit '"'which searcheth 
 deep things," and whose " witness" ''cannot be uttered ; " 
 to the " life which is hid with Christ in (icd." The power, 
 the sanctity, the solace of the gospel, all flow from this 
 image of divine things behind the earthly and the human ; 
 an image which no statistics of physical law can supersede 
 or blot out, but whose colours, unless what is highest in 
 our nature and the past deceives us,--- will continue to gleam
 
 90 FACTORS' OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH 
 
 through the dust of this world's course, and light up the 
 darkness of its end. 
 
 Though, however, moral and religious teaching can never 
 be a copy of the actual world, but always of a divine ideal 
 that transcends it, yet, in order to apply it to the relations 
 and consciousness of men, it must keep clear of all 
 variance with their widening knowledge and highest feel- 
 ing : it must be pliant to the expanding pressure of new 
 and nobler thought; and take care never to be the material 
 contradiction, but always the holy transfiguration, of the 
 universe, of history, of life, as the freshest and largest 
 intelligence represents them. This necessity it is that 
 renders it impossible to dispense with the fullest mental 
 culture in those who aspire to a share in the Christian 
 guidance of their time, and demands of them that they 
 keep well abreast of the science, the scholarship, the 
 philosophy of their age. The "kingdom of heaven" is 
 not the same in its picture, though continuous in its spirit, 
 through the centuries as they succeed : once it was the 
 little Hebrew realm ; to the Baptist it was Messiah's 
 coming ; to the Apostles the return of Christ and the end 
 of the historic aeons ; to the Chiliasts the Millennium; to 
 the medieval Catholicism the Roman theocracy ; to the 
 Evangelical Protestants the invisible Church of the elect ; 
 to a few the life to come ; to all, according to the measure 
 of their conception, the Divine thought and life in the 
 world. It has transmigrated from form to form as each 
 became too small to hold it, or was dissolved by the touch 
 of time ; and now, amid the riches of our modern ex- 
 perience, beneath the canopy of Herschel's sky, upon 
 the surface of Lyell's earth, at the end of Bunsen's ages 
 of humanity, and in presence of Miillcrs conspectus of 
 tongues and peoples, it can never resume its antiquated 
 shapes ; nor dare we finally fix it with a Lo ! here, or I,o ! 
 there ; but can only wait upon the seasons of an expanding 
 Providence, knowing that through all the "kingdom of 
 God is within us." 1'Yom the mere fact that Theology
 
 IN MODERN SOCIETY. 91 
 
 is not so much one of the special segments of knowledge, 
 as the comprehension of them all under the light and 
 within the embrace of spiritual faith, it comes into contact 
 with all the lines of human research : it belies its very 
 nature when it rests content with the cram of professional 
 learning, or only fills the torrent of a narrow zeal ; and in 
 its discipline it needs no less a genuine intellectual catho- 
 licity than, in its application, an unhesitating breadth and 
 warmth of love. Whilst the simple devotedness of a pure 
 and pious mind is a power unspeakably higher than any 
 mere mental gift, it cannot in our time put itself forth with 
 its proper efficacy, except under condition of competent 
 sympathy with the modes and images of thought that 
 distinguish the present from the past. In different strata 
 of society the exigencies of ministration are doubtless in 
 some degree different ; though I believe there are none 
 where the apprehensive tact and ready resource and refined 
 bearing of the scholar and the gentleman will not be felt as 
 powerful aids to the charity and devotion of the Christian. 
 But whatever scope there may be, in the great Infirmary of 
 human ills, for faithful labour in every form, some at least 
 there ought ever to be who, while not slow to bind the 
 wounded and tend the cup of cold water, can look beyond 
 the suffering symptoms of the hour, or even the epidemic 
 of the clay, and following the maladies of our humanity 
 to their deepest ground can obey the Supreme Physician's 
 voice, " Bring them hither to me.''
 
 VI. 
 
 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 . IN THEOLOGY.* 
 
 THE act of finality which, two hundred years ago, shut 
 up the future of the Church of England, opened it 
 for the exiles whom it flung upon the world. The Non- 
 conformists, discharged from their ecclesiastical allegiance, 
 had to break with the past ; and, like colonists landed on 
 an untrodden shore, to trace the lines of their own spiritual 
 commonwealth, to plant its fields with such seeds of 
 promise as they had, and build, according to their own 
 ideal, their city of God. Driven from the settled territory 
 of tradition and usage, they were sent forth as explorers of 
 new possibilities beyond the beaten track of experience. 
 The National Church, relinquishing to them all untried 
 forms of religious faith and life, proclaimed for herself, 
 " Here I take my stand and keep the trust committed 
 to me ; I guard the eternal truth, for which there is no 
 movement, but only rest." And certainly there is some- 
 thing majestic in the quiet persistency of her witness 
 to divine things, something that seems to represent their 
 own unchangeableness. Day by day in her cathedrals, 
 week by week in her parish churches, her prayer, her 
 penitence, her hope, have poured themselves forth in the 
 same words ; meditation has paced the same annual round 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1862.
 
 94 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 of lessons from holy writ ; all faces have turned to the 
 east at the same signal, and all lips repeated the same 
 symbols of ancient faith ; expressing by a sublime 
 monotony the repose of a patient piety, and testifying 
 to those constancies in religion which are " the same 
 yesterday, to-day and for ever. And it is a venerable office 
 thus to compel the present to hear the voices of the past 
 and meet them with some reverent sympathy ; to qualify 
 the dialect of the hour with the grave speech of an elder 
 time ; and through each season's decid"ous crop of thought 
 and feeling to shew the permanent stem .md the everlasting 
 root of faith. In proportion as the changes of the world 
 are rapid, and its young spirit grows audacious and intense, 
 do we need to be recalled to the ground of all vicissitude, 
 and made to feel the filiation of our humanity. Still this 
 is but half the duty of a church. However immutable 
 the objects of faith, man, the believing subject, changes 
 from age to age : the range of his knowledge, the meaning 
 of his words, the colouring of his thought, are affected 
 by every accession to science and every new character 
 which genius impresses upon literature ; and it is im- 
 possible that through all this the same representations of 
 divine things should remain congenial to him, and retain 
 at last the adequacy they had at first. And when we 
 remember what the two centuries have been that expire 
 this year; that they include the whole history of the 
 European academies of science, and the lives of Newton, 
 Davy, Cuvier and Humboldt ; that among their products 
 were the system of Locke, the scepsis of Hume, the critical 
 philosophy of Kant ; that they have enriched the shelves 
 of the divine with the works of Cudworth and Butler, of 
 Lardner and Priestley, of Schleiermacher, Neander and 
 Ewald, to say nothing of Strauss and Baur ; that they have 
 kept the minds of men awake with vast political revolu- 
 tions, fertile in temporary wars, but more fertile in the 
 lasting arts of peace ; that besides widening the general 
 commonwealth of knowledge, they have given birth to
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 95 
 
 national literatures singularly rich and free ; we must own 
 it impossible that, with nature, history, life so much ex- 
 panded, the scope of religious conception should remain 
 unchanged. The language of the elder theology respecting 
 the creation of the heavens and the earth, the origin and 
 the fall of man, the beginning and the end of death and 
 sin, was indigenous to a lesser world than ours, and has a 
 strange and childish sound in a universe opened by the 
 telescope, on an earth interpreted by the geologist, and in 
 face of what we now see of the great drama of human 
 growth and civilization. Without some provision for dis- 
 charging from its. terms what is perishable and obsolete, 
 and permitting its indestructible truth to live into new 
 forms, no church can permanently meet the conditions of 
 human life, but, while affecting to represent the eternal 
 counsel of God, will slip away from the unresting intellect 
 and affections of men. That the ecclesiastical constitution 
 of this country contains no such provision, and pretends 
 not only to uniformity but to perpetuity of doctrine, is 
 placed beyond doubt by a recent judicial decision, in 
 which this memorable statement occurs, that should the 
 progress of knowledge ever so conclusively disprove some 
 affirmation of the established creed, the ordained minister 
 is none the less bound to teach the exploded falsehood 
 and disregard the discovered truth. This clashing between 
 the obligations of personal veracity and the reverence for 
 divine reality is notoriously no hypothetical contingency. 
 In the free air of English life, the clergy cannot be cut off 
 from the influences which circulate through the mental 
 atmosphere of their time, and determine the modes of 
 secular thought and the tone of current literature ; and 
 since the whole dogmatic scheme embodied in the 
 symbols of the church has lost all hold of men of letters 
 and science, since all natural speech which has any living 
 force is quite empty of it, since European culture every- 
 where goes on apart from it, without even taking the 
 trouble to contradict it, it must be foreign to the very
 
 96 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 teachers of it, so far as they share the intellectual life 
 of their age. And the struggles of a few foremost spirits 
 among them to realize in fact a latitude denied to them in 
 word, afford suggestions sad enough of sacred doubts 
 that never become light, of noble longings sullenly sup- 
 pressed, of minds enfeebled by disastrous compromise. 
 It is a lesson hard to learn, but sure to make itself felt at 
 last, that a final church foregoes the future. 
 
 It was with an implicit feeling, if not an explicit appre- 
 hension of this truth, that the Nonconformists of two 
 centuries ago refused to bind themselves by the conditions 
 proposed for them. They wanted not so much other 
 doctrine as more latitude ; not a different uniformity, but a 
 freer variety. Scope for conscience, an open margin for the 
 Spirit of God, a transparent way for fresh light from holy- 
 writ, room every way for the soul to turn about and try the 
 paths to God, this was the meaning of their cry ; a 
 meaning which, though hidden from themselves in their day 
 of power, came out more and more clearly with the deeper 
 experiences of natural sorrow and spiritual perplexity. As 
 their complaint against the Church was, not that it was false, 
 but that it was narrow, so, when they came to provide for 
 the training of successors to their own ministers, their 
 injunction to the learned men entrusted with the task was, 
 not "Teach them our doctrine" but "Teach them to seek 
 God's truth." The several Dissenting academies which pre- 
 ceded our own, founded by men smarting under the demand 
 of subscription to articles of faith, were characterized by a 
 high-minded trust in the issues of growing learning and the 
 native force of sacred truth. They refused to take any 
 security for right belief beyond the pure thirst for light in 
 well-ordered, devout and duly-furnished minds ; and charged 
 their tutors with no other duty than to open before the 
 intelligence and conscience of the student the media of 
 divine knowledge, whether in scripture or in the universe, 
 and let the persuasive word pass through. " Shew him 
 where the infinite treasure lies : conduct him to the crand
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 97 
 
 points of contact between the divine and human in this 
 world ; give him command of the materials and exercise in 
 the habit of thought ; accustom his eye to the lines of 
 spiritual light ; and if then he follows not in our path, he 
 may be able to lead us to a better ; " such, in effect, was 
 the inscription on the vestibule of these institutions. This 
 simple faith in nature and scripture as the unexhausted 
 depositories, and in disciplined faculty as the apprehensive 
 organ, of the highest truth, appears to me eminently dignified 
 and noble. In its prospective and hopeful character, it is 
 the natural complement of the other religion which only 
 accepts and guards the past, and cannot but carry a different 
 spirit into every department of theological culture. It has 
 always influenced, and must always influence the whole 
 program of study, the style of scholarship, the tone of piety, 
 in the schools of learning which it animates. This will 
 readily appear if we spread out before us in their mutual 
 relations the main lines of religious research. I take them 
 in the order, not of their relative importance to us, but of 
 their logical bearing among themselves. 
 
 Theology is the doctrine of divine things ; and for their 
 their true apprehension the theologian must station himself 
 at the points where they manifestly touch the human and 
 leave their mark within the range of our life and thought. 
 What and where are these ? 
 
 I. One sphere there is of immediate relation between 
 ourselves and God, where the apprehension of Him is first- 
 hand and direct, viz. the sphere of our own mind. We are 
 not made for the cognizance of finite and transient things 
 alone, but have something in us answering to the whole 
 realm of being in which we stand : on the one hand, to the 
 natural world of phenomena ; on the other, to the super- 
 natural Reality behind. The structure of our faculties 
 discloses more than we need for a true picture and an 
 accurate reckoning of the physical theatre around, or even 
 for the provident and comfortable ordering of human life : 
 when our outfit for the visible and passing scene has been 
 
 VOL. IV. H
 
 98 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 measured off, there is still a mysterious fund of residuary- 
 thought, belief, affection, which, unless it be a delusion and 
 a counterfeit, is the token of the invisible Perfection that is 
 and was and ever will be. No sooner do we exercise any 
 endowment of natural knowledge or momentary energy, 
 than we are flung into mysterious discoveries that transcend 
 experience ; behind perception of the finite, Space uncreated 
 and infinite ; behind consciousness of succession, a motion- 
 less Eternity ; behind perishable phenomena, imperishable 
 Power ; behind the impulses of affection and the problems 
 of the will, the authority of a living Righteousness ; behind 
 the beauty of the world and the graces of pure souls, a light 
 of meaning from the first Fair and the first Good. Strip 
 off where you will the outer folds of intelligence or feeling, 
 and you will find yourself in the presence of essential ideas 
 all infinite, all converging upon a point in the invisible, all 
 functions of an eternal life and thought. Self-knowledge 
 therefore, in whatsoever direction, discloses in the last resort 
 far more than self ; and the sciences of self-knowledge, as 
 their line drops deeper and deeper through the nature of 
 man, feel in the end the unfathomable ground and touch 
 the everlasting Rock. Logic, winding its way through the 
 laws of thinking, rests at length at the roots of thought : 
 ^Esthetic, after removing the accidents of taste and defining 
 the rules of just admiration and the principles of true Art, 
 feels still a mystery of expressiveness which speaks and 
 cannot be spoken of : Ethics, by simply unfolding the 
 moral sentiments and examining the assumptions of the 
 moral law, are transported beyond the limits of human 
 nature, and brought face to face with an auguster Holiness. 
 All knowledge of our own mind culminates in the appre- 
 hension of God ; and I believe it was the sense of this fact 
 that gave so prominent a place, in our old theological 
 academies and literature, to moral, logical and metaphysical 
 pursuits. It was not simply that they afforded a healthy 
 discipline to the understanding ; that the analysis of 
 reasoning gave the power of detecting falsities ; that the laws
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 99 
 
 of sensation and suggestion explained away the wonder from 
 all our faculties, and exhibited belief and affection in the 
 weaving ; that to have insight into classification was to hold 
 the key of science ; that to scrutinize the essence of private 
 right and wrong would make good casuists, and to know the 
 theory of the State and its public law would help to form 
 good citizens. True as all this is, the real interest of these 
 studies lay elsewhere ; in the vestiges sought within our 
 humanity of a life more than human ; in the suspected 
 signs of a Divine witness to our reason, our conscience, our 
 affections. Were it not for the hope of lifting some corner 
 of the sacred veil, the deeper speculative philosophy, how- 
 ever serviceable as an intellectual gymnastic, would want 
 that highest fascination by which in every age it has drawn 
 to it so many capacious, fervid, meditative minds. But this 
 consecrated charm, this divine thirst, is gone the moment 
 you stereotype the forms of faith and shut up the future 
 possibilities of light. Philosophy must have hope, or it will 
 pine away ; you cannot take from its voice the undertone of 
 prayer; its foot must be free if it is to move at all. In 
 churches, therefore, that have passed their acts of finality, 
 its inspiration is extinct ; it has no advance to make, no 
 territory to win ; as the bondslave of the past, it is permitted 
 only to throw up earthworks of defence to stop the 
 conquering founders of new empires. It needs but little 
 acquaintance with literary history to perceive how prevail- 
 ingly, under the rule of fixed ecclesiastical systems, a purely 
 negative and critical function has been given to philosophy. 
 At the utmost, leave has been granted it to work up, by 
 some way of its own, to a foregone conclusion, and corrobo- 
 rate the Sacraments from Aristotle or the Trinity from Plato. 
 More frequently it has been deemed dangerous to let both 
 the councils of the church and the courts of philosophy sit 
 under the same roof, with the advocates passing from the 
 one to the other ; and the jurisdiction of thought in cases 
 of faith has been denied altogether. Psychology has been 
 called in, but only to testify that we have no faculty of 
 
 H 2
 
 ioo THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 divine apprehension ; Logic, but only to disparage its own 
 limits ; Metaphysics, but only to demonstrate their incompet- 
 ency ; Ethics, but only to erase the religious value of moral 
 distinctions. This is the last humiliation of philosophy, 
 to force its own implements into its own hand, that 
 it may bleed itself to death and make the church its heir. 
 If this is all it has to do, to prove that it can do nothing, 
 it must soon be tired and ashamed of life and fly from 
 the ignominy of existence. We may well be thankful that 
 our forerunners escaped this attitude of scepticism towards 
 the religion of Thought. They never dreamed that our 
 humanity could be without any organ of religious knowledge, 
 constituted just as it might be in an atheistic world. 
 They knew that without a prior Natural religion, no subse- 
 quent Revealed was possible, since on mere deaf incapacity 
 even heavenly voices are thrown away. And by their 
 habitual example and their abstinence from distrustful 
 restraints upon the future, they encouraged the reverential 
 and hopeful resort to human Reason and Conscience, as 
 not only the seats of finite wisdom, but as audience-halls of 
 God. 
 
 II. I have spoken of the theology arising in self-know- 
 ledge as an immediate apprehension of divine truth, in 
 order to mark it off from religion that comes to us through 
 the medium of some object interposed between ourselves 
 and God, whether it be the visible frame of Nature or the 
 persons and events of History. Is it a mysticism or an 
 enthusiasm to refer us to a faith direct and intuitive, as dis- 
 tinguished from one indirect and logical ? All that I mean 
 is this, that if, with your powers opened and matured, you 
 were in solitude with God, with no presence of the world 
 or of the crowd of men, you would not be without 
 cognizance of Him ; you would find, in what you had to 
 think and feel, traces of something other and higher than 
 self, and would not be forced into the delusive egotism of 
 supposing you were all in all. To deny this is to say that 
 there are no "footprints of the Creator" in the human
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 101 
 
 mind ; or that while He leaves his mark on all gradations 
 of creatures, the very being who is most expressly in his 
 image is driven to the lower signs of his reality. This 
 would be a strange result of the similitude, in the common 
 element of spirituality, between his nature and ours, that 
 Living God and living Man should be ever in presence of 
 each other, yet have no concerns together, no meeting- 
 points of possible recognition, no gleam from the eternal 
 perfectness mingling with the broken lights of human 
 aspiration. If the language of our conscious spirits is all 
 secular, the universe has for us no voices that are divine. 
 
 Man, however, would never know what he is, or even be 
 what he is, were he suspended in loneliness, however sacred. 
 For the training and evolution of his powers, for the 
 awakening of his latent life, and therefore for his self- 
 knowledge as well as for other knowledge, he needs the 
 scene and society around him. The phenomena of his 
 inner experience, when found, furnish him with a theology ; 
 but to find them, he must have also an outer experience, 
 and belong to a world open to his intellect, and a human 
 history that is the multiplying mirror of himself. Set thus 
 in presence of objects related to his faculties and divinely 
 constituted no less, he finds in them mediate sources of 
 religion : of natural religion, so far as it flows in upon him 
 from the spectacle of the universe : of historical religion, 
 so far as it enters by the path of personal sympathy and 
 reverence, and owns the manifestations of God in the 
 spiritual records of humanity. 
 
 i. Of these two media of divine knowledge, Nature, the 
 great source of Pagan religion, has been characteristically 
 subordinated, not to say neglected, in Christendom. All 
 the leading conceptions of the Christian faith are moral 
 and personal, not cosmical ; they arise out of the direct 
 relation of the human spirit to the Divine, and would not 
 be much affected though the world were removed out of the 
 way. In the problems of sin and holiness, of ruin and 
 redemption, of estrangement and reconciliation, sun and
 
 102 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 stars, equator and ecliptic, have nothing to do : composition 
 of water, and speed of light, and laws of crystallization, 
 are irrelevant accidents ; the rocks might have a different 
 succession, and the flora and fauna of every zone might be 
 changed, without touching the result. From this neutral 
 attitude of physical phenomena towards Christian ideas, it 
 might seem to follow, that the theologian had no interest, 
 either way, for or against the researches of men of science ; 
 that their whole intellectual field was foreign to him, and 
 therefore equally safe from his interference, whether his 
 system were shut or open. In this case, as there would be 
 no affinity, so there would be no clashing, between religion 
 and science : and on this basis accordingly many a treaty 
 of peace has been concluded between divines who cannot 
 keep their eyes off nature, and savans who will give any- 
 thing for a quiet life. In effect, however, the rule supplies 
 but a hollow truce which it is impossible to keep. The 
 divine, entrenched behind the written word of God, may 
 give up all natural Theism, and let the study of nature pass 
 free as a mere secular pursuit : but he soon discovers that, 
 if it cannot establish natural religion, it can contradict what 
 he had reserved as revealed ; and is angry at the breach of 
 understanding, by which the instruments of discovery and 
 peaceful art are turned against him as weapons of war. 
 Must we not tell him, it is his own fault ? Is he not himself 
 the first offender, in taking more than he could fairly claim 
 into his reserved field ? Did he not label a good many 
 scientific propositions with the name " Revealed Religion,'"' 
 and carry them off into his sacred enclosure? andean he be 
 offended if they are re-captured and perhaps destroyed ? 
 That the universe was created in six days, the earth as the 
 chief thing, and the starry heavens as its decorated roof ; 
 that the human race are descended from one pair, of whose 
 lapse Death and Sin are the perpetual entail ; that, in re- 
 demption of this entail, a divine person, born of a woman, 
 assumed our humanity, confronted the spirits of evil, and 
 drove them from the minds and bodies they had possessed,
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 103 
 
 and carried off the general curse by his own sacrifice ; 
 these are samples of doctrinal assertion that variously trench 
 on the domain of natural knowledge, and must be amen- 
 able to its scrutiny. A church which is committed to them 
 has already thrown down the gauntlet to science, and 
 instinctively looks for an adversary in every calm advance 
 of discovery or sudden rush of genius. The only escape 
 from this humiliating fear is an unpledged theology, in- 
 accessible to all variations of phenomenal knowledge, and 
 consecrating nothing as " revealed " but those moral and 
 spiritual truths whose range is beyond the reach of in- 
 duction, which no telescope can interpret into meteors, no 
 analysis precipitate as dust. But this is not all. Besides 
 the negative relief from fear, a positive trust that greater 
 conceptions must dawn upon us ensues from an open 
 faith : the indifference to science as merely secular, and its 
 discharge from all higher obligations, are recalled : Nature, 
 no longer suspected of being against us, is re-consecrated 
 as the handiwork of God ; and a reverent' curiosity seeks 
 for true links of thought by which to connect the divine 
 order of the outer world with the divine inner laws of our 
 humanity. Precisely and only in proportion as the intellect 
 has been released from the restraints of a fixed dogmatic 
 system, has the interest in natural religion deepened, and 
 the foresight of science been found compatible with the 
 insight of faith. Care for natural religion is the constant 
 attendant on breadth of Christian faith. It needed some 
 latitude of thought in Newton to stand upon the confines 
 of the new universe he had found, and find its relation 
 to Him whose duration (to use the Philosopher's own 
 solemn words) " reaches from eternity to eternity ; whose 
 presence from infinity to infinity ; who governs all things, 
 and knows all things that arc or can be done " :* in Clarke 
 to construct, in Butler to criticize the Theistic interpretation 
 of space and time : in Priestley to blend into one whole 
 the discoveries of the chemist, and the meditations of the 
 
 * Principia, the concluding Scholium.
 
 104 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 divine. Wherever the relations are deeply pondered 
 between the method of physical and that of religious 
 knowledge, not for the sake of severing them by any 
 impassable chasm, but in the hope of bringing them to 
 unity, depend upon it you are in the presence of a liberal 
 school or a liberal age. The noble wonder of the intellect, 
 which still sighs and seeks for a " First Philosophy " able, 
 with the two eyes of faith and science, to make the double 
 picture one, can live only in men and churches that have 
 something to learn. If any sacredness is to invest natural 
 knowledge, if it is to be more than the outfit for a pro- 
 fession, the source of material power, and the occasion of 
 mean competition in the race of ideas, it will owe it to the 
 few whose worship as well as science is touched with hope, 
 and expects from the brightest meridian of knowledge the 
 richest vesper glow of prayer. 
 
 2. The great medium, however, of divine contact with 
 our world is not, after all, the physical Cosmos, that speaks 
 God's power and the method of his thought, but the con- 
 stitution and course of human history, which are the 
 organs of his communicated character and will. Clear 
 traces of himself he has doubtless impressed on the in- 
 dividual soul. But individuality itself is not formed 
 except in society and by long inheritance of time ; it is the 
 last product of rich and various culture ; and the philoso- 
 pher or worshipper of to-day is an epitome of all the ages. 
 The lives of other men, their spoken admiration, their acted 
 grief and passion, the stature of their higher nobleness, 
 touch us with more than sympathy, and are the great 
 means of shewing us what we are, and lifting us towards 
 what we are not yet. Biography, history, and language, 
 that wonderful crystallization of the very flow and spray of 
 thought, constitute an objective self-knowledge, and, by a 
 thousand affinities, draw out into clearer light whatever 
 our nature holds of authoritative and divine. If men have 
 never and nowhere been left alone by their Heavenly 
 Guide, if his mystery has always mingled with their life.
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 105 
 
 ancient and foreign literature can in no case be quite 
 profane, but in their artless expressions of wonder, love 
 and pity, must appeal to some pieties in us; and even 
 where no religious end is directly in view, a wide and 
 scholarly familiarity with the words and ways of other times,, 
 with their special types of character, with the tone of their 
 poetry and the temper of their laws, indirectly generates 
 an atmosphere of humane and considerate sympathy, the 
 proper climate of justice and veneration. It is not, how- 
 ever, till we address ourselves to men's conscious thought 
 about divine things, their efforts to pass behind the veil of 
 the visible world and read the secrets there, that we begin 
 to glean and count the scattered elements of sacred truth 
 on which the higher trusts of humanity have lived. The 
 time is past when faiths and philosophies foreign to our 
 own were studied merely to contrast their darkness with 
 our light, and make the chasm absolute all round our 
 solitary island of exclusive revelation. We begin to see 
 that they were the noble efforts of a reason never wholly 
 baffled, a conscience never quite asleep, and became the 
 depositaries of partial truth, till the stream of " living 
 water " could take up the confluent tributaries and fill the 
 river of life. In this thought we gain, for the first time, 
 the key of interpretation for what is alien to our experience, 
 Antipathy understands nothing ; and not till the theologian 
 looks on Christendom as the last stage in the providential 
 evolution and inspiration of humanity, related to all that 
 goes before, will he apprehend either what lies within or 
 what lies beyond his own faith. But once let him seize 
 this point of view, and then the attempt to master systems 
 of thought belonging to another intellectual latitude will 
 afford him the finest discipline of understanding and 
 sympathy ; and while imparting a catholic breadth of aspi- 
 ration for what is distant from him, will leave the keenest 
 sense of the distinctive sanctities that abide with him at 
 home. To a wide knowledge and thoughtful estimate of
 
 106 THE TRANSIENT AND THE PERMANENT 
 
 the past we must look as the only real safeguard against 
 the passing caprices of sceptic or fanatic thought. Churches 
 that have no trust take securities from their clergy, and 
 bind them to the forms of distant centuries ; but what they 
 gain in persistency they lose in life. On the other hand, 
 the mere practical man of to-day, nurtured on the current 
 literature and touched with the newest zeal, goes into utter 
 captivity to the humour of the hour ; and if he seems to 
 lead others, does so by the levity of his nature, carrying 
 him ahead of them down any stream of tendency that 
 may have the swiftest flow. In the minister of sacred 
 things, who represents before men the constancies of eternal 
 truth and righteousness, this helpless mobility is a humiliat- 
 ing spectacle, secretly despised amid the noisest applause. 
 We expect from him a spirit lifted above the fitful tem- 
 perature that alternately strains or relaxes the chords of more 
 dependent minds ; and we shall expect in vain, unless we 
 help him to an intellectual eminence above surprise, whence 
 the great movements of humanity can be watched with the 
 quick eye of Pity and of Trust, and the distant voices of 
 its prayer and strife can meet the ear. 
 
 It must needs be, however, that the history and literature 
 of paramount interest for us are those which convey to us 
 and embody our own faith. The sacred records of the 
 Hebrew race, and the primitive memorials of the Christian 
 revelation, must ever form the main objects of the theo- 
 logian's study, the spring of his inspiration, the source of 
 his teaching. Other ignorances of his may be deplorable ; 
 but ignorance of these is simply disqualifying. The 
 languages in which they were written, the origin of their 
 constituent books, the history of their text, the comparison 
 of their versions, the interpretation of their contents, have 
 been treated so copiously since the Reformation, as to 
 create a vast apparatus of sacred learning, itself the material 
 of no little subsidiary scholarship ; but the topics are worthy 
 of it all. True, the keenness and minuteness of biblical
 
 IN THEOLOGY. 107 
 
 research may have arisen from a too narrow and rigorous 
 conception of the Word of God, from an acceptance of 
 the Scriptures as throughout a kind of divine legal instru- 
 ment, which criticism had only to construe and piety to 
 obey. If so, however, it needs a still larger and more 
 searching erudition to undo the effects of this error, and to 
 resolve the false documentary monotony into the variegated 
 lights, divine and human, the distinctive colourings of 
 person, place and time, that make the difference felt 
 between the dead letter of a bequest and the living spirit 
 of a sacred history. In truth, the genuine grounds of 
 theological defence for biblical learning are far stronger 
 than any fiction of which they take the place. If in the 
 Scriptures we had one uniform charter, any part of which 
 might be used in explanation of any other, its meaning 
 would open to the key of a simply grammatical and textual 
 criticism, and the scholarly divine would be a mere com- 
 petent translator and annotator. But if the interest of the 
 writings consists in this, that while they constitute a purely 
 human literature, they tell the story, and confess the sins, 
 and breathe the devotion, of a people most susceptible of 
 the prophetic inspiration and most conscious of their divine 
 Guide, that, further, they present to us, as the consum- 
 mate flower of this growing and refining life, the tran- 
 scendent personality of Jesus, in whom the power of the 
 Spirit took up humanity entirely and showed it to be 
 immortal, yet draw this picture with touches various and 
 rude, not in its absolute reality, but in its relative impression 
 upon differing and wondering minds ; then, although the 
 essence of their truth may speak for itself to the sound in 
 reason and the pure in heart, yet rightly to disengage it 
 from its envelopments, without either giving them its 
 authority or throwing them away, is a work far beyond the 
 reach of the mere grammarian and translator, a work of 
 historical reconstruction, in which there is use for the 
 amplest materials of learning, commanded by force of
 
 io8 TRANSIENT AND PERMANENT IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 imagination and cultivated sympathy. The large combi- 
 nations of modern historical criticism bring with them, no 
 doubt, their speculative temptations ; but no one can 
 doubt that they are the fruit of not less erudition and of 
 greater genius than the annotative scholarship of rigid 
 schools and of an earlier time.
 
 VII. 
 
 THEOLOGY IN RELATION TO PROGRESSIVE 
 KNOWLEDGE.* 
 
 THE College which resumes its work this day professes 
 to impart a special training for the Christian Ministry ; and 
 the Christian Minister is one who, in discipleship to Jesus 
 Christ, aims to guide the reverence, to ennoble the con- 
 science, and sustain the piety, of men. To treat such an 
 office as the object of a particular discipline, not simply for 
 the character and affections, but for the intellect too, takes for 
 granted, what has not always been admitted, that Theology 
 is, in some sense, a Science and admits of being methodi- 
 cally taught. This assumption would be false, if religious 
 truth were simply a natural intuition, or a supernatural 
 inspiration, in each individual mind. Just as Aristotle, in 
 order to save Ethics for scientific treatment, dismisses the 
 hypothesis that virtue is either a native faculty or a given 
 feeling, and insists that it is a formed quality and developed 
 order of preferences in the mind ;t so, if our " schools of the 
 prophets" are to have any justification, we must be prepared 
 to show, that religion contains matter for teaching, and is 
 neither inborn like eyesight, nor an arbitrary visitant like 
 a trance or dream : for, in the one case, training would be 
 superfluous, and, in the other, impossible. All teaching is 
 communication from mind to mind : it implies that one 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1865. 
 t Eth. Nic. II. v.
 
 i io THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 mind may know more than another, and the same mind 
 more at a later time than at an earlier. And, using the 
 inequality as instrument for the progress, it further assumes 
 that teacher and taught, instead of being abandoned to 
 lonely inspiration, "words that cannot be uttered," have 
 a common medium of thought and mutual intelligence, and 
 can meet, when they speak together, upon the same real 
 objects. As every Medical school takes for granted, by 
 its very existence, that the animal body is real, and its 
 physiological constitution permanent and cognizable ; as 
 every 1 ,aw school takes for granted that human society is con- 
 stant, and throws its self-regukting forces into a machinery 
 but little variable ; so does a Theological school assume that 
 God and his relations to man are objective realities, perpe- 
 tually there and approachable by human faculties. Two 
 things therefore, with regard to the nature of religion, are 
 denied by every such institution as this : (i) it is not a 
 mere natural instinct; (2) it is not a mere supernatural 
 grace. And two things about it are affirmed : (i) it pre- 
 sents something real and permanent for the intellect to hold 
 by: (2) it has its undetermined and progressive lines, on 
 which it is the business of the teacher to move and mark 
 the fixed points as they emerge. 
 
 Without this mixed composition, of the constant and the 
 variable, it may be doubted whether, intellectually, religion 
 would retain its interest at all. Were it nothing but a 
 scheme of shifting conceptions, unrelated to anything 
 beyond our personality, the mere shadow of ourselves 
 flung on the universe without, it might remain, like any 
 other illusion, a curious object of psychological analysis, 
 but would lose all serious place in human life. Were it. 
 on the other hand, a scheme of absolute knowledge, so 
 determined and rounded off as to be, like its Object, 
 "without variableness or shadow of a turning," it might no 
 doubt be recited afresh to each generation, like the alphabet 
 or the numeration table, and so far be made the business 
 of a school : but however new to the learner, it would be
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. in 
 
 old to the teacher, and become wearisome as a routine, 
 unquickened by the real life of his mind. So repugnant is 
 this to both the intellectual and the spiritual nature, that 
 no effort can render it possible for long. Thought is alive, 
 and cannot rotate like a machine ; and, in its eagerness for 
 movement, carries every science with it, if not into advance, 
 into aberration, at any rate into change. Still more are 
 reverence and affection alive ; and, while faithful to the 
 same object, they are unable to rest without transporting 
 it into a new air and investing it with fresh lights : so that 
 a religion forbidden to improve betakes itself to degeneracy, 
 rather than become petrified, and, instead of growing up- 
 wards into statelier proportions, breaks into lateral defor- 
 mities, as the only vent for its vitality. What, for instance, 
 are all the outrages on sense and history committed by the 
 prophetic or allegorical interpreter, but an attempt to adjust 
 a fixed text to a moving world, to find room within the 
 narrow frame of the ancient letter for the grand lines and 
 various groups of the modern picture ? These cannot be 
 left out of the scheme of faith, since they have found their 
 way into the scheme of things : and those who seek for 
 God, not in his own universe, but in a document about it, 
 are obliged to stretch and distort the record to make room 
 for what is not there. Even in the most stationary theo- 
 logies, the real interest lies in the expansion of old truth to 
 embrace and consecrate the newest births of time. 
 
 The mode, however, of dividing the constant from the 
 variable elements in a religion is not always the same ; 
 and in the intellectual training of Christian teachers, it 
 makes the greatest difference which of two principles we 
 adopt as our rule. 
 
 The first assumes that the things to be taught are a 
 determinate stock of truths given in perpetuity, susceptible 
 of no increase, secured against all abatement. These are 
 the divine constants ; filling the whole sphere of religion ; 
 and throwing out all the variables into the secular sciences 
 and arts ; amid which religion is to find its application
 
 U2 THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 without any reaction upon its theory. Let us consider 
 what direction is naturally impressed upon theological 
 education by this assumption. 
 
 The primary aim will be to teach methodically the fixed 
 scheme of positive religion, and secure on every side its 
 hold on the student's mind. Nor is it by any means a 
 scanty intellectual culture that may subserve this end. 
 For the Protestant (to whom we must limit our view) the 
 scheme is embodied in Scripture. Now to be master of 
 Scripture is to be at home in two languages, most unlike 
 each other, and long silent upon the earth : to have an eye 
 and ear for their dialectic variations in time and place; 
 to trace the literary life of the Hebrew people from its 
 dawn to its decline, and of Christendom in its obscure 
 beginnings ; to be familiar with the history of the Eastern 
 world till it became a province of the West. These resources 
 are needed for entering into the interior of Scripture. But 
 no ancient book is rightly appreciated, unless its external 
 history is surveyed, and the witnesses examined to its origin, 
 its travels, its transmission, the uncertainties of its text, 
 and worth of its translations : researches, the extent and 
 complexity of which are sufficiently attested by the immense 
 critical apparatus they have placed at our disposal. From 
 the moment when the Scriptures were snatched from sacer- 
 dotal keeping and delivered over, as the new-found oracles 
 of God, to the venerating scrutiny of reading men, the 
 development of sacred learning was large and rapid ; and, 
 though for a time suspended by the excitement and desola- 
 tion of religious wars, still shewed, in Limborch and Le 
 Clerc, how little the intellectual impulse given by Calvin 
 and Be/a had spent its force. The refinement and security 
 which modern scholarship has gradually attained, and the 
 compendious form into which the results of vast research 
 are now reduced, are unfavourable to the reputation of 
 those earlier masters of sacred criticism : the light hand- 
 book gives us what we want at a glance, and their heavy 
 folios are left to gather the dust upon our shelves. But
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. 113 
 
 whoever has occasion to consult them will be disposed to 
 wonder at the vast strides of approach already made towards 
 the standard of learning in our own day ; especially when 
 he remembers to how great an extent the scholar of the 
 sixteenth and even the seventeenth century had to be his 
 own lexicographer and grammarian, to make his own index 
 and concordance, to work out his own archaeology, to con- 
 struct his own maps and tables of dates, and go to the 
 sources of history for himself. These disadvantages, which 
 would excuse a much greater inaccuracy than we actually 
 find, drove the man of learning out over an immense field, 
 and gave him a range of erudition and a grasp of judgment 
 which may well astonish the more special students of later 
 times. 
 
 The proportions in which the religious and the simply 
 intellectual impulse contributed to the great works of Pro- 
 testant erudition, it is impossible to determine. Were it 
 not that, at the revival of learning, precisely similar phe- 
 nomena appeared on the field of secular literature, and 
 Joseph Scaliger and Henry Stephens rivalled the greatest 
 prodigies of theological industry, we might be tempted to 
 say that nothing short of an overpowering reverence for the 
 Bible as the word of God, could sustain the laborious 
 patience of the old divines, or invest with any living interest 
 their verbal criticisms and technical disputes. Perhaps the 
 spell put upon the imagination in the two cases, by the 
 undiscovered wisdom and beauty of Pagan literature, and 
 by the spiritual depth of the sacred books, was not so 
 dissimilar as we might suppose, and would stir the mind to 
 the same efforts, and produce analogous results. But, 
 when the first flush of wondering impulse had passed away, 
 secular and sacred learning were doomed, by a single cause, 
 to take different directions, and acquire a character ever 
 more distinct. The Scriptures were assumed to be a con- 
 tinuous oracle, an unbroken authoritative record, homoge- 
 neous for all the purposes of religious guidance, a divine 
 book in which the ever-living Author, wielding the human 
 
 VOL. IV. I
 
 114 THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 secretaries as his organs of communication, discloses all 
 that is known of his will and moral government. If a critic 
 were to treat the Iliad of Homer, the Cyropsedeia of Xeno- 
 phon, and the history of Thucydides, as belonging to one 
 another, and all as components of the philosophy of Aris- 
 totle, the results could scarcely be more fatally grotesque. 
 No doubt, the sanctity attributed to every line secured an 
 eager and prolonged scrutiny of the text, word by word : 
 but the gaze was too close, and the imaginary light was too 
 intense, for clear and comprehensive vision. An exaggerated 
 significance was seen in the simplest phrase ; narrative was 
 construed into type, and myth mistaken for history; a 
 Hebrew ode was made to yield evangelic dogma ; and 
 whether the Elohist or the Jehovist told the story of Crea- 
 tion, whether Job affirmed of God or his friends denied, 
 whether the Preacher taught Epicureanism or the later 
 Isaiah the law of humiliation, whether Matthew presented 
 Christ as miraculously conceived, or Paul as the pre-existing 
 spiritual Adam, or John the evangelist as the Incarnate 
 Logos, it was all alike authoritative, the various elements 
 fused into one uniform alloy, and re-issued, as shekels of 
 gold, to serve for coin of the temple. In the presence of 
 such preconceptions, it is evident that all historical method, 
 all recognition of natural growth of religious ideas, all 
 critical appreciation of contrasted doctrines, all discharge 
 of local and personal errors from the imperishable essence 
 of divine truth, must remain impossible : and scholarship, 
 kindled at first, but dizzied at last, with the monotonous 
 glory it sees upon the page, settles into blindness and 
 distinguishes nothing. There is an immense accumulation 
 of theological erudition ; but, under this spell, it lies dead 
 and dark, and yields none of the brilliant results of the 
 corresponding secular learning. There is not within it the 
 free, sincere and healthy movement on which elsewhere 
 the veracious instinct of the intellect insists ; it is held in 
 hand and marched about, as if to check an enemy. Are 
 there weak places exposed and threatened ? its masses are
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. 115 
 
 ordered up to close and hide them. Can an impression be 
 made of reserved strength ? its ranks are opened to shew 
 it and scare assault away. This is not the spirit of the true 
 scholar ; who, knowing no enemy, can leave unguarded 
 any holy places already held, and go forth, as pilgrim and 
 explorer, to find new ones that shall enlarge his homage 
 and consecrate fresh points upon the world. 
 
 Not even the most rigid theologian, however, can live 
 exclusively with what he regards as the constants of religion. 
 Fix these as he may, he finds himself in a changing scene, 
 with the variables of which he is in immediate contact ; and 
 the relations between the immutable data of his creed and 
 the shifting conditions of human life have to be re-adjusted, 
 as new ideas and wants arise. To qualify himself for this, 
 and become a proficient in applied religion, he must know 
 how the world is going on, follow in the track of the 
 advancing sciences, listen to the tones of the younger 
 literature, and breathe the air of other men's thought. He 
 cannot act as trustee of the deposit committed to him, 
 unless he looks around him and sees how it is to be 
 administered in the altered temper of the generations as 
 they rise ; what doubts it has to meet, what repugnance to 
 encounter ; by what fresh paths of approach it must reach 
 minds now transported into uncalculated latitudes. 
 Theological education, therefore, however severely con- 
 servative, is far from deserving the reproach of indifference 
 to the march of the phenomenal sciences. Its own purpose 
 can never be fulfilled without a comprehensive knowledge, 
 revised and filled in from time to time, of whatever the 
 historical critic, and the inductive philosopher, and the 
 speculative thinker, may profess to have achieved. But, 
 under such an inflexible system, the student's specialty is 
 this ; through his wide range he sees nothing in its simply 
 natural light, judges nothing by its own proper evidence, 
 but carries with him a criterion foreign to the field ; his 
 stock of constants he uses as regulative, determining without 
 appeal what shall be taken and what be left ; all that falls 
 
 I 2
 
 Ii6 THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 in with them he appropriates and works in to modernize his 
 creed ; all that conflicts with them he discards and blackens 
 as profane. By thus importing the postulates of a divinity- 
 school as the measure of inductive truth, a hopeless breach 
 is created between the logic of theology and that of science, 
 and a war begun which is the more miserable, because the 
 parties to it, always within reach of irritating challenge, 
 move upon different lines and can never fairly meet. It is 
 needless to say how this method spoils everything it 
 touches, scholarship, natural knowledge, religion, and pro- 
 duces the temper most alien to the genius of them all. Is 
 it not a melancholy fact that every modern science has had 
 to make good its footing, not only against sluggish 
 incredulity and prejudice, but against misguided piety? 
 that the very Sun could not find his right place in the 
 heavens, or Man prove, by bits of pottery and flint, his 
 long tenancy of this earth, without a clamour of devout fear 
 and futile contradiction ? Is it right that we should always 
 know beforehand, irrespective of the evidence, what recep- 
 tion every physical or ethnological theory which makes 
 large demands on time, every critical verdict which lowers 
 the date or re-names the author of a Hebrew book, will 
 meet with from the clergy ? There must be something 
 wrong in a system which disturbs the quiet of eternal truth 
 by dissolving in it a fermenting mass of decaying opinion : 
 and whoever can precipitate the precarious foreign admix- 
 tures, and leave the fountains of faith pure and clear, brings 
 the truest healing to the moral and spiritual life of men. 
 
 In order to provide for this function, and escape the evils 
 just described, the College for which I speak to-day follows 
 a different rule in drawing its line between the constants 
 and the variables in religion. The principle is this : the 
 things about which u<c leach are given in perpetuity : but 
 the things to be taught about than are open to revision in 
 every age. (>od, in his relations to the universe and to 
 ourselves : Man, his individual and social nature, his 
 responsible position, his history, his destination, are the
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. 117 
 
 ultimate objects which we here aspire to know ; and, as 
 media of this knowledge, on the philosophical side, the 
 intellectual, ethical and spiritual phenomena of the mind ; 
 and, on the historical, the manifestations of Divine Life in 
 the past of our humanity, and primarily in the person and 
 work of Jesus Christ, with whom it culminates, and from 
 whom dates a new birth of inextinguishable faith and 
 aspiration, a new glow, unexhausted yet, of pity and of 
 hope. The form and spirit of an intellectual training con- 
 ducted on this principle it is not difficult to trace. 
 
 It is sometimes supposed, that where so much is left 
 open to revision, the continuity of belief must be broken, 
 and no permanent roots be struck to feed the growth and 
 mature the fruits of religious character. Each teacher, it 
 is imagined, relying on his lonely fancies, and dignifying 
 them with the name of intuitions, will begin his quest de 
 novo, and think out his scheme of doctrine, as if he were 
 floating by himself in space ; owning no authority, and 
 deriving no strength from his partnership in the heritage of 
 humanity. Nothing can be more erroneous. No doubt it 
 must always rest with the individual reason and conscience 
 to pronounce the personal verdict of true or false ; but the 
 pleadings on which they decide are fetched from the 
 gathered stores of Christian and heathen wisdom, and 
 epitomize the thought expended on the oldest and deepest 
 problems ; and, when seeming to flow immediately from a 
 single mind, are rendered possible there only by a traceless 
 myriad of influences infiltrating into it from earlier time. 
 The whole Past must rain upon the uplands, and the clouds 
 hang on the invisible peaks, of history, to make the smallest 
 rill of thought that winds through our own day. Even in 
 the philosophical treatment of natural Ethics and Religion, 
 where, as in all deductive reasoning, we seem to be inde- 
 pendent of what predecessors have found, and to draw con- 
 clusions that would be at home in any age, the appearance 
 is illusory ; for that very human nature from whose 
 phenomena we reason and whose affections we interpret,
 
 Ii8 THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 has expanded into new and richer forms, and presents, in 
 its circle of Christian experience, data unknown before. 
 And in historical theology, the very semblance of any 
 breach with the past is simply impossible. No man can 
 extemporize, or spin out of himself, a critical knowledge of 
 ancient languages, literature and life ; he is here absolutely 
 dependent on forerunners for his whole outfit of original 
 assumptions and beliefs, and must start on his own 
 explorings from the point at which they have deposited 
 him. The slow and gentle way in which alone the shadows 
 can ever break from off the ancient world, and a little light 
 steal in, now from the pages of a recovered book,now through 
 the propylseum of a dug-up temple, and then from some 
 happy flash of philological combination, sufficiently secures 
 us, so long as we are simple and trustful, without fear and 
 without guile, from any but silent and insensible changes of 
 historical conviction. In such matters, the shocks all come 
 from our insincerities and delays on the one hand, and 
 from the reaction of irreverent extravagance provoked upon 
 the other ; feverish paroxysms being the inevitable retribu- 
 tion of long reticence and suppression. 
 
 In order to fall in with the peaceful course of theological 
 change, to hold by what is undisturbed, and detach it from 
 the doom of the rest, the student must be well brought up 
 to the point already reached, the point at which he pitches 
 his tent and raises his altar, till he is ordered to move on. 
 This involves the whole apparatus of knowledge required, 
 in the former case, by the stationary defender of the faith ; 
 together with an important addition, viz., an acquaintance 
 with the history of theology, in the largest sense ; not only 
 with the ecclesiastical stages by which accepted dogma was. 
 formed, but with the inverse critical processes by which it 
 has been partially dissolved, and removed from the faith of 
 scholarly men. One who is pledged to hold a compacted 
 scheme of belief as divine, can never recognize it as grow- 
 ing or declining with the changing seasons of our nature, at 
 one time the creation, at another the victim, of human
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. 119 
 
 reason. He is obliged, therefore, to ignore its history, how- 
 ever indisputable it may be ; to treat as an image fallen from 
 heaven, some idol of doctrine which, if you are familiar with 
 its first age, you may see gradually moulded under the 
 pressure of the time ; and to insist that it still stands as 
 adamant, though in the dry intellectual air all its tenacity 
 is gone, and observers wonder when the clay is to crumble 
 into dust. Even within the memory of our own generation, 
 how many are the determinate points of change, which it 
 would be simply stupid not to register as past events in the 
 history of opinion ! What has become of the date which 
 stood in our school-tables, " Creation of the World, 
 B.C. 4004 " ? and what of the next, " The Universal Deluge, 
 B.C. 2348 " ? Into what undreamt-of distance has 
 Egyptian chronology retreated ! yet how many such steps 
 must we repeat, ere we alight upon the first vestiges of 
 man ! and how many more, to exhaust the relics of life and 
 death upon this world ! We have learned to recognize the 
 composite structure and comparatively low date of the 
 Pentateuch ; the progression of religious doctrine through 
 the Old Testament ; its variety in the New ; the mixture 
 of unhistorical elements in both, and of human opinions 
 long ago corrected, and expectations never fulfilled. In 
 what state of mind would the scholar be who did not know 
 these things ? or the reasoner who should suppose that they 
 left all as it was before ? All that is real, indeed, all that is 
 Divine, God in his perfection, Christ in his filial sanctity, 
 and for humanity the eternal law of Duty and Self-sacrifice, 
 they and similar changes without end, sweep past and 
 leave more majestic than before. But he only can feel the 
 serenity of this assurance, to whose trust no constants are 
 essential beyond the irremovable realities. 
 
 Even he, however, must, from time to time, take careful 
 account of the course of discovery in its bearings on the 
 common heritage of faith, with a view to guide and re-settle 
 the piety of others. For this end, something more is needed 
 than a knowledge of what has already been done, affecting
 
 120 THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 theological belief : he must know what is still doing, the 
 inquiries that are hovering and preparing to alight, the 
 thoughts that are in the air, the weather-signs that drift 
 upon the clouds : for these, interpreted by the law of the 
 past, will often give a serviceable presage of the future, and 
 prevent the misplacement of sympathy and effort. If he 
 have the tact of a tender and pious heart, he will use this 
 foresight of the probable direction of thought, not loudly to 
 prejudge what is yet on trial, or to hurt a reverence which 
 time, if it does not entirely spare, may gently train another 
 way ; but to avoid lingering too long upon a precarious spot, 
 and silently to withdraw men's -vorship to ground for ever 
 sacred. But, beyond this noiseless preparation for changes 
 that may not be far, he will guard his mind against any 
 interest of religious partizanship in the pending problems 
 of science or criticism. Removed alike from boastful elation 
 at their progress and from blind repugnance to it, he will 
 give his religion no regulative power over his scientific judg- 
 ment : so that, from the tone of his devotion and the cast 
 of his affections, you shall not be able to tell beforehand 
 what he thinks of the origin of species, or the antiquity of 
 man, or the date of Daniel, or the authenticity of the fourth 
 Gospel : but he will surrender himself simply to the facts 
 as they appear in evidence ; frankly going with every con- 
 clusion fairly won ; pausing in every suspense ; resting on 
 what is undisturbed ; deeming it the office at once of reason 
 and of faith, not to bespeak the universe that ought to be, 
 but humbly to accept the universe that is, and find room in 
 it for reverence and trust. 
 
 That this enlargement of the variables in theology, so as 
 to include the whole sphere of phenomenal knowledge, is 
 alone consistent with the true temper of the philosopher 
 and the scholar, will hardly be questioned. But how will 
 it affect our religion ? 1 )oes it not put Revelation at hazard ? 
 Is piety safe, when so much to which it clings is set afloat ? 
 
 I reply, our rule sets nothing afloat, but only provides 
 how we shall demean ourselves towards that which, by the
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. 121 
 
 decree of nature and of God, is afloat : and the rule is 
 simply, not to deal with it, whilst it is in motion, as if it were 
 fixed. Certainty is not ours to create or to annihilate ; we 
 cannot make it, by pretending it ; we do not destroy it, by 
 letting its absence speak for itself. If piety has been 
 brought, as is too probable, to cling to many doubtful and 
 perishable things, so far it is assuredly unsafe : but will you 
 remedy this by declaring the doubtful to be sure, and the 
 perishable immortal ? or, by giving the affection its true 
 Object, and carrying it to an eternal rest ? If Christendom, 
 sickly and feeble with its long disease of dogma, has come to 
 put its trust, not so much in the living God and his own real 
 ways, as in certain opinions about him and reports of his 
 acts, it is a healing process to disengage its soul from the 
 detaining veil of human notions and propositions, and 
 deliver it straight into personal divine relations. An unre- 
 served repose upon reality, an acceptance of it as better 
 than any semblance and having absolute right over our 
 ideas, is the genuine piety of the intellect, without which 
 there is no sacredness in its exercise, no struggling refrac- 
 tions, no tender tints of trust and sacrifice, to mellow its dry 
 light. 
 
 All " Revelation," by the very force of the term, must be 
 a disclosure of things as they are. Every corrected concep- 
 tion of things as they are, sustained by scientific evidence, 
 either concurs with the presumed revelation, or it does not. 
 If it does not, a human error is eliminated from an aggregate 
 which we had charged entirely on God, and what is his own 
 stands purified : the natural has gained a light, and the 
 supernatural has lost a darkness. If it does concur, then 
 what was before known as revealed is now also known as 
 natural : we see for ourselves what had been taken on the 
 testimony of those who knew better ; and our apprehension 
 is unspeakably cleared and deepened. The truth no longer 
 hangs detached, plainly seen indeed, but apart from its tissue 
 of relations ; it has found its footing and settled upon its 
 own ground. Revealed religion, so far as it is not fancied
 
 122 THEOLOGY IN RELATION 
 
 but real, must always be undergoing this conversion into 
 natural : if it gives us the master-thought of God, the true 
 key to which the unopened recesses of the inner and the 
 outer world will yield, it can hardly fail to find, or by de- 
 veloping to add, the experiences which conform to it and 
 evidence it. Whatever, being found in Scripture, is re-found 
 in nature and in life, becomes an independent possession of 
 humanity ; and, except that the history of truth is only 
 second in importance to truth itself, the very Scriptures 
 might so far suffer again their medieval disappearance, with- 
 out loss of the treasure they had given to the world. 
 
 And, if the theologians could but look with a calm eye 
 upon the past, they must see that, wherever the strife is 
 over and the field is still, every advance of knowledge has 
 been a gain to religion, won at the expense only of deforming 
 fictions. As our petty schemes of the world break in pieces 
 and fall away, diviner ones construct themselves and make 
 us ashamed of our regrets. Who would now, in the interests 
 of piety, wish to have back the childish little cosmos of the 
 Hebrew legends, or the three stories of the Pauline heaven ? 
 or dare to say, that, in superseding them, Copernicus and 
 Newton blasphemed ? Who would choose to have no cosmos 
 at all till six thousand years ago, or fling a stone at a Her- 
 schel or a Lyell for letting in light and shewing life within 
 that dark immensity ? The age of the world, as it deepens, 
 does but prolong its testimony to God. and make it worthier 
 of his eternity : its scale, as it expands, does but place us 
 in a temple more august, and nearer to his Infinity. Does 
 any one, whose mind has been enlarged by ancient history 
 and whose heart has listened to the old mythologies, want 
 to have his sympathies reduced again to the " chosen 
 people," and the divine communion with our race, so various 
 and pathetic in its early struggling tones, restricted to that 
 only channel ? And if from the person of Jesus Christ the 
 artificial dress of Messianic investiture and some disguising 
 shreds of Jewish fable, drop away, who that can fix an 
 appreciating eye on the emerging form, will not say that it
 
 TO PROGRESSIVE KNOWLEDGE. 123 
 
 is diviner far, embodying in its grand and touching linea- 
 ments the essence and spirit of a new life of God in our 
 humanity ? This experience, this removal to a higher point 
 of faith, is from the first the invariable result with the 
 scholar who works most freely, because quite trustfully, at 
 these problems : as, after long delay, it comes to be the 
 result with all at last. The intermediate disturbance of 
 religious calm, the pious dismay on the one hand, the 
 petulant irreverence on the other, befall chiefly those who 
 do not intimately commune with such researches, but, 
 looking on, judge them by external and inapplicable 
 standards, and not by their inner and essential relations. 
 Whoever, in these things, has gone deep and touched 
 ground, is not afraid of falling into a bottomless abyss : and 
 hence the moral importance of that thoroughness of study 
 which we strive to cultivate here. For, may we not say, the 
 essence of the large and liberal spirit lies in the absence of 
 fear and the promptness of love ?
 
 VIII. 
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY.* 
 
 THE College which enters to-day on a new year of work 
 belongs, however modest its own pretensions, to a class of 
 institutions highly characteristic of English life. They are 
 lineally descended from the Puritan resistance to sacerdotal 
 authority ; they are the public declaration that England 
 shall not be all Anglican ; the acknowledgment of a sphere 
 of truth and duty where no writ of King or Parliament will 
 run. The Act of Uniformity, which finally destroyed the 
 religious unity it aimed to establish, terminated also the 
 educational unity which had brought all candidates for 
 University learning to Oxford and Cambridge. The 
 national character and convictions had set in two distinct 
 types, and were following two different directions : and 
 those ancient schools would henceforth represent but one. 
 The other, not content to be starved out, had to create for 
 itself private institutions where, perhaps under some 
 reverend exile returned from the lecture-rooms of Leyden 
 or Basel, the sons of the Nonconformist gentry and their 
 future clergy might find compensation for what even -Mag- 
 dalen College must now deny them. The disadvantage of 
 these poor schools is so obviously great, that there is less 
 to wonder at in the scholarly contempt for the " Dissenting 
 Academies," than in the fair success with which they have 
 fostered the love of learning and the appreciation of intel- 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1868.
 
 126 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 lectual gifts among a people driven from the public springs 
 of higher life. Without fixed seat or local associations, 
 without libraries, without endowments ; lodged in no 
 venerable halls rich in the memorials of English history ; 
 dependent on the precarious bounty of living supporters 
 and the still more precarious capacity of accessible 
 teachers ; with scant companionship, with little emulation 
 and less variety of mind ; these obscure Colleges seem not 
 only repellent to all natural ambition, but unqualified to be 
 the home of a large and liberal culture. Something indeed 
 they have had to plead as a set-off against this poverty of 
 resource. In the spiritual field it is not always the most 
 elaborate husbandry that produces the most ample fruits ; 
 and the very self-abnegation which could dispense with the 
 honours, if only it could find the light, of knowledge, 
 nay, even the struggle to keep pace on foot with the well- 
 mounted official guides on the road of truth, favoured a 
 manly, strenuous, and disinterested tone of mind, without 
 which the most delicate scholarship becomes a lifeless per- 
 sonal accomplishment. Inheriting, moreover, the genius 
 and traditions of the Genevan Reformation, the Noncon- 
 formist Colleges, like the Universities of Scotland, reducing 
 the Pagan literature to a secondary place, threw all their 
 earnest interest into the gravest problems of human nature 
 and human life, and strengthened themselves chiefly on 
 the side of philosophy and theology : so that their dis- 
 cipline produced, as in the case of Butler, Price, and 
 Priestley, a certain power, precision, and flexibility of 
 thought in dealing with moral, social, and metaphysical 
 theories ; and, as in the case of Jeremiah Jones and Lard- 
 ner, a comprehensive and sympathetic insight into the 
 early history and literature of Christianity. Accordingly, 
 throughout the last and the present century, we find, in the 
 best representatives of the Nonconformist laity, a taste for 
 letters and art, a scientific curiosity, a breadth and firmness 
 of political judgment, which have had their natural weight 
 in spite of ungenial manners and unpopular opinions.
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 127 
 
 And if we compare, for the same period, the Bishops' 
 requirements for ordination with the range of study for the 
 young divine at Daventry, Homerton, Warrington, or 
 York, we shall understand how it is that the most elementary 
 discussions of Biblical criticism, which have long ago 
 spent their effect elsewhere, and left the religion of 
 thoughtful men purer than before, fall upon the English 
 Church with the shock of novelty, and tear it between 
 retreating superstition and hurrying negation. 
 
 Still, whatever partial merits these small Colleges may 
 claim, no one would have devised them, or resorted to 
 them, but for a necessity of conscience. They constituted 
 a provisional -service organized for a period of exile, the 
 little school-shed run up in the forest, because the queenly 
 Alma Mater was out of humour, and had shut against us 
 the gates of her intellectual metropolis. It is easy to see, 
 in spite of some stately airs of reluctance and delay, that 
 her relenting mood has come at last, and that the way will 
 soon be open for our return ; and it is a natural question, 
 whether there will then be further occasion for special 
 institutions like ours ; or whether, with the removal of 
 ecclesiastical barriers, all separate education ought not to 
 merge in the great national schools of the higher culture. 
 "You withdrew," we shall be reminded, "from Oxford 
 and Cambridge, not because you did not like their teach- 
 ing, but because you could not get it, so long as intolerant 
 tests barred the way. You took your youth aside, not 
 from any preference for learning in a corner, but because 
 they could not pass into the throng without leaving honour 
 on the threshold, or enter on the race but on unfair condi- 
 tions. The times are changed, the tests are all but gone : 
 why not disband your Colleges, turn their resources into 
 scholarships, and send your young men to find their level 
 among the mass of educated contemporaries and in the 
 class-rooms of the elite of English teachers ? " 
 
 This proposal is too rational not to demand, and too 
 fascinating not to obtain, serious consideration ; especially
 
 128 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 as it only carries out to the last result a process already 
 successfully begun. A policy, unique among Noncon- 
 formists, has been followed in regard to this Institution. 
 Everywhere else they have shrunk from the experiment of 
 mixed education, and in presence of great open Colleges 
 here and in Manchester, have maintained and multiplied 
 their purely denominational schools. The supporters of 
 this Institution, on the other hand, removed it to London 
 from express preference for mixed education, and cancelled 
 all its functions except those of the theological faculty 
 which University College did not supply. This, however, 
 is supplied by the older Universities ; and it becomes a 
 question, whether, when they finally cease to shut us out, 
 the last remnant of separate teaching should not be aban- 
 doned, our Divinity school be dissolved, and our students 
 mingle undistinguished, like Hungarians or Swiss at Got- 
 tingen or Bonn, with those of other communions. 
 
 Among those who are afraid of mixed education, so bold 
 a question could never be entertained. Their primary care 
 is to create and fix a preconceived type of belief and 
 character in the alumnus ; their secondary, to infuse as 
 much knowledge and accomplishment as may consist with 
 this chief end. And if, even during the disciplinary- 
 studies of his undergraduate career, they think it requisite 
 to keep him all to themselves, much more vigilantly will 
 they insist on securing his mind when he reaches the 
 Divinity school and launches on problems unfathomable 
 and infinite. They will never send him where there is no 
 guarantee that their scheme of doctrine will prevail with 
 him ; and their objection to trust their young divines to 
 Oxford and Cambridge will be that Dr. Pusey is not an 
 Independent, or Dr. Lightfoot a Baptist, and that Mr. 
 Maurice is dangerously far from the Westminster divines. 
 This kind of objection I wish emphatically to disclaim. It 
 can have no weight with those who courageously embrace 
 the principle of mixed education, and believe in the invigo- 
 rating effect of a new atmosphere of thought, under which
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 129 
 
 the still life of habitual things assumes shifting forms and 
 changing colours. What travelling scholar, in choosing his 
 University abroad, would dream of inquiring whether at 
 Jena he could be sure of a good Lutheran Professor, sound 
 on the Real Presence, and at Berlin he should be protected 
 from Rationalism, and at Heidelberg be kept right about 
 the Fourth Gospel and the Incarnation ? No sooner does 
 he escape from our insular narrowness, and see before him 
 the broad continent of European culture, than he asks only 
 where he may learn most, and simply follows where the 
 light may lead : warmed by the genius of Ewald, stimulated 
 by the ingenuity of Volkmar, enriched by the learning of 
 Hilgenfeld, aided by the judgment of Dorner, without even 
 measuring their place on the great map of dogmatic opinion. 
 The moment the opportunity is given him, he forgets the 
 prejudices of ecclesiastical position and follows the intel- 
 lectual instinct of the scholar ; returning probably, after it 
 has been satisfied, to his own place ; but bringing into it a 
 different presence, a mind and heart carried out beyond the 
 stiff formulas of custom and tradition, to breathe a larger 
 air, and bathe in a sweeter light, and gather a more gracious 
 wisdom to be diffused around. 
 
 By sending our students in Arts into the class-rooms of 
 University College, we have pronounced in favour of mixed 
 education. By encouraging our Hibbert scholars to resort 
 to the Universities of Germany, we directly extend the 
 principle to Theology, and refuse, even in that field, to take 
 security for the reproduction of our own opinions. It 
 would seem to follow that if the rule is good for Leipzig or 
 Tubingen, it must hold for Oxford and Cambridge. Are 
 we then prepared to dissolve our only surviving faculty, and 
 hand over our students to those more distinguished theo- 
 logical schools ? Certainly not ; and that for a reason 
 purely Academic, and quite removed from all ecclesiastical 
 fears or interests. Oxford and Cambridge are not like 
 Leipzig and Tubingen ; and the difference is this : that the 
 former have to teach up to certain pre-determined results ; 
 
 VOL. IV K
 
 130 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 the latter, to teach whatever they find to be true. The 
 former, that is to say, are there, not to educate, but to arrest 
 education ; the latter, to conduct the student to the present 
 limits of the known, and exercise him in the method of 
 advancing them into the unknown. This alone is Science; 
 the other is the negation of Science ; and all the erudition 
 it may gather is but the ashes of a burnt-out fire, in which 
 no flame of intellect and soul can live. There are two con- 
 ditions of an open University. It is not enough that no 
 one is turned back from the doors of its lecture-rooms : the 
 Professors must be free to teach, as well as the students to 
 learn ; and until that is the case no less in the faculty of 
 Theology, than in those of Law, Philology, and Physics, 
 thoughtful men can only treat its pretensions as a venerable 
 imposture, and it must yield the palm, as an instrument of 
 culture, to the most modest school which honestly accepts 
 the appointed conditions of intellectual and spiritual -light. 
 The Obscurantist never dies ; but as he re-appears from age 
 to age, he adroitly changes his mask and speech. In the 
 days of Reuchlin and Erasmus, he set his face against the 
 " new learning," as if he had some " old learning," instead 
 of mere "old ignorance" to defend. His cry has now 
 become " Denominational education," " Catholic Univer- 
 sities," " Anglican " schools, Presbyterian, Independent, 
 Methodist Colleges : devices all for showing things not as 
 they are, but as he would like them to look, and for 
 absorbing this or that element of the divine light, ere it 
 reaches the eye, by intercepting and darkening media. The 
 Sects and the Sciences do not admit of being classified 
 together ; the one being founded on subjective limitations 
 of human thought, the other on distinctions present in the 
 objective reality of things : and if a University is to be the 
 orderly home of all knowledge, storing the present and 
 with spaces for the future, if its organism is to reflect the 
 whole intelligent effort of man to interpret the world, it 
 must repudiate all alliance with ecclesiastical parties as a 
 simple betrayal of its trust. The practical effect in this
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 131 
 
 country of such faithlessness in our Universities to their 
 own idea I will describe in no words of my own, but in 
 those of the distinguished Rector of Lincoln College, 
 Oxford. Reviewing the schools of his own University, Mr. 
 Mark Pattison excuses himself thus for passing by, in the 
 silence of despair, the first in rank and in endowment. 
 "The faculty of Theology must be considered in abeyance 
 for purposes of education at present. There is indeed a 
 scientific theology, and, in the Christian records of the 
 early and later ages, the amplest material for various 
 learning and critical investigation. But theology has not 
 begun to exist as a science among us. In the present state 
 of the public mind in this country, it is hopeless to propose 
 to assign to it the place and rank which is its due. I must be 
 content with having marked this place, as being side by 
 side with the other schools which entitle, each of them, to 
 a degree, and which have a defined course of studies leading 
 up to that degree. But I cannot venture to propose what 
 is obviously impossible. Theology will, I fear, in practice, 
 continue to occupy its present degraded position of an 
 extraneous appendage tacked on to the fag-end of every 
 examination in every other subject. In this respect the 
 academical traditions of the sixteenth century, when all 
 education was theological, have been continued into our 
 day, partly from mere habit, partly with the idea that, by 
 thrusting in theology into every examination, we were 
 making education religious, as the Puritans of a former age 
 imagined, that by the employment of Scripture phraseology 
 they sanctified common conversation."* 
 
 * " Suggestions on Academical Organization, with especial reference 
 to Oxford," pp. 319, 320. This little book, remarkable as a lucid 
 picture of Oxford in its present constitution and usages, handles the 
 whole problem of University reconstruction with a breadth and firm- 
 ness truly impressive. Its suggestions are probably too bold and 
 comprehensive for early adoption. But meanwhile the ideal which 
 they present cannot be contemplated without a purifying effect upon 
 English prejudices, and an enlarged appreciation of the University as 
 a function of the national life. 
 
 K 2
 
 132 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 Here, then, is our answer to those who say, " The old 
 Universities will be open immediately : dissolve your 
 College, and send your students there, where there are 
 schools, not of Arts alone, but of Divinity too." We can- 
 not send them to a place where " the faculty of Theology 
 must be considered in abeyance for the present." And 
 here is our plea for still attaching some value to our own 
 school : that, however inadequate its division of labour, 
 however imperfect the competency of its teachers, when 
 measured by the intellectual resources of the continental 
 seats of learning, it at least (and, so far as I know, alone) 
 incorporates their principle, and serves, till better days, as 
 an asylum for the hunted and banished idea of " a scientific 
 theology." No pledges, actual or implied, are asked from 
 the professors, except for the faithful devotion of their 
 faculties, in the respective provinces assigned them, to the 
 search and communication of truth. No question is asked 
 of the student, except the practical one as to his choice of 
 a mode of life ; and that as a condition, not of his instruc- 
 tion, but of the benefaction which saves him its cost. Nor 
 in its lectures is there anything which might not be trans- 
 posed to an auditorium at Berlin or Halle, with no other 
 effect than that of sinking into the shade beside the brilliant 
 expositions of distinguished teachers. This function, of 
 saving, till the floods of party delusion subside, the idea 
 and example of " a scientific theology," is the solitary claim 
 I put forth for this College. I know that the claim is 
 derided by outside observers who judge all human projects 
 by the complexion of their subscription lists. I am not 
 surprised that it is unappreciated by those who think of all 
 theologies as so many party manifestoes. The English 
 mind is vitiated through and through by the identification 
 of religion with partisan opinions. But the procession of 
 new orthodoxies cannot be eternal ; and if only a few men 
 will but hold fast to the assurance that the truth about 
 divine things is to be found on similar conditions with the 
 truth about human and cosmical, the higher spirits will at
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 133 
 
 last return, and find that they gain no genuine light and 
 sacredness till they are beyond the hootings of the Church 
 crowd. 
 
 Is there, however, such a thing as " a scientific theology " 1 
 For I find its possibility questioned from quite another 
 side ; not by those who have too narrow a conception of 
 religion, but by those who have too narrow a conception of 
 science. It is one of the most curious effects of the 
 brilliant and rapid advance of physical research in modern 
 times, that it has absorbed to itself alone the meaning of 
 the word " Science," and forced its own language and con- 
 ceptions, as if the intellect had no other instrument or work, 
 upon the whole field of human thought. Pronounce the 
 word " Science " before an English crowd, and in not one 
 man out of a hundred will it call up any notion but of 
 astronomy, geology, chemistry, optics, and other partial 
 interpretations of the outer world ; and if it be the educated 
 crowd, gathered in the halls of the British Association 
 recently assembled at Norwich, in not one of a thousand. 
 In this restricted sense, undoubtedly, Theology is no 
 " Science " ; along this path, if that were all, its Infinite 
 Object is not apprehensible ; and I cannot wonder that the 
 eminent and high-minded President of the Association, 
 speaking from this exclusive point of view, sanctioned with 
 his great authority the dictum that religion deals only with 
 the inscrutable, and can make no terms with science, except 
 by unconditional surrender of the whole field of intelligence, 
 and withdrawal into the dark ; and that " if the two would 
 work in harmony, both parties must beware how they fence 
 with that most dangerous of all two-edged iveapotis, Natural 
 Theology ; a science falsely so called, when, not content 
 with trustfully accepting truths hostile to any presumptuous 
 standard it may set up, it seeks to weigh the infinite in the 
 balance of the finite, and shifts its ground to meet the re- 
 quirements of every new fact that science establishes and 
 every old error that science exposes. Thus pursued,' 1 it is 
 said, " natural theology is to the scientific man a delusion
 
 134 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 and to the religious man a snare, leading too often to dis- 
 ordered intellects and to atheism."* 
 
 In this latest indictment of the scientific against the 
 religious intellect, the distinguished botanistf has surely 
 expressed himself with less than his usual precision. Two 
 voices seem to sound through these sentences, one which 
 denounces all natural theology, another which denounces 
 only bad natural theology, and thereby allows the possibility 
 of a better. In declaring the Power behind the world 
 absolutely inscrutable, the speaker cuts off all passage from 
 nature to God, and unconditionally excludes all " natural 
 theology," as necessarily illusory in its very aim and 
 essence. Yet instantly, as if in recoil from the strength of 
 his own charge, he softens his tone to this dangerous 
 impostor, and makes it a false science only when it mis- 
 behaves itself, in a way which he proceeds to describe. 
 And what is the disqualifying offence to which it is said to 
 be prone? (i) That it will not accept discovered truths 
 which displace its preconceptions ; (2) that it is always 
 shifting its ground to meet the requirements of new facts 
 as they are established. As one part of this misconduct 
 consists in rejecting, and the other in admitting, new 
 truths ; one in holding by an obsolete universe, the other 
 in moving onwards through the opening fields, they cannot 
 both be committed by the same culprit at the same time ; 
 and, since the only way of avoiding each is to enact the 
 other, the first cannot be wrong unless the second is right. 
 If any "natural theologian" sets up a "presumptuous 
 standard," and obstinately refuses to see the fresh spaces 
 explored beyond it, let him by all means be condemned : 
 not, however, for his "theology," but for his "presump- 
 tion " and his prejudice ; for his irreverent preference of his 
 own dreams to the Divine order he pretends to seek. But 
 if your rebuke shames him into repentance, and he flings 
 his "presumptuous standard" away, and advances his 
 
 * Report of President's Address : Athenuiim for August 22, 1868. 
 t Sir Joseph Hooker.
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 135 
 
 position to the front, with what consistency can you turn 
 round upon him with the reproach that he has run away 
 from the " old errors " and is occupying the " new truth " ? 
 What would the Theist be worth, if he were not for ever 
 shifting his ground, and widening his program ; letting the 
 Jewish " firmament " open, and release his thought into 
 the real vault of night ; reconstructing his petty chronometry, 
 and learning to count by the beats of geologic time ; drop- 
 ping from his imagination the successive starts and 
 paroxysms of creation, and substituting the eternal thinking- 
 out of the Universal Order along the quiet steps of law ? 
 The very test of his fundamental conception is, whether it 
 permits him to shift his ground fast enough without parting 
 company with it ; whether it is flexible enough to bend and 
 move with the rapid curves of advancing knowledge : or 
 whether, on the other hand, polarized light, or the waves of 
 sound, or the magnetic current, or the cellular architecture, 
 are impossible modes of action for a Living Will. How 
 can it be an offence in the natural theologian to say of these 
 things, " I embrace them all ; for me they make a far better 
 and diviner world than the poor little peep-show of Genesis 
 or the Timaeus ; and He of whose mind all the modern 
 sciences are the partial reflection is to me an auguster being 
 than Jehovah or Zeus ? " With what sense or justice can 
 you tell him that his study, " thus pursued, leads too often 
 to disordered intellects and atheism ? '' and yet not tell him 
 how, otherwise pursued, it may consist with sanity and 
 theism ? To class atheism with madness and to hold it up 
 in terror and in warning, is to treat it as a disastrous illusion, 
 into which it is pitiable to fall. But it can be so only in 
 proportion as the truth which it denies is important and 
 accessible to a reasonable mind. The path (wherever it 
 may be) of legitimate access to that truth is " natural theo- 
 logy " ; and to shut up the approaches, yet frighten you for 
 missing the goal, is surely an inconsistency which would be 
 more in place in a council of the church than in a hall of 
 the philosophers.
 
 136 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 Probably we shall best reach the real meaning of the 
 indictment, if \ve let its qualifying clauses fall away, and 
 take it in its unconditional form, as charging absolute 
 nullity upon all natural theology, however it may behave. 
 And if by this be meant that there is no place for it among 
 the Inductive Sciences, and that the cognitive powers and 
 methods which help us to our Physics and Chemistry are 
 incompetent to carry us on to Religion, I am not disposed 
 to controvert (though, to render it exact, I should wish to 
 qualify) the proposition. The objects of Natural knowledge 
 are the phenomena which we notice by outward perception, 
 and which we group into laws by attention to their differ- 
 ences and succession ; and if this were all the work for 
 which our intellect is fitted, we certainly could never 
 apprehend a Divine nature which is beyond phenomena, 
 and is the ground of all their laws. But, I must submit, 
 it is a very inadequate reckoning of the cognitive resources 
 of the human mind, which limits them to the inductive 
 faculties ; and nothing can be more unwarrantable than to 
 pronounce an object unknowable simply because they are 
 unable to reach it. We are made capable of knowing, not 
 only that which happens, but that which is ; not only 
 phenomena, but existences ; not only laws, but causation : 
 and this additional knowledge not only is just as certain as 
 the other, but actually underlies it as its condition, and has 
 to be assumed in every inductive proposition. Space, for 
 example, infinite Space, is no phenomenon, and no law of 
 phenomena, but a necessary existence, of which we have 
 more absolute assurance than of any physical changes 
 occurring within it. Causal Power again is no phenomenon, 
 and is more than the law of phenomena : it evades your 
 senses, which notice only the changes which take place ; it 
 evades your registering memory, which can record only their 
 order of succession : yet you so believe in it, that you 
 cannot speak of a natural fact without assuming it ; the 
 language of all physical sciences is steeped in the conception 
 of it : and the whole tissue of relations among them is
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 137 
 
 woven by the dynamical idea. These interpreting ideas, 
 not inductively reached, but furnished by the intellect 
 itself as organizing principles for its experience, no one can 
 help accepting as exponents of reality, and treating as a 
 part of his knowledge. They are the sources of his deduc- 
 tions (as Geometry works out the idea of Space), without 
 being the result of his inductions. Even therefore within 
 the limits of physical knowledge, the mind is introduced to 
 existences, real and not phenomenal, which are no part of 
 its scientific discovery, yet which form the very cement of 
 its conceptions, and deserve whatever trust belongs to the 
 primary conditions of intelligence itself. 
 
 Among the existences thus disclosed in the very structure 
 of our faculties, only half-hid till the moral nature speaks, 
 is the Divine. Conscience is as much a human fact as 
 Reason and Perception, and is no less entitled to be 
 believed on its word. And if there is anything invariably 
 clear in its utterance, it is this : that we live under an 
 authority above us, speaking in the law of right and wrong, 
 and wielding our compunctions as ministers of justice ; 
 therefore, from the very nature of authority, under a Living 
 Will transcending our personality and communing with it. 
 The Divine rule over life is no less correlated to the Moral 
 faculty, than the existence of an external world to the 
 Perceptive ; and as there is no difference in the nature of 
 their evidence, so are they held with equal cogency of 
 natural belief, wherever men are found : and they first come 
 into question together, when the mind's intuitive reliances 
 are corroded by the action of false metaphysics. Under 
 such artificial influence, you may dispute the validity of the 
 natural revelation ; you may construe the world and God 
 into Matter and Force; but with no result beyond the 
 exchange of full and concrete assumptions for abstract and 
 empty ones : for of matter and force you know nothing 
 except on the very same tenure on which others hold the 
 ideas you reject ; and on whatever grounds you call the 
 interpretation of the universe by Dead Force a science, on
 
 138 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 the same must its interpretation by Living Force be a science 
 too. The different choice of an interpreting conception 
 entitles neither expositor to excommunicate the other, and 
 banish him into the outer darkness. Natural theology 
 then, I must contend, is a perfectly legitimate exercise of 
 the human intellect. It simply carries over into the natural 
 world that idea of a Living Will at the heart of things, 
 which it has found chiefly in the moral world ; and tries 
 how it will fit the cosmical scene, and adjust itself to the 
 natural laws, which thus far the scientific surveyors have laid 
 open. Far from denying anything which they have found, 
 such an interpreter necessarily adopts it all, as the very 
 material on which he works. His account of the origin of 
 things in no way contradicts theirs, but simply includes it : 
 flinging around their field, which is limited to the detection 
 of method, the embracing idea of intellectual purpose, and 
 interfusing an omnipresent Thought with the working 
 powers which they have found. He accepts in full their 
 report of how things came about, and realize the ends we 
 see; he only adds by way of caution "You have found 
 the laws of countless phenomena before unreduced : be 
 content with this, and dream not that you have dispossessed 
 their Cause. Once upon the track of their order, you can 
 tell the issue of this or that, long before it comes. But 
 that these ends resulting are not ends contemplated is more 
 than you can ever show : that they necessarily arise from 
 their antecedents, only proves that they were not contem- 
 plated without being provided for : came they from Fate, 
 or came they from pre-disposing Thought, this is an aspect 
 which they must in any case present.'' While I thus 
 vindicate a place among the recognized applications of the 
 intellect for Natural Theology, I must confess the retribu- 
 tion not surprising, if, after centuries of stupid obstruction 
 from the divines, the men of science, in the exulting con- 
 sciousness that their day has come, are tempted to break 
 bounds, and to direct a reactionary scorn upon the philoso- 
 phic theologian ; whose province, however, they would
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 139 
 
 more happily distinguish from their own, did they not 
 include metaphysics in their contempt. 
 
 The occupation, then, of the moralist and theologian is 
 not yet gone ; and would not be in the smallest degree 
 affected, though the palaeontologist could actually show 
 under the microscope the very type of parent-cell from 
 which, through myriad links in natural history, the human 
 race has sprung. The facts of personal life, of moral 
 obligation, of social ties, of ideal aims, of religious intuition, 
 are not altered, or made unworthy of intellectual treatment, 
 by any previous development of the organism in which 
 they appear. They remain phenomena sui generis, which 
 no physiological record of corporeal antecedents, however 
 refined and perfect it might be, would enable you to pre- 
 dict : they cannot be got under the object-glass of any 
 optical instrument : they are known, and must for ever be 
 known, only subjectively, through the consciousness of the 
 human race, whether immediately, by silent individual 
 reflection, or mediately, by expression in language, in law, 
 in literature, in the usages of the state and the worship of 
 the temple. The systematic study of these things, with a 
 view to disengage the purest truth attainable respecting the 
 Divine relations of man, is what we mean by Scientific 
 Theology ; " theology" because a right apprehension of 
 God is its end ; " scientific^ because in handling the 
 materials, resort is had to an orderly plan and approved 
 critical methods. 
 
 Though the classification of studies on which we proceed 
 in this College has been determined partly by its practical 
 object as a training school for ministers, partly by an 
 economy of personal aptitudes in the teachers, it appears 
 to me to be not deficient in scientific propriety and con- 
 venience. If we are to begin, as good sense requires, with 
 the better known, our point of departure must necessarily be 
 the type of moral and religious civilization which is present 
 in our world to-day, whose life is before us, whose ideas 
 are within us, and which, whether consciously or uncon-
 
 140 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 sciously, we shall carry with us as our measure into the 
 critique of other forms. The Christian religion then, 
 looked at as a realized spiritual fact, the nearest and best 
 known, and, provisionally at least, the highest in the world, 
 occupies, not only justly but inevitably, the centre and main 
 portion of the field. No object, however, can be judged 
 of when seen insulated and alone ; but only when struck 
 by the crossing lights of various comparison, be it of con- 
 trast with foreign objects, or of partial similitude among 
 the successive stages of its own growth. Hence the 
 immense importance, and the vast scope, of the historical 
 theology which engages two Professorships, and occupies the 
 just primacy, in this place. Conceived in its whole extent, 
 it would amount to a comparative history and critical survey 
 of the religions of mankind, wherever they find distinctive 
 expression in literature or life : under the limitations 
 imposed by practical exigencies, it works out its object with 
 special fulness all down the historical line of the Jewish 
 and Christian faiths, with such collateral notices of other 
 theologies as may at once clear the characteristics, and 
 exhibit the affinities, of the main thread of light. So great 
 is the apparatus of erudition involved in this survey, that 
 in too many teachers it has overwhelmed the spiritual 
 faculties, buried out of sight the end in view, and simply 
 choked the well of life with a mass of learned dust : but it 
 ?s wielded with ease, and applied with enriching power, 
 where the ripe tact of the scholar and the copious resources 
 ,>fthe historical critic are simply at the service of quickened 
 Christian affections and a supreme love of truth. The two 
 biblical languages with their dialectic modifications, the 
 whole series of biblical texts, with the history of their origin 
 and transmission, the interpretation of their meaning, the 
 testing of their recorded facts, the appreciation of their 
 laws, their poetry, their vaticiuia, the tracing through them 
 oi their growing religious idea, the reconstruction from 
 them of their lost forms of life, are included in the pro- 
 gram of this department. Yet these are but its first
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 141 
 
 section : for they bring us no further than the date of the 
 literature itself; and it has run through time with an un- 
 measured and ever multiplying power, which makes its 
 effects greater than itself, and more in need of voluminous 
 exposition. The Christian Church in its rise, from a mere 
 section in the synagogue or the proseucha, to a consoli- 
 dated spiritual power dominating the civilized world ; and 
 again in its Protestant dispersion into varieties, irrigating new 
 fields of thought, reaching the latent seeds of fresh growth, 
 and, while outwardly falling to pieces, becoming by inward 
 penetration more catholic than before ; presents a mar- 
 vellous spectacle which no dry chronicler or ecclesiologist 
 can exhibit, but only an expositor who has access to the 
 deepest springs of art and philosophy, of human aspiration 
 and human trust. 
 
 Large and various as are the contents of historical 
 theology, they do not, however, find for us our point of 
 final rest. They present a crowd of significant phenomena 
 which must be passed before the mind mainly in the order 
 of time ; and though incidentally the mixed multitude may 
 be sifted out into its more or less pure elements by the com- 
 ment of a philosophical expositor, he is too busy with 
 pushing on the movement of his materials to pause in 
 quest of their ultimate interpretation, or critically to 
 establish his own critical tests. It remains to contem- 
 plate the whole of these phenomena in another light ; as a 
 language of manifestation expressive of the religious nature 
 and faculties of man ; and to seek the final roots and 
 essential validity of those beliefs, which work out for them- 
 selves so august, so various, at one time so benign, at 
 another so terrible a history. Only by a critique of human 
 nature itself, by an analysis of its intrinsic capabilities, can 
 the last principles be gained which may serve as criteria of 
 religious truth, and justify the limits we assign to the re- 
 tention of traditional beliefs. There is therefore a philo- 
 sophical theology needed to supplement the historical. It 
 is essentially a psychology ; which, in tracing the higher
 
 142 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 
 
 beliefs to their genesis, untwines from them the threads of 
 accident, and discharges the colours of illusion, and lays 
 bare the golden fibre of their imperishable texture. Were 
 the religion of man due to a special faculty, of insulated 
 function, the range of this investigation would be incon- 
 siderable, and would fill but a chapter in the descriptive 
 analysis of the human mind. But the elements of even the 
 simplest faith are contributed from all sides of our nature ; 
 ideas of Causation, of Beauty, of Right, of Truth, all 
 mingle in our conception of the Divine, and leave it only 
 partially pursued to its ground, till our scrutiny has been 
 carried through the whole circle of perceptive, logical, 
 affectional and moral faculties. To distinguish a prejudice 
 from an axiom, we must know the laws of legitimate in- 
 tellectual action ; to avoid confounding an abstraction of 
 thought with a reality of being, we must read our mental 
 experience aright, and not transpose the elements and the 
 products of its history. To decide whether duty is a re- 
 finement of interest and sympathy, or speaks with a distinct 
 voice of its own, and whether compunction is a reflected 
 image of the public anger or an indigenous notice of 
 violated obligation, we must discriminate, by the most 
 rigorous tests, the primitive material from the fabricated 
 structure of our moral life. Whilst we hear all the religious 
 phenomena explained away, on the one hand, as a tissue of 
 artificial associations, spreading over the face of things a 
 veil of illusion which is destined to dissolve like the ghosts 
 already gone, and claimed, on the other hand, as the ex- 
 pression of native insight into things as they are, given us 
 by the necessary postulates of reason and conscience ; is it 
 not evident that the last controversy is already passing on 
 to the psychological field ; and that on the self-interpreta- 
 tion of human nature depends the continued recognition of 
 the Divine? Were it possible that the analyses of Thought 
 and Will now prevalent in the schools should prove final, 
 and that nothing should be found behind the current Logic 
 of science, we should be living in the last age of Theology,
 
 A WORD FOR SCIENTIFIC THEOLOGY. 143 
 
 and it would scarcely need another step for its self- 
 knowledge to overbalance into self-extinction. Since, 
 however, our " modern thought " does not solve, but only 
 despair of the haunting problems of " Metaphysics," since 
 again it makes no provision for any primary truths, but 
 makes all our mental stores alike derivative, and that 
 from sensible experiences common to us with the brutes, 
 it may be surmised that intellectual curiosity may yet rise 
 in discontent and reclaim its natural range ; that the device 
 will not permanently succeed of shutting up vast chambers 
 of human thought and labelling them " empty " ; and that 
 the relation between our phenomenal knowledge and what 
 lies beyond it- may be reconstrued, and lifted into a real 
 relation, neither inscrutable nor insignificant. If so, 
 there is a future still for philosophical theology ; and the 
 death with which, from the time of Epicurus to that of 
 Comte, it has been so often threatened by the expositors of 
 natural laws and molecular hypotheses, will yet be post- 
 poned. " Modem thought " is strong ; but ancient trusts 
 are stronger ; and with the vigour of eternal youth they 
 will re-assert their moral power, as the inexhaustible springs 
 of noble and reverent action, and vindicate their intellectual 
 place, as the immovable basis of any satisfying philosophy.
 
 VOL. IV.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE vindication of Dissent contained in the following 
 Address will be understood by my readers to be simply 
 moral and historical, and will not, I trust, be mistaken for a 
 declaration of political opinion with regard to impending 
 ecclesiastical questions. It implies no approval of the policy 
 of " Disestablishment/' and no disapproval of the aim at a 
 comprehensive National Church system. Indeed, but for my 
 large agreement with Mr. Matthew Arnold's judgments on these 
 points, I should have less regretted his habitual disparagement 
 of the Nonconformist history and spirit. Among the various 
 causes which have recently abated the hope of any National 
 union for religious ends, not the least powerful, I fear, may 
 be found in the Prefaces to " Culture and Anarchy " and 
 " St. Paul and Protestantism." And the more I honour the 
 genius and high purpose of their author, the more do I lament 
 any needless resistance which their historical misappreciations 
 may unintentionally provoke. 
 
 LONDON, OCTOBER 16, 1871.
 
 WHY DISSENT ?* 
 
 IN the early "days of English Nonconformity, its leaders 
 assumed their position with reluctance, and readily owned 
 that it required apology. It was a secession from partner- 
 ship in the national life at its highest point ; nay, it turned 
 into an occasion of disunion that force of reverence which 
 chiefly blends the conflicting wills of men into one social 
 system. The responsibility of such act of separation was 
 not to be incurred without a clear moral necessity : no 
 personal distaste, no disappointed preference, no self- 
 will which might be sacrificed, could for a moment be 
 pleaded in defence: against these the claim of the common 
 sentiment was a conclusive answer, which, if resisted, left 
 the imputation proved of ungenial temper and wanton 
 schism. Nothing short of a supreme obligation, directly 
 imposed from the Source of all duty, could release from the 
 secondary authority of society and the Commonwealth, 
 and warrant retreat into exceptional modes of religious 
 life. Hence the elder Nonconformists were always anxious 
 to show that some positive Divine ordinance stood in the 
 way of their compliance with the ecclesiastical rule of 
 their country ; that they did not resist the public order 
 of religion, so long as it enacted nothing ultra vires ; but 
 that the sacrifice which they would freely make of their 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1871. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 WHY DISSENT? 
 
 private fancies could not be applied to matters already 
 put out of their power by the will of God. They thus 
 admitted an antecedent obligation on the citizens to all 
 possible moral and religious unity ; the right of the nation 
 to strive towards this unity in its authorized Church 
 system ; the guilt of disobedience on trivial and egotistic 
 grounds : and they rested their case on the single plea, 
 that the Act of Uniformity mistook the terms of Christian 
 communion, and required conditions at variance with the 
 pure and primitive model. So soon as the State should 
 discover its mistake, and ask nothing which the Head 
 of the Church had not imposed, their excuse for isolation 
 would be taken away, and they would be bound to fall into 
 their place in the spiritual organism of their country. In 
 accordance with this view of their position, the Puritan 
 exiles from the English Church, regarding their expulsion 
 as temporary, gave to their separate institutions a pro- 
 visional character only, and assumed a waiting attitude 
 till the closed door should be re-opened to them ; resort- 
 ing still for their education to the public schools and 
 colleges which remained accessible to them, with perhaps 
 some supplementary years at Utrecht or Leyden ; main- 
 taining their civic place by " occasional conformity " ; and 
 relying for the theological instruction of their intellectual 
 classes on an almost private system of Academical teach- 
 ing on the part of their leading ministers. At every 
 possible point, every point from which they were not 
 driven by inhibitory law, they long retained their contact 
 with the national sources of culture and habits of action ; 
 and i: was only when a generation had passed in dis- 
 appointed hope, and the Revolution finally gave them 
 " Toleration,'' but refused them re-admission, that they 
 sorrowfully accepted their attitude of isolation, and laid the 
 foundation of integral churches and schools for a separate 
 people. For nearly two centuries these institutions have 
 been allowed to grow and gather round them the bequests 
 of the dead and the attachment of the living ; till their
 
 WHY DISSENT* 149 
 
 scale has attained a national and their duration an his- 
 torical importance ; and they have set into a form which 
 renders their re-absorption into the established ecclesiastical 
 system as it is, plainly impossible. Yet this is the time 
 chosen by one of our most accomplished poets and 
 brightest of critics, for censuring the history, deriding the 
 character, and even impugning the moral right of our Non- 
 conformity ; and for inviting us to relinquish the life of 
 outside barbarians, and seek a late entrance into the inner 
 circle of English culture and religion.* As this invitation 
 is not without support from many tendencies of our age, 
 from the fading of old distinctions and the fusing power 
 of new beliefs, from the widening scope of modern 
 education and the dislike of nursed and narrow types 
 of mind, and (must I not add ?) from relaxed vigour 
 of public veracity, it may be reasonable to consider, 
 whether it is time for our Nonconformity to cease ; or 
 whether there is yet a work to be done, and a testimony 
 to be borne, which justify the continued function of such 
 a College as I represent to-day. 
 
 The quarrel between the Anglican and the Puritan 
 resolves itself into the difference between a sacerdotal and 
 a personal Christianity ; the one relying on the mediation 
 of priest and sacrament ; the other, on the imniediateness 
 of individual faith. It seems to be admitted that between 
 these two, so long as each doctrine was a living reality, 
 harmonious co-existence was impossible ; but, since neither 
 of them can now be seriously regarded as essential, or, 
 indeed, as more than a " human development," they ought, 
 it is said, to make reciprocal concessions, and shelter their 
 equal rights under the common adoption of the State. 
 Sacerdotalism and Solifidianism, gaining nothing by their 
 internecine war, may as well come to terms, and, as joint 
 instructors of the nation in spiritual things, divide the 
 functions and aspects of religion between them. Since 
 
 * " St. Paul and Protestantism, "by Matthew Arnold, M.A. LL.D., 
 Preface, pp. xx-xxv.
 
 150 WHY DISSENT1 
 
 both are already found side by side in the parishes of 
 the same diocese, in the debates of Convocation, and in 
 the ecclesiastical literature which keeps an impartial shelf 
 for Newton and Simeon, Pusey and Keble, the hindrance, 
 it is urged, is evidently not in any constitutional exclusion ; 
 but lies wholly in the will of the Dissenter, in his political 
 churlishness, his narrow sympathies, and his preference for 
 institutions of his own invention to those of national 
 scope.* 
 
 The proposal for putting an end to the impertinence 
 of Nonconformity assumes that it is no longer the guardian 
 of any considerable religious principle ; and that even its 
 early zeal gave an overstrained importance to words and 
 usages which, if left unchallenged, would have remained 
 innocuous. Nowhere, however, is illusion more easy than 
 in measuring the magnitude of religious differences ; and 
 the estimate, to be of any value, must be made from the 
 interior, i.e. by one to whom the objects of faith and 
 affection are real, and the disputed propositions respecting 
 them are definitely true or definitely false. If, instead of 
 this, the appreciation is attempted by the critic from an 
 exterior position, it is inevitable that all the actual beliefs, 
 being treated as mere varieties of subjective sentiment, 
 alike without objective significance, should seem to present 
 no difference worth a serious sacrifice. From his point of 
 view, Religion is only a popular form of culture, exercising 
 the ideal faculties in various ways, and suffusing life with 
 colours of solemn or tender sentiment : he sees in it only 
 such differences as separate the several forms of eloquence 
 and poetry, Drama and Lyric, Epic and Elegy; and 
 with his attention arrested by the symbol while shrinking 
 from the thing symbolized, it is no wonder that he is 
 similarly affected by opposite expressions of piety, and finds 
 nothing but what is trivial in intervals of meaning which to 
 
 * " St. Paul and Protestantism," Preface, pp. xxvi, xxvii ; "Puri- 
 tanism and the Church of England," pp. 58, 59; "Culture and 
 Anarchy," Preface, pp. xliii, xliv.
 
 WHY DISSENT? 151 
 
 others are impassable. The affections towards God are 
 strictly personal affections : the relations to Him which are 
 recognized in worship are intimate realities, not less clear 
 and living than those which men sustain to one another. 
 On this assumption all the language and life of Churches 
 are founded ; and where the Divine Name has lost this 
 meaning, and its essence is discharged as an anthropo- 
 morphic superstition, the whole matter of Religion dis- 
 appears ; and the arbitrator who pronounces on its disputes 
 from such foreign point of view understands the position 
 of neither party. An inevitable defect of sympathy is 
 liable to impair the judgment of the simply literary or 
 neutral observer of religious phenomena, and distort for 
 him their actual intervals and affinities. Looking, for 
 example, on the surplice as a frock, and the mitre as a 
 cap, and the Collect or the Litany as a fancied incanta- 
 tion, he thinks it folly to care about such trifles, and sighs 
 over the wasted passion they excite. Where no living 
 communion is supposed to exist in Worship, no interchange 
 of human aspiration and Divine response, and prayer is 
 resolved into mere soliloquy, it is natural enough that with 
 the reality should vanish also the scrupulosity of devotion ; 
 for it is but a small thing for one man to concede this or 
 that to the soliloquy of another, or even to read for others 
 the rhapsody which is alien to himself : he is dealing only 
 with his fellows ; and their momentary misunderstanding 
 of his complaisance he can easily correct by subsequent 
 explanation. Nothing so lubricates the ethics of Con- 
 formity as to reduce public offices of piety to a mutual 
 social engagement, in which men can agree to give and 
 take, and the measure of right may be voted in and out as 
 humours change. But this is to blend religions by dis- 
 solving them ; to force charity by artificial heat to blossom 
 at the head while leaving the frost to kill it at the root. 
 Even as an element in the discipline of a man's character, 
 every such departure from simplicity is hurtful to his 
 reverence and veracity. And whoever is still possessed by
 
 152 WHY DISSENT* 
 
 the Puritan feeling, and stands in prayer before the 
 All-Holy Presence, is powerless to pretend or to recite 
 or to lie ; he cannot shape his lips except to the thing 
 which is, or seek harmony with the infinitely True by be- 
 coming the organ of the consciously false. Thus it is 
 inevitable that the measures of religious interval should 
 look quite different from within and from without ; and 
 though it is but too possible for sects and schools to 
 exaggerate things of slight significance, and nurse their 
 own peculiarities, and lose all largeness of sympathy and 
 apprehension, it is no' less common for the external 
 observer to extend his satire of these faults to other 
 characteristics, arising from a true spiritual insight. 
 
 Now, estimate as we may other and secondary hindran- 
 ces to religious union, there are two impassable barriers in 
 the way of conformity on the part of such liberal Puritanism 
 as this College represents : we cannot join a Sacerdotal 
 Church : we cannot join a Solifidian Church ; still less can 
 we join a Church which, heedless of the contradiction, 
 manages to be both. Mr. Arnold admits that between the 
 beliefs which these words express, the antipathy is irreme- 
 diable ; but, under inspiration of the Zeitgeist, he finds them 
 both to be erroneous ; whence the natural inference would 
 seem to be that both should take themselves away at 
 opposite doors of retreat. Our critic, however, concludes 
 that they should both of them stay and be friends, or at 
 least sleep side by side, like dead enemies buried in the 
 same tomb. It is evident that their antipathy is not less 
 from their truth becoming more doubtful ; and our assent 
 is not made easier by showing that the proposition offered 
 to us is false. In the condescending patronage extended 
 by modern " culture " towards religious conceptions which 
 it does not embrace, there is a curious inversion of the old 
 rigour and simplicity. We used i to think that the measure 
 of mischief in a wrong belief was its distance from the 
 truth, and that we should be most patient of error that 
 least distorts the real. But, to judge from the growing
 
 WHY DISSENTS 153 
 
 literary habit of mild compliment to extreme superstition, 
 and supercilious scorn towards mere overstrained truths, it 
 would seem to be supposed that the extravagantly false is 
 the completely innocent, and that in the outer region of 
 nonsense you may make your bow all round, and smile on 
 every well-meant absurdity. The ancient veracity has not 
 yet so lost its nerve as to be subdued by the grand air of 
 these benevolences. So long as its Sacramental principle 
 remains, the Established Church rests upon a theory of 
 religion utterly at variance with all the residuary varieties of 
 Puritan faith, and amounting as many of us conceive, to a 
 reversal of the very essence of Christianity ; for it intercepts 
 that immediatehess of relation between the human spirit and 
 the Divine which is the distinctive boon of Jesus to the 
 world; and it reinstates that resort to mediation and " chan- 
 nels of grace," and magically-endowed men, which it was his 
 special aim to sweep away and render impossible. It cannot 
 be denied that the opposition between these two conceptions 
 is fundamental ; that it justified the protest of the Puritans 
 and Quakers against the Church of Andrewes, Laud, and 
 Parker ; and why not then our prolonged resistance, seeing 
 that not one pretension of prelacy has been withdrawn, and 
 that never since that age have priestly doctrines, and usages, 
 and tastes, advanced with so bold a front as now ? How can 
 we, whose whole gospel lies in the intimate personal access 
 of each soul to God, play with the language of absolution, 
 affect to be organs for the remission of sins, or stand by 
 while others profess to take the obstacles away which 
 neutralize the everlasting love ? As it would be an 
 imposture in us to assume the possession of supernatural 
 functions for the divine governance of men, so would it be 
 a faithless hypocrisy silently to sanction their assumption 
 by others ; and while so many Christians and Englishmen 
 rest on the simple, filial, immediate relation of the soul to 
 God, we can acknowledge neither the Catholicity nor the 
 Nationality of a Church which makes its ministers "Priests,"
 
 154 WHY DISSENT? 
 
 turns its rites into spells, and gives efficacy in its Eucharist 
 to an act of sacrificial mediation. 
 
 But, apart from the sacerdotalism of the Church which 
 repels all the descendants of Puritanism, its whole theory 
 of religion, of human ruin by nature, and select rescue by 
 faith, forbids the approach of those to whom it presents an 
 utterly false picture of the universe, its author, and its moral 
 government. A worship which begins with the abjectness 
 of man before the terror of God, and is lifted thence only 
 by foreign deliverance, and ends with a borrowed righteous- 
 ness, fails to reach the springs of conscience, to satisfy the 
 needs of devout affection, or relieve the shadows of life 
 with lights of intelligible trust. It is true that, side by side 
 with this imaginary drama of perdition and salvation, we 
 find fragments of nobler and more natural faith, and hear, 
 rising from the midst, occasional strains of a bright and 
 tender piety. But for Church communion it is not enough 
 that here and there the mind can flow in with a note of 
 harmony, if the theme as a whole, and the genius of the 
 place, are out of tune with the inward thought : and who 
 can pretend that the theological economy presented in the 
 teachings and services of the Church is compatible with 
 the scientific knowledge, or the moral sense, or the ideal 
 aspirations, of this age of the world? or even with that 
 supremacy of Righteousness in which Mr. Arnold himself 
 discovers the essence of the Gentile Gospel ?* Is it just, 
 then, to taunt us with our separation, and invite us to close 
 our "Philistine" conventicles and obscure Colleges, and go 
 with the majority to the Church and the older Universities ? 
 Surely he forgets, what we also inadequately remember, that 
 the religious acts of life are simply the expression of supreme 
 reverence and inmost conviction, and in the absence of 
 these are only simulated, i.e. are just turned into their 
 contraries, and become profaneness and irreligion. "Optimi 
 corruptio pessima est ; ' : the infusion of insincerity into the 
 * "St. Paul and Protestantism,'' p. 97, scqq.
 
 WHY DISSENT1 155 
 
 highest action of the soul reduces it to one of the lowest ; 
 and would make us dead members of the Church to which 
 we seem to belong. Hence the necessity laid upon us, not 
 less in the present than in the past, of accepting our position 
 of exiles, and going apart for freedom of religious education 
 and genuineness of religious service. We have no honour- 
 able option. It is a question of a withering away of the 
 spiritual life, or of its ampler unfolding in a more sequestered 
 but congenial field. 
 
 Must we then accept as our inevitable portion the con- 
 sequences which are charged upon our Puritan severity? 
 It is said to take us out of the current of the national life ; 
 to leave us without share in its literature, its characteristic 
 exploits, its favourite traditions ; and to condemn us to the 
 position of eVot amid a native polity and civilization. 
 Accordingly no great name, we are assured, has entered 
 from the Puritan side on the roll of English art or letters ; 
 and the history of our country unfolds its drama with no 
 signal appearance, except in the background, of actors from 
 the Nonconformist camp. The only " fruitful men " that 
 have stepped forth thence, Milton, Baxter, Wesley, were 
 themselves the offspring of the Establishment with which 
 they were dissatisfied. On the whole, a moral contraction 
 and intellectual blight seem to fall on the votaries of a 
 " hole-and-corner " Christianity* 
 
 Even before examining this plausible reproach, may we 
 not say that it comes with an unbecoming cruelty from those 
 who have shut against us, as long and as far as possible, all 
 the public provisions for culture ; who have monopolized 
 the great schools, the universities, and their colleges; have 
 obstructed access to the professions ; and till within living 
 memory have held exclusive possession of the municipalities, 
 the magistracy, and virtually the legislature. Be it ever so 
 true that some provincial narrowness and austerity are 
 noticeable in the genius of a people, who for a whole 
 generation were forbidden to keep school, were driven from 
 * " Culture and Anarchy'' : Preface, pp. xx., xxiv.
 
 156 WHY DISSENT '? 
 
 the towns, were imprisoned for publishing books, were 
 denied the right of meeting and the exercise of their 
 religion, and have ever since been treated as interlopers in 
 English society, and usurpers of spiritual functions which 
 do not belong to them : with what grace can they be 
 upbraided for their defects by a representative of the 
 dominant party? To be thrust into " holes and corners," 
 and then derided for being there, to be put on intellectual 
 low diet, and then satirized for having long faces and spare 
 looks, is a kind of treatment little likely to win us to the 
 compassionate critic's " Sweetness and Light." * 
 
 But is this appreciation of Puritanism true ? Not with- 
 out qualifications which leave only a slender residue of fact. 
 In the earliest period, when the recent Tudor settlement of 
 the Crown and the Prelacy was overstrained and gave way 
 in the hands of the Stuarts, the patriots of the Civil War 
 and the great men of the Commonwealth, who, being the 
 " rebels" were certainly the " nonconformists" of their day, 
 were not simply " in contact with the current of national 
 life," but swelled its stream and altered its channel ; so that 
 even to speak of England without them, to form an image 
 of its people, of its towns, of its county society, even of its 
 landscape, apart from all reference to them, is simply 
 impossible. They brought new elements to the national 
 character, and, while the enthusiasm was at white heat, 
 welded them by firm blows into the general mass. It is 
 said they did not quit the Church, but changed it, and so 
 were embraced still by a national system and were affected 
 by its largeness. In the first place, the assertion has no 
 valid application to a time when there was no fixed order in 
 ecclesiastical affairs, and Episcopalians, Presbyterians and 
 Independents, all found their way into the parish pulpits. 
 And, in the second place, the same plea will hold for the 
 Nonconformists now : for they too are not without their 
 conception of a best organization of religion in the nation, 
 and their constant aim to bring it about. In that organi/a- 
 * " Culture and Anarchy," pp. 23-30.
 
 WHY DISSENT ? 157 
 
 tion they propose to do their duty, and to bear their part as 
 a responsible and recognized constituent of the whole ; and 
 it is only in the process of transition to a general settlement, 
 just as in the Puritan struggle under Charles I., that they 
 are isolated by Episcopalian pre-occupation of the national 
 field. There is no obvious right by which the old Catholic 
 constituents of English society, which rallied round the 
 Royal Standard in the Civil War, should claim to be the 
 essence of the national life, and should leave the Puritan 
 element to stand outside as something foreign. And as 
 little is there reason for arrogating an exclusive national 
 character to the Established Church, and virtually expa- 
 triating the Dissenters as spiritually homeless in the land. 
 
 The place of Milton in English literature ought, one 
 would think, to protect Nonconformity from the reproach 
 of intellectual barbarism or defect of large and liberal 
 learning ; for nowhere is the genius of dissentient and 
 even solitary religion more marked than in him. He was 
 brought up, however, we are reminded, under an established 
 system, and carried its affluence of resource into his more 
 isolated position ; as Baxter also did, and Wesley. If the 
 rule is to be read thus, we cannot refuse to accept its con- 
 verse application also ; and Butler, who gained his 
 education and his first philosophical reputation at Samuel 
 Jones's Academy at Gloucester and Tewkesbury, must be 
 surrendered (with his fellow-student, Seeker, the Archbishop) 
 to the Nonconformist roll of honour. Unless poets, 
 historians and humorists alone, are to stand as representa- 
 tives of culture, the exclusive claim for the Established 
 Church of an interest in English literature is rash and 
 inconsiderate ; and as Mr. Arnold is proud of Butler, and 
 reckons Baxter and Wesley among his "fruitful" men, 
 we cannot suspect him of so narrow an interpretation, or 
 suppose that, in the most recent style of supercilious 
 criticism, he discharges theology and philosophy from the 
 list of intellectual pursuits, and takes them as witnesses to 
 ignorance instead of forms of educated thought. Doubt-
 
 158 WHY DISSENT? 
 
 less it was into these channels that the earnest and medita- 
 tive Puritans predominantly directed their mental activity ; 
 not without results bearing honourable proportions to their 
 numbers and their opportunities. In French and German 
 historical notices of ethical and metaphysical philosophy, it 
 is rare to find any English names since the time of Locke, 
 except those of Price, Hutcheson and Priestley, all of 
 them lights of Nonconformity ; unless it be that Hartley 
 and Bentham also appear, both of them recusants of the 
 Church tests. And if in the libraries of English theology 
 there are any volumes on the shelves bearing more weighty 
 and erudite names than those of Baxter, Owen, Lardner, 
 Jones, Taylor, Doddridge, Priestley, Davidson, I have yet 
 to learn what they are. Nay, it was when the Universities 
 were under Independent rule that the English Church itself 
 acquired, in the " Latitude-men" perhaps the purest lustre 
 of her moral history : her own genius alone, but for the 
 stimulating touch of Puritanism, would not have nursed 
 into their rich power the minds of Whichcote, Cudworth, 
 Smith, and More ; or have inspired the sweet and saintly 
 persuasion (second only to that of the Theologia Ger- 
 manica), which, as a negociator of peace and virtual 
 Dissenter though an unwilling Bishop in Scotland, Leigh- 
 ton poured forth at Dunblane and Glasgow. And unless 
 the natural sciences are to be struck out from the con- 
 stituents of national culture, it is due to the Independents 
 to remember that under their rule the Royal Society arose 
 at Oxford in 1645, and continued its meetings in Wadham 
 College till 1659: it was thus a birth of the Puritan 
 Commonwealth, reserved for later " Royal " adoption. 
 And who that calls to mind the chief epochs of subsequent 
 discovery, and duly ranges along the history the contribu- 
 tions to it of Priestley, Dalton, Faraday, Lyell and Lassell, 
 can deny that science has fairly vindicated its independence 
 and religious impartiality, and refused to be made the 
 peculium of a national establishment ? Nor is there any 
 want, in the field of literature proper, of such partnership
 
 WHY DISSENl^ 159 
 
 in the intellectual life of our English tongue as may prevent 
 its being reduced to the monopoly of a Church. Bunyan and 
 Defoe are not forgotten writers ; nor has the last generation 
 swept away with it the repute of Godwin, Roscoe or 
 Barbauld ; and (if we come to more recent times) we see 
 in the charming fictions of Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot, 
 how the keen eye and delicate sympathy of genius can 
 detect a genuine poetry in the interior life and typical 
 characters of Nonconformist society. 
 
 It is very true that the course on which the imaginative 
 literature of our country entered after the Restoration, and 
 under the reaction from the rigour of the Commonwealth, 
 was repulsive to the feeling of the remaining Puritans, and 
 was little likely to stir them to emulation, even when the 
 gradual removal of oppression gave them once more some 
 liberty for liberal pursuits. Apart from the unbridled 
 licence which, under favour of the Court, invaded the stage 
 and tainted the old fancy of the time, the mere influence of 
 French models, which simultaneously became paramount, 
 was enough to alienate the graver English genius which had 
 laboured for the national liberties, and now fell back into 
 the shadow of disappointment and defeat. This tyranny 
 of French tastes, established by the ascendency of Dryden 
 and Pope, hardly relaxed its hold before the time of 
 Cowper and of Goldsmith; and was not completely thrown off 
 till the tales of Scott and the poetry of Wordsworth found 
 their way to other springs of sentiment. During the whole 
 intermediate period, the imagination of our country was 
 virtually lying under a foreign and usurping power ; stunned 
 by an authority it could not discard, and too timid and 
 suspicious of its own different inspirations to dare a creative 
 effort. This sudden check to the deeper and intenser part 
 of the national mind, at the moment when else, being now 
 released from practical conflict, it would naturally open to 
 the quiet air of thought and break into the foliage and 
 bloom of Art, is often misconstrued into an evidence of 
 Puritan rudeness and contempt for the intellectual beauty
 
 160 WHY DISSENT1 
 
 and grace of life. If, however, we weigh the significance of 
 Milton's career, and remember not only the ample riches of 
 his own learning and accomplishment, but the immense in- 
 fluence which he has exercised upon his compatriots of the 
 same school, we must acknowledge that they could give a 
 passionate admiration to a poet of comprehensive range, 
 who, besides adorning their theology, gave life again to 
 Greek and Roman myths, and reproduced the feeling of 
 Italian Art, and laid the homage of his stately love at the 
 feet of Shakespere. In the earlier Puritans e.g., Lord 
 Brooke and Sir Harry Vane, there are many incipient 
 movements of invention towards the creation of a literature 
 congenial to that side of the national feeling. And it is a 
 question which, if too fanciful for solution, is not without 
 interest as a speculation, whether, if the course arrested by 
 the Restoration had continued its development without 
 check, we might not, without the incubus of foreign taste, 
 have sooner found the riches of our characteristic genius, 
 and have grown into stronger men under the training of a 
 firmer and fuller indigenous literature. 
 
 After all, however, we may confess without dishonour 
 that Nonconformity has found something else to do than 
 with the muses of history or song. The ideal which it has 
 struggled to work out has been a life rather than a word. 
 Instead of letting the national current run on in undis- 
 turbed and therefore slugglish course, it has varied and 
 refreshed the stream with new elements of character and 
 aspiration : especially throwing in a more vigorous in- 
 sistency on the dignity of conscience and a larger pity for 
 the privations and sufferings of men. Take away the 
 Puritan conflict of the seventeenth century ; take away the 
 effects of the Act of Uniformity and St. Bartholomew's 
 Day, down to last session's victory over the exclusive 
 principle ; take away the Wesleyan movement a century 
 xigo ; take away the initiative of Joseph Lancaster in the 
 creation of popular education ; the Clarkson crusade 
 against slavery ; Elizabeth Fry's compassion for the
 
 WHY DISSENT? 161 
 
 prisoner ; and what would England now have been ? Has 
 the religious struggle nothing to do with the discipline of 
 her conscience and the elevation of her aims ? And has 
 the relaxation of that struggle nothing to do with the too 
 easy morals and languid indifference of the present genera- 
 tion ? I venture to believe that Dissent, with all its 
 inevitable faults, has mingled a certain Scottish element of 
 energy and gravity with the old type of English character, 
 and made a larger nature from the blending of the two. 
 Nor, until greater justice is done to it, and freer conces- 
 sions are made to its sense of veracity and its necessity for 
 an unfettered life, is the time come for its functions to cease 
 and its institutions to die. 
 
 VOL. IV. M
 
 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY MODERN 
 MATERIALISM. 
 
 M 2
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE following Address, published by desire of my College, 
 was much curtailed in oral delivery. As somewhat more 
 patience may be hoped for in a reader than in a hearer, it now 
 appears in full. The position assumed in it, of resistance to 
 some speculative tendencies of modern physical research, is far 
 from congenial to me : for it seems to place me in the wrong 
 camp. But the exclusive pretension, long set up by Theology, 
 to dominate the whole field of knowledge, seems now to have 
 simply passed over to the material Sciences ; with the effect 
 of inverting, rather than removing, a mischievous intellectual 
 confusion, and shifting the darkness from outward Nature to 
 Morals and Religion. I cannot admit that these are con- 
 quered provinces : and to re-affirm their independence, and 
 protest against their absorption in a universal material empire, 
 appears to me a pressing need alike for true philosophy and 
 for the future of human character and society. 
 
 LONDON, Oct. 12, 1874.
 
 X. I. 
 
 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY MODERN 
 MATERIALISM.* 
 
 THE College which places me here to-day professes to 
 select and qualify suitable men for the Nonconformist 
 Ministry ; that is, the headship of societies voluntarily 
 formed for the promotion of the Christian life. In carry- 
 ing out its work, two rules have been invariably observed : 
 (i) the Special Studies which deal with our sources of 
 religious faith, whether in the scrutiny of nature or in the 
 interpretation of sacred books, have been left open to the 
 play of all new lights of thought and knowledge, and have 
 promptly reflected every well-grounded intellectual change ; 
 and (2) the General Studies which give the balanced apti- 
 tudes of a cultivated mind .have been made as extensive 
 and thorough as the years at disposal would allow. In 
 both these rules there is apparent a genuine thirst for a 
 right apprehension of things, a contempt for the dangers 
 of possible discovery, a persuasion that in the mind most 
 large and luminous the springs of religion have the freshest 
 and the fullest flow ; together with the idea that the 
 Preacher, instead of being the organ of a given theology, 
 should himself, by the natural influence of mental superior- 
 ity, pass to the front and take the lead in a regulated 
 growth of opinion. 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1874.
 
 1 66 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 There have never been wanting prophets of ill who dis- 
 trusted this method as rash. So much open air does not 
 suit the closet divine ; such liability to change disappoints 
 the fixed idea of the partisan ; and the "practical man" 
 does not want his preacher's head made heavy with too 
 much learning, or his faith attenuated in the vacuum of 
 metaphysics. At the present moment these partial dis- 
 trusts are superseded by a deeper and more comprehensive 
 misgiving, affecting not the method simply, but the aim 
 and function of our Institution. Side by side with the 
 literary pursuits of the scholar, the study of external nature 
 has always had a place of honour in our traditions and our 
 estimates of a manly education ; and there is scarcely a 
 special science which has not some brilliant names that 
 range not far from the lines of our history ; and from the 
 favourite shelf of all our libraries, the Principia of Newton, 
 the Essays of Franklin, the Papers of Priestley and Dalton, 
 the " Principles " of Lyell, the Biological Treatises of 
 Southwood Smith and Carpenter, and the records of 
 Botanical research by Sir James Smith and the Hookers, 
 look down upon us with something of a personal interest. 
 The successive enlargements given by these skilled inter- 
 preters to our earlier picture of the world, the widening 
 Space, the deepening vistas of Time, the new groups of 
 chemical elements and the precision of their combinations, 
 the detected marvels of physiological structure, and the 
 rapid filling-in of missing links in the chain of organic life, 
 have been eagerly welcomed as adding a glory to the 
 realities around, and, by the erection of fresh shrines and 
 cloisters, turning the simple temple in which we once stood 
 into a clustered magnificence. Thus it was, so long as dis- 
 coveries came upon us one by one ; nor did any Biblical 
 chronology or Apocalypse interfere with their proper evi- 
 dence for an hour. But now, must we not confess it ? 
 certain shadows of anxiety seem to steal forth and mingle 
 with the advancing light of natural knowledge, and temper 
 it to a less genial warmth. It comes on, no longer in the
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 167 
 
 simple form of pulse after pulse of positive and limited dis- 
 covery, but with the ambitious sweep of a universal theory, 
 in which facts given by observation, laws gathered by 
 induction, and conceptions furnished by the mind itself, 
 are all wrought up together as if of homogeneous validity. 
 A report is thus framed of the Genesis of things, made up 
 indeed of many true chapters of science, but systematized 
 by the terms and assumptions of a questionable, if not an 
 untenable philosophy. To the inexpert reader this report 
 seems to be all of one piece ; and he is disturbed to find 
 an account apparently complete of the " Whence and the 
 Whither" of all things without recourse to aught that is 
 Divine; to see the refinements of organism and exacti- 
 tudes of adaptation disenchanted of their wonder ; to 
 watch the beauty of the flower fade into a necessity ; to 
 learn that Man was never intended for his place upon this 
 scene, and has no commission to fulfil, but is simply flung 
 hither by the competitive passions of the most gifted 
 brutes ; and to be assured that the elite beings that tenant 
 the earth tread each upon an infinite series of failures, and 
 survive as trophies of immeasurable misery and death. 
 Thus an apprehension has become widely spread, that 
 Natural History and Science are destined to give the coup 
 de grace to all theology, and discharge the religious pheno- 
 mena from human life ; that churches and their symbols 
 must disappear like the witches' chamber and the astro- 
 logists' tower ; and that, as everything above our nature is 
 dark and void, those who affect to lift it lead it nowhither, 
 and must take themselves away as " blind leaders of the 
 blind." Whether this apprehension is well founded or not 
 is a very grave question for society in many relations ; 
 emphatically urgent for those who educate men as spiritual 
 guides to others, and who can invest them with no direct- 
 ing power except the native force of a mind at one with 
 the truth of things and a heart of quickened sympathies. 
 Hitherto, they have been trained under the assumptions 
 that the Universe which includes us and folds us round is
 
 i68 RELIGIOfi AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 the Life-dwelling of an Eternal Mind ; that the World of 
 our abode is the scene of a Moral Government incipient 
 but not yet complete ; and that the upper zones of Human 
 Affection, above the clouds of self and passion, take us 
 into the sphere of a Divine Communion. Into this over- 
 arching scene it is that growing thought and enthusiasm 
 have expanded to catch their light and fire. And if " the 
 new faith " is to carry in it the contradictories of these posi- 
 tions, if it leaves us to make what we can of a simply 
 molecular universe, and a pessimist world, and an unap- 
 peasable battle of life, it will require another sort of 
 Apostolate, and would make such a difference in the 
 studies which it is reasonable to pursue, that it might be 
 wisest for us to disband, and let the new Future preach its 
 own gospel, and devise, if it can, the means of making the 
 tidings "glad." Better at once to own our occupation 
 gone than to linger on sentimental sufferance, and accept 
 the indulgent assurance that, though there is no longer any 
 truth in religion, there is some nice feeling in it ; and that 
 while, for all we have to teach, we might shut up to-mor- 
 row, we may harmlessly keep open still, as a nursery of 
 " Emotion.''* I trust that, when " emotion " proves 
 empty, we shall stamp it out, and get rid of it. 
 
 Though, however, no partnership between the physicist 
 and the theologian can be formed on these terms, of 
 assigning the intellect to the one and the feelings to the 
 other, may it not be that, in the flurry of exultation and of 
 panic, they misconstrue their real position ? and that their 
 relations, when calmly surveyed, may not be in such a 
 state of tension as each is ready to believe ? Looking on 
 their respective contentions from the external position of 
 logical observation, and without presuming to call in 
 question the received inductions of the naturalist, I believe 
 that both parties mistake the bearing of those inductions 
 upon religion ; and that, although this bearing is in some 
 
 * See Professor Tyndall's Address before the British Association ; 
 with Additions, p. 61.
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 169 
 
 aspects serious, it is neither of the quality nor of the mag- 
 nitude frequently ascribed to it. I venture to affirm that 
 the essence of religion, summed up in the three assump- 
 tions already enumerated, is independent of any possible 
 results of the natural sciences, and stands fast through the 
 various readings of the genesis of things. 
 
 The unpractised mind of simple times goes out, it is 
 true, upon everything en wasse, and indeterminately feels 
 and thinks about itself and the field of its existence, the 
 inner and the outer, the transient and the permanent, the 
 visible and the invisible : its knowledge and its worship, 
 the pictures of its fancy and the intuitions of its faith, 
 are as yet a single tissue, of which every broken thread 
 rends and deforms the whole. Hence the oldest sacred 
 traditions run into stories of world-building ; and the 
 earliest attempts at a systematic interpretation of nature, 
 in which physical ideas were clothed in mythical garb, 
 are regarded by Aristotle as "theological." It must be 
 admitted that our own age has not yet emerged from this 
 confusion. And in so far as Church belief is still com- 
 mitted to a given cosmogony and natural history of Man, 
 it lies open to scientific refutation, and has already received 
 from it many a wound under which it visibly pines away. 
 It is needless to say that the new " book of Genesis,'' which 
 resorts to Lucretius for its "first beginnings/' to protoplasm 
 for its fifth day, to " natural selection " for its Adam and 
 Eve, and to evolution for all the rest, contradicts the old 
 book at every point ; and inasmuch as it dissipates the 
 dream of Paradise, and removes the tragedy of the Fall, 
 cancels at once the need and the scheme of Redemption, 
 and so leaves the historical churches of Europe crumbling 
 away from their very foundations. If any one would 
 know how utterly unproducible in modern daylight is the 
 theology of the symbolical books, how absolutely alien 
 from the real springs of our life, let him follow for a few 
 hours the newest movement of ecclesiastical reform, and 
 listen to the reported conferences at Bonn on the remedies
 
 1 70 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 for a divided Christendom. Scarcely could the personal 
 re-appearance of Athanasius or Cyril on the floor of the 
 council-hall be more startling, or the cries of anathema 
 from the voices of the ancient dead have a more wondrous 
 sound, than the reproduction, as hopes of the future, by 
 men of Munich, of Chester, of Pittsburg, and of the 
 Eastern Church, of formulas without meaning for the 
 present, the eager discussion of subtle varieties of false- 
 hood, and the anxious masking of their differences by 
 opaque phrases under which everybody manages to look. 
 Such signs of strange intellectual anachronism excuse the 
 aversion with which many a thoughtful man, with a heart 
 still full of reverence, turns away from all religious associa- 
 tion, and lives without a church. It has been the infatua- 
 tion of ecclesiastics to miss the inner divine spirit that 
 breathes through the sources of their faith, and to seize, as 
 the materials of their system, the perishable conceptions 
 and unverified predictions of more fervent but darker 
 times ; so that, in the structure they have raised, all that is 
 most questionable in the legacy of the past, obsolete 
 Physics, mythical History, Messianic Mythology, Apoca- 
 lyptic prognostications, have been built into the very 
 walls, if not made the corner-stone, and now by their 
 inevitable decay threaten the whole with ruin. Why indeed 
 should I charge this infatuation on councils and divines 
 alone ? It is not professional but human : it is a delusion 
 which affects us all. We are for ever shaping our repre- 
 sentations of invisible things, in comparison with other 
 men's notions, into forms of definite opinion, and throwing 
 them to the front, as if they were the photographic equiva- 
 lent of our real faith. Yet somehow the essence of our 
 religion never finds its way into these frames of theory: 
 as we put them together it slips away, and, if we turn to 
 pursue it, still retreats behind : ever ready to work with 
 the will, to unbind and sweeten the affections, and bathe 
 the life with reverence ; but refusing to be seen, or to pass 
 from a divine hue of thinking into a human pattern of
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 171 
 
 thought. The effects of this infatuation in the founders 
 of our civilization are disastrous on both sides, not only 
 to the Churches whose system is undermined, but to the 
 Spirit of the Science which undermines it. It turns out 
 that, with the sun and moon and stars, and in and on the 
 earth both before and after the appearance of our race, 
 quite other things have happened than those which the 
 consecrated cosmogony recites : especially Man, instead of 
 falling from a higher state, has risen from a lower, and 
 inherits, instead of a uniform corruption, a law of perpetual 
 improvement ; so that the real process has the effect, not 
 only of an enormous magnifier, but of an inverting mirror, 
 on the theological picture. Yet, notwithstanding the de- 
 plorable appearance to which that picture is thus reduced, 
 it is exhibited afresh every week to millions still taught to 
 regard it as Divine. This is the mischief on the Theologic 
 side. On the other hand, Science, in executing this 
 merited punishment, has borrowed from its opponents one 
 of their worst errors, in identifying the anomalous or law- 
 less with the divine, and assuming that whatever falls 
 within the province of nature drops thereby out of relation 
 to God. As the old story of Creation called in the Supreme 
 Power only by way of supernatural paroxysm, to gain some 
 fresh start beyond the resources of the natural order, so the 
 new inquirers, on getting rid of these crises, fancy that the 
 Agent who had been invoked for them is gone, and pro- 
 claim at once that Matter without Thought is competent 
 to all. In thus confounding the idea of the Divine Mind 
 with that of miracle-worker, they do but go over to the 
 theological camp, and snatch thence its oldest and bluntest 
 weapon, which in modern conflict can only burden the 
 hand that wields it. How runs the history of their alleged 
 negative discovery ? The Naturalist was told in his youth 
 that at certain intervals. at the joints, for instance, between 
 successive species of organisms, acts of sudden creation 
 summoned fresh groups of creatures out of nothing. These 
 epochs he attacks with riper knowledge ; he finds a series
 
 172 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 of intermediary forms, and fragmentary lines of suggestion 
 for others ; and when the affinities are fairly complete, and 
 the chasm in the order of production is filled up, he turns 
 upon us and says, " See, there is no break in the chain of 
 origination, however far back you trace it; we no more 
 want a Divine Agent there and then than here and now.'' 1 
 Be it so ; but it is precisely here and now that He is needed, 
 to be the fountain of orderly power, and to render the 
 tissue of Laws intelligible by his presence : his witness is 
 found not only in the gaps, but in the continuity of being, 
 not in the suspense, but in the everlasting flow of 
 change ; for, the universe as known, being throughout a 
 system of Thought-relations, can subsist only in an eternal 
 Mind that thinks it. 
 
 The whole history of the Genesis of things Religion 
 must unconditionally surrender to the Sciences. Not in- 
 deed that it is without share in the great question of 
 Causality : but its concern with it is totally different from 
 theirs ; for it asks only about the " IVhence " of all pheno- 
 mena, while they concentrate their scrutiny upon the 
 "fftnv".- by which I mean that their end is accomplished 
 as soon as it has been found in what groups phenomena 
 regularly cluster, and on what threads of succession they 
 are strung, and into what classification their resemblances 
 throw them. These are matters of fact, directly or cir- 
 cuitously ascertainable by perception, and remaining the 
 same, be their originating power in'hat it may. On that 
 ulterior question the Sciences have nothing to say. And, 
 on the other hand, when Religion here takes up her word 
 and insists that the phenomena thus reduced to system are 
 the product of Mind, she in no way prejudges the modus 
 operand!, but is ready to accept whatever affinities of aspect, 
 whatever adjustments of order, the skill of observers may 
 reveal. On these investigations she has nothing to say. If 
 indeed you could ever show that the method of the universe 
 is one along which no Mind could move, that it is absolutely 
 incoherent and unideal, you would destroy the possibility
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 173 
 
 of Religion as a doctrine of Causality ; only, however, by 
 simultaneously discovering the impossibility of Science, 
 which wholly consists in organizing the phenomena of the 
 world into an intellectual scheme reflecting the structure 
 of its archetype. That those who labour to render the 
 universe intelligible should call in question its relation 
 to intelligence, is one of those curious inconsistencies to 
 which the ablest specialists are often the most liable when 
 meditating in foreign fields. If it takes mind to construe 
 the world, how can the negation of mind suffice to con- 
 stitute it ? 
 
 It is not in the history of Superstition alone that the 
 human mind may be found struggling in the grasp of some 
 mere Nightmare of its own creation : a philosophical hypo- 
 thesis may sit upon the breast with a weight not less 
 oppressive and not more real ; till a friendly touch or a 
 dawning light breaks the spell, and reveals the quiet morn- 
 ing and the bed of rest. Is there, for instance, no logical 
 illusion in the Materialist doctrine which in our time is 
 proclaimed with so much pomp and resisted with so much 
 passion ? " Matter is all I want," says the Physicist : "give 
 me its atoms alone, and I will explain the universe." 
 " Good : take as many of them as you please : see, they 
 have all that is requisite to Body, being homogeneous 
 extended solids." " That is not enough," he replies ; " it 
 might do for Democritus and the mathematicians, but I 
 must have somewhat more ; the atoms must be not only 
 in motion and of various shapes, but also of as many kinds 
 as there may be chemical elements ; for how could I ever 
 get water, if I had only hydrogen molecules to work with?" 
 " So be it," we shall say ; " only this is a considerable en- 
 largement of your specified datum, in fact, a conversion 
 of it into several ; yet, even at the cost of its monism, your 
 scheme seems hardly to gain its end ; for by what manipu- 
 lation of your resources will you, for example, educe 
 consciousness ? No organism can ever show you more than 
 matter moved ; and, as Dubois-Reymond observes, there
 
 174 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 is an impassable chasm " between definite movements of 
 definite cerebral atoms and the primary facts which I can 
 neither define nor deny / feel pain or pleasure, I taste 
 a sweetness, smell a rose-scent, hear an organ tone, see red, 
 together with the no less immediate assurance they give, 
 therefore I exist" : "it remains," he adds, " entirely and 
 for ever inconceivable that it should signify a jot to a 
 number of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen 
 and other atoms how they lie and move " ; " in no way can 
 one see how from their concurrence consciousness can 
 arise." * " What say you to this problem " ? " It does not 
 daunt me at all," he declares : "of course you understand 
 that my atoms have all along been affected by gravitation 
 and polarity; and now I have only to insist, with Fechner,f 
 on a difference among molecules ; there are the inorganic, 
 which can change only their place, like the particles in an 
 undulation ; and there are the organic, which can change 
 their order, as in a globule that turns itself inside out. 
 With an adequate number of these, our problem will be 
 manageable." " Likely enough," we may say, " seeing how 
 careful you are to provide for all emergencies ; and if any 
 hitch should occur at the next step, where you will have to 
 pass from mere sentiency to Thought and Will, you can 
 again look in upon your atoms, and fling among them a 
 handful of Leibnitz's monads, to serve as souls in little, and 
 be ready, in a latent form, with that Vorstellungsfahigkeit 
 which our picturesque interpreters of nature so much prize. 
 But surely you must observe how this " Matter " of yours 
 alters its style with every change of service : starting as a 
 beggar, with scarce a rag of " property " to cover its bones. 
 
 * " Ueber die Grenzcn des Xaturerkennens," p. 29. Compare p. 
 20. "I will now prove, as I believe in a very cogent way, not only 
 that, in the present state of our knowledge, Consciousness cannot be 
 explained by its material conditions, which perhaps every one allow?, 
 but that from the very nature of things it never will admit of explan- 
 ation by these conditions." 
 
 f " Einige Ideen zur Schupfungs-und Entwickelungsgeschichte der 
 Organismen, i. ii."
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 175 
 
 it turns up as a Prince, when large undertakings are wanted, 
 loaded with investments, and within an inch of a plenipo- 
 tentiary. In short, you give it precisely what you require 
 to take from it ; and when your definition has made it 
 " pregnant with all the future," there is no wonder if from 
 it all the future might be born. 
 
 " We must radically change our notions of "Matter," says 
 Professor Tyndall ; and then, he ventures to believe, it will 
 answer all demands, carrying " the promise and potency 
 of all terrestrial life." * If the measure of the required 
 "change in our notions" had been specified, the proposition 
 would have had a real meaning, and been susceptible of a 
 test. Without this precision, it only tells us, " Charge the 
 word potentially with your qucesita, and I will promise to 
 elicit them explicitly." It is easy travelling through the 
 stages of such an hypothesis ; you deposit at your bank a 
 round sum ere you start ; and drawing on it piecemeal at 
 every pause, complete your grand tour without a debt. 
 Words, however, ere they can hold such richness of prero- 
 gative, will be found to have emerged from their physical 
 meaning, and to be truly 6eo(f)6pa 6v6p.aTa, terms that bear 
 God in them, and thus dissolve the very theory which they 
 represent. Such extremely clever Matter, matter that is 
 up to everything, even to writing Hamlet, and finding out 
 its own evolution, and substituting a molecular plebiscite 
 for a divine monarchy of the world, may fairly be regarded 
 as a little too modest in its disclaimer of the attributes of 
 Mind. 
 
 Nor is the fallacy escaped by splitting our datum into 
 two, and instead of crowding all requisites into Matter, 
 leaving it on its own slender footing, and assuming along 
 with it Force as a distinct entity. The two postulates will 
 perform their promise, just like the one, on condition that 
 you secrete within them in the germ all that you are to 
 
 * Address before the British Association ; with Additions, pp. 54, 
 55. Compare the statement, by Dubois-Reymond, of the opposite 
 opinion, quoted in the note on the last page.
 
 176 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 develop from them as their fruit ; and in this case the word 
 " Force " is the magical seed-vessel which is to surprise us 
 with the affluence of its contents. The surprise is due to 
 one or two nimble-witted substitutions, of which a conjuror 
 might be proud, whereby unequals are shown to be equals, 
 and out of an acorn you hatch a chicken. First the noun 
 Force is sent into the plural (which of course is only itself 
 in another form), and so we get provided with several of 
 them. Next, as there is now a class, the members must be 
 distinguishable ; and, as they are all of them activities, 
 they will be known one from another by the sort of work 
 they do : one will be a mechanician, another a chemist, 
 a third will be a swift runner along the tracks of life, 
 a fourth will find out all the rest, will do our reasoning 
 about them, and get up all our examinations for us. The 
 last of these, every one must own, at least every one who 
 has graduated, is much more dignified than the others ; 
 and all through we rise, at every step, from ruder to more 
 refined accomplishment. With things thus settled, we 
 seem to have found Plato's ideal State, in which every 
 order minds its own business, and no element presumes to 
 cross the line and become something else. Not so, how- 
 ever : for, after thus differencing the forces and keeping 
 them under separate covers, the next step is to unify them, 
 and show them all as the homogeneous contents of a single 
 receptacle. The forces, we are assured, are interchange- 
 able and relieve each other ; when one has carried its 
 message, it hands the torch to another, and the light is 
 never quenched or the race arrested, but runs an eternal 
 round. But why then, you will say, divide them first, only 
 to unite them afterwards ? Follow our logical wonder- 
 worker one move further, and you will see. He has now, 
 we may say, his four vessels standing on the table ; the con- 
 tents of the whole are to be whisked into one ; having 
 them all, he has more ways than one of working out their 
 equivalence : and it remains at his option, which he shall 
 lift to let the mouse run out. For some reason, best known
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 177 
 
 to himself, he never thinks of choosing the last ; indeed it 
 is pretty much to avoid this, and obtain other receptacles 
 empty of thought, that he broke down the original unity. 
 If he be a circumspect physiologist, he will probably prefer 
 the third, and exhibit the universal principle as in some 
 sense living ; if he be a daring physicist, he will lay hold 
 of the first, and pronounce mechanical dynamics good 
 enough for the cosmos. 
 
 Am I asked to indicate the precise seat of fallacy in the 
 hypothesis which I have ventured to criticize ? The alleged 
 division of forces, considered as something over and above 
 the phenomena ascribed to them, is absolutely without 
 ground ; each of them, as apart from any other, has a 
 purely ideal existence, without the slightest claim to objec- 
 tive reality. Science, dividing its labours, has to break 
 down phenomena into sets according to their resemblances 
 and the affinities of their conditions ; it disposes them thus 
 into natural provinces, the laws of which, when ascertained, 
 give us the rules by which the phenomena assort them- 
 selves or successively arise, but nothing more. But what- 
 ever field we survey, we carry into it the belief inherent 
 in the constitution of the intellect itself, of a Causal Power 
 as the source of every change : we believe it for each, we 
 believe it for all : it repeats itself identically with every 
 instance ; and when a multitude of instances are tied up 
 together in virtue of their similarity and made into a class, 
 this constantly recurring reference, this identity of relation 
 to a power behind, is marked by giving that power a sin- 
 gular name : as the phenomena of weight are labelled with 
 the title Gravitation, expressing unity in their causal rela- 
 tion. Were \\e closeted with this group of facts alone, this 
 unity would live in our minds without a rival, and we should 
 have no numerical distinction in our account of force. But, 
 meanwhile, other observers have been going through a like 
 experience in some separate field ; have gleaned and bound 
 into a sheaf its scattered mass of homogeneous growths, and 
 denoted them by another name say, Electricity, carrying 
 
 VOL. IV. N
 
 1 78 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 in it the same haunting reference to a source for them all. 
 Now why is this a new name ? Is it that we have found a 
 new pcnver ? Have we carried our observation behind the 
 Phenomena, so as, in either instance, to find any power at 
 all ? Are the two cases differenced by anything else than 
 the dissimilarity of their phenomena ? Run over these 
 distinctions, and, when you have exhausted them, is there 
 anything left by which you can compare and set apart from 
 each other the respective producing forces ? All these 
 questions must be answered in the negative ; the differen- 
 tiations lie only in the effects ; the causal power is not 
 observed, but thought ; and that thought is the same, not 
 only from instance to instance, but from field to field ; and 
 by this sameness it cancels plurality from Force, and 
 reduces the story of their transmigration into a scientific 
 mythology. The distinctive names therefore mark only 
 differences in the sets of phenomena ; they are simply in- 
 struments of classification for noticeable changes in nature, 
 and carry no partitions into the mysterious depths behind 
 the scenes. The dynamic catalogue being thus left empty 
 and cut down to a single term, do we talk nonsense when 
 we attach qualifying epithets to the word Force, and speak 
 of ' electric force,' of ''nerve force,' of ' polar force,' c. ? 
 Not so ; provided we mean by those phrases, simply, Force, 
 quantum sufflcit, now for one set of phenomena, now for 
 another, without implication of other difference than that of 
 the seat and conditions and aspect of the manifestations. 
 But the moment we step across this restriction, we are in 
 the land of myths. 
 
 Power then is one and undivided. As external causality, 
 it is not an object of knowledge but an element given in tJie 
 relations of a knowledge, a condition of our thinking of 
 phenomena at all. Were this all, our necessary belief in it 
 would be unattended by any representation of it ; it would 
 remain an intellectual notion (Begnff), and we could no 
 more bring it before the mind under any definite type than 
 we can the meaning of such words as " substance '' and
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 179 
 
 <: possibility." In one field, however, and no more, it 
 falls into coincidence with our experience ; for we our- 
 selves put forth power in the exercise of Will and are 
 personally conscious of Causality ; and this sample of 
 immediate knowledge because ^//-knowledge supplies us 
 with the means of representing to ourselves what else we 
 should have to think without a type. Here accordingly we 
 reach, I venture to affirm, what we really mean, and what 
 alone saves us from the mere empty form of meaning, 
 whenever we assent to the axiom of causality. It is very 
 true that the exercise of Will, having more or less of 
 complication, itself admits of analysis ; intention may play a 
 larger or smaller part, may leave less or more for the share 
 of automatic or impulsive activity ; and by letting the for- 
 mer withdraw into the background of our conception, we 
 may come to think of causation apart from purpose, 
 which, I suppose, is the idea of Force. But this is a bare 
 fiction of abstraction, shamming an integral reality ; an old 
 soldier pensioned off from actual duty, but allowed to wear 
 his uniform and look like what he was. Since we have to 
 assume causality for all things, and the only causality we 
 know is that of living mind, that type has no legitimate 
 competitor. Even if it had, its sole adequacy would leave 
 it in possession of the field. For among the products 
 to be accounted for is the whole class and heirarchy of 
 minds ; and unless there is to be more in the effect than 
 in the cause, nothing less than Mind is competent to realize 
 a scheme of being whose ranks ascend so high. As for the 
 plea, which has unhappily passed into a commonplace, 
 that, even if it be so, that transcendent object is beyond all 
 cognizance, I will only say that this doctrine of Nescience 
 stands in exactly the same relation to causal power, whether 
 you construe it as Material Force or as Divine Agency. 
 Neither can be observed : one or the other must beassumed. 
 If you admit to the category of knowledge only what we learn 
 by observation, particular or generalized, then is Force 
 unknown ; if you extend the word to what is imported by 
 
 N 2
 
 i8o RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 the intellect itself into our cognitive acts, to make them 
 such, then is God known. 
 
 This comment on current hypotheses refers to them only 
 so far as they overstep the limits of Science, and aspire to 
 the seat of judgment on ulterior questions of Philosophy. 
 So long as they simply descend upon this or that realm of 
 nature, and try their strength there in simplifying its laws 
 or rendering them deducible, or, passing from province to 
 province, labour to formulate equations available for several 
 or for all, they must be respectfully left to pursue their 
 work ; and whenever their authors present their demon- 
 strated " system of the world," all reasonable men will learn 
 it from them, whatever it may be, as scholars from a master. 
 In the investigation of the genetic order of things, Theology 
 is an intruder, and must stand aside. Religion first reaches 
 its true ground, when leaving the problem of what has 
 happened, it takes its stand on what/<?r ever is.* I do not 
 
 * This statement has been pronounced by a friendly critic (Spectator, 
 October 17, p. 1293) "not only questionable, but gravely misleading ; '' 
 as implying " that if history and science showed us constant degrada- 
 tion instead of evolution of higher forms, and filled us with anticipa- 
 tions from which reasonable hope, hope, that is, measured by 
 experience, was utterly excluded, the religion of the Soul would 
 just as certainly assert the supremacy of righteousness and the love of 
 God, as she does with the united voices of revelation and experience to 
 help her out." 
 
 If I had said that Religion has no interest in the history of nature 
 and the world, this criticism would have been just. But I cannot 
 see how it applies to the positions which the text aims to make good : 
 viz., that Religion has no locus standi in investigations about the order 
 of phenomena in the past, but must make what it can of that order 
 as determined by scientific evidence : and that Religion has a locus 
 standi, where Science has not, in the quest and cognition of the Cause 
 that is behind all phenomena. To reach that Cause, there is no need 
 to go into the past, as though, being missed here, He could be found 
 there. But when once lie has been discerned through the proper 
 organs of divine apprehension, the whole life of humanity is recognized 
 as the scene of His agency, and the past, no less than the present, has 
 to be embraced in the religious interpretation of the world, and becomes 
 an object of sacred interest. Though Religion, in taking its stand on
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 181 
 
 say that it is indifferent to us how antecedent ages have 
 been filled, and have brought up the march with which we 
 fall into step to-day ; for we are beings of large perspective, 
 concentrating in us many lines of distance and images 
 that lie between the eye and the horizon ; and what we 
 see at hand borrows a portion of its aspect from relation 
 to remoter zones behind. But still, if the light were all 
 turned off from the Past, and on facing it we looked only 
 into the Night, the reality for us is not there, but here, 
 where it is Day. However the present may have come 
 about, I find myself in it : in whatever way my faculties 
 may have been determined, faculties they are, and they 
 give me insight into my duty and outlook on my position : 
 however the world, of Nature and of Society, may have 
 grown to what it is, its scene contains me, its relations 
 twine around me, its physiognomy appeals to me with a 
 meaning from behind itself. If these data do not suffice 
 to show me my kinship with what is above, below, around 
 me, and find my moral and spiritual place, I shall not be 
 greatly helped by discovering how many ages my constitu- 
 tion has been upon the stocks, and its antecedents been 
 upon the way. The beings that touch me with their look 
 and draw me out of myself, the duties that press upon my 
 heart and hand, are on the spot, speaking to me while the 
 clock ticks ; and to love them aright, to serve them faith- 
 fully, and construct with them a true harmony of life, is the 
 same task, whether I bear within me the inheritance of a 
 million years, or, with all my surroundings, issued this 
 morning from the dark. 
 
 Remaining then at home, and consulting the nature 
 which we have and which we see, we find that, far from 
 being self-inclosed, or related only to its visible depen- 
 dences, it turns a face, on more than one side, right towards 
 the Infinite, and, often to the disregard of nearer things, 
 moves hither or thither as if shrinking from a shadow 
 
 what for ever is, first reaches its true ground, it does not follow that it 
 must always remain there.
 
 1 82 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 advancing thence, or drawn by a light that wins it forward. 
 We are constantly, even the most practical of us, seeing 
 what is invisible and hearing what is inaudible, and per- 
 mitting them to send us on our way. Not left, like the 
 mere animal, to be the passive resultant of forces without 
 and instincts within, but invested with an alternative power, 
 we are conscious partners in the architecture of our 
 own character, and know ourselves to be the bearers of a 
 trust ; and this fiduciary life takes us at once across the 
 boundary which separates nature from what transcends it. 
 Seducing appetites and turbulent passions and ignoble ease 
 never gain our undivided ear , while we bend to them, 
 there are pleading voices which distract us, and which, if 
 they do not not save us, follow us with an expostulating 
 shame. Nor, if ever we wake up and kindle at the appeal 
 of misery and the cry of wrong, or with the spontaneous 
 fire of disinterested affection or devotion to the true and 
 good, can we construe them into anything less than a Divine 
 claim upon us : we know their right over us at a glance : 
 we feel on us their look of Authority in reply ; if, to our 
 careless fancy, we were ever our own, we can be so no more. 
 Once stirred by the higher springs of character, and pos- 
 sessed by the yearning for the perfect mind, we are aware 
 that to live out of these is our supreme obligation, and that 
 for us nothing short of this is holy. To have seen the vision 
 of the best and possible and not to pursue it, is to mar the 
 true idea of our nature, and to fall from its heaven as a 
 rebel and an outcast. This inner life of Conscience and 
 ideal aspiration supplies the elements and sphere of Reli- 
 gion ; and the discovery of Duty is as distinctly relative to 
 an Objective Righteousness as the perception of Form to 
 an external Space : it is a bondage, with superficial reluct- 
 ance but with deeper consent, to an invisible Highest : 
 and both moral Fear and moral Love stand before the face 
 of an Authority which is the eternal Reality of the holy, 
 just, and true. On the first view, you might expect that 
 the stronger the enthusiasm for goodness, and the surer the
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 183 
 
 recoil from ill, so much the fitter would the mind be to 
 stand alone in its self-adequacy ; yet it is precisely at such 
 elevation that it most trusts in a Supreme Perfection to 
 which it only faintly responds, and leans for support on 
 that everlasting stay. The life of aspiration, attempting to 
 nurse itself, soon pines and dies ; it must breathe a diviner 
 air and take its thirst to unwasting springs ; and wherever 
 it settles into a quiet tension of the will and an upturned 
 look of the affections, it is sustained by habitual access to 
 the Fountain of sanctity, and by the consciousness of an 
 Infinite sympathy. Are not both the need and the exist- 
 ence of this objective sustaining power acknowledged by 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold himself, when he insists on that 
 strange entity, " That, not ourselves, which makes for right- 
 eousness " ? By an abstraction, however, such a function 
 cannot be discharged ; nothing ever " makes for righteous- 
 ness " but One who is righteous. To support and raise the 
 less, there must be a greater ; and that which does not 
 think and will and love, whatever the drift of its blind 
 power, may indeed be larger, but is not greater, than the 
 sinning soul that longs for purity. 
 
 Now so long as the devotee of Goodness is possessed by 
 a faith, not only in his own aspirations, but in an Infinite 
 Mind which fosters and secures them as counterparts of 
 the highest reality, it is of little moment ethically what 
 theory he adopts of their mode of origin within him. 
 Whether he takes them as intuitive data of his Under- 
 standing, or, with Hartley, as a transfiguration of sensible 
 interests into a disinterested glory, or, with Darwin and 
 Spencer, as the latest refinement of animal instinct and 
 discipline after percolating through uncounted generations, 
 that which he has reached, be it first or last, is at all 
 events the truth of things, the primordial and everlasting 
 certainty, in comparison with which all prior stages of 
 training, if such there were, give but dim gropings 
 and transient illusions. In Hartley himself, accordingly, 
 a doctrine essentially materialistic and carrying in it the
 
 1 84 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 whole principle of Evolution, so far as it could be epito- 
 mized in the individual's life, easily blended with moral 
 fervour and even a mystic piety ; and, in Priestley, with a 
 noble heroism of veracity and an unswerving confidence in 
 the perfect government of the universe. But what if the 
 process of atomic development be taken as the Substitute 
 for God, not as His method ? if you withdraw from the 
 beginning all Idea of what is to come out at the end, 
 all Model or Archetype to control and direct the procedure, 
 and restrain the possible from running off indefinitely into 
 the false and wrong ? Do you suppose that the ethical 
 results can be still the same ? The inevitable difference, 
 I think, few considerate persons will deny ; and without 
 attempt to measure its amount, its chief feature may be 
 readily defined. 
 
 It was often said by both James and John Stuart Mill, 
 that you do not alter, much less destroy, a feeling or senti- 
 ment by giving its history : from whatever unexpected 
 sources its constituents may be gathered, when once their 
 confluence is complete the current they form runs on the 
 same, whether you know them or not. How true this may 
 be is exemplified by the younger Mill himself: who, while 
 resolving the moral sentiments into simple pleasure and 
 pain, and moral obligation into a balance of happiness, yet 
 nobly protested that he would rather plunge into eternal 
 anguish than falsely bend before an unrighteous power. If 
 so it be, then one in whom benevolence, honour, purity, 
 had reached their greatest refinement and most decisive 
 clearness would suffer no change of moral consciousness, 
 on becoming convinced that it is a " poetic thrill " of his 
 " ganglia "* induced by the long breaking-in through which 
 his progenitors have passed, in conformity with the system 
 of organic modification that has deprived him of his fur 
 and his tail. In spite of the apparent incongruity, let us 
 grant that his higher affections will speak to him exactly 
 as before and make their claims felt by the same tones of 
 * Professor Tyndall's Address, p. 49.
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 185 
 
 sacred authority, so that they continue to subdue him in 
 reverence or lift him as with inspiration. The surrender to 
 them of heart and will under these conditions, the vow to 
 abide by them and live in them, may still deserve acknow- 
 ledgment as Religion ; but, inasmuch as they have shrunk 
 into mere unaccredited subjective susceptibilities, they have 
 lost all support from Omniscient approval, and all presum- 
 able accordance with the reality of things. . For what are 
 these moral intensities of his nature, seen under his new 
 lights ? Whence is their message ? With what right do 
 they deliver it to him in that imperative voice ? and, it it 
 be slighted, prostrate him with unspeakable compunction ? 
 Are they an influx of Righteousness and Love from the 
 life of the universe. Do they report the insight of beings 
 more august and pure ? No ; they are capitalized " expe- 
 riences of utility " and social coercion, the record of ancestral 
 fears and satisfactions stored in his brain, and re-appearing 
 with divine pretensions, only because their animal origin is 
 forgotten : or, under another aspect, they are the newest 
 advantage won by gregarious creatures in " the struggle for 
 existence." From such an origin it is impossible to extract 
 credentials for any elevated claim ; so that although low 
 beginnings may lead, in the natural order, to what is better 
 than themselves, as a Julia may be the mother of an 
 Agrippina, yet in such case the superiority lies in new 
 endowment, which is not contained in the inheritance. For 
 such new endowment as we gain in the ascent from interest 
 to conscience the theory of transmission cannot provide ; 
 if the coarse and turbid springs of barbarous life, filtered 
 through innumerable organisms, flow limpid and sparkling 
 at last, the element is still the same, though the sediment 
 is left behind ; and as it would need a diviner power to 
 turn the water into wine, so Prudence run however fine, 
 social Conformity however swift and spontaneous, can never 
 convert themselves into Obligation. Hence arises, I think, 
 an inevitable contradiction between the scientific hypo- 
 thesis and the personal characteristics of a high-souled
 
 1 86 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 disciple of the modern negative doctrine. For his supreme 
 affections no adequate Object and no corresponding Source 
 is offered in the universe : if they look back for their cradle, 
 they see through the forest the cabin of the savage or the 
 lair of the brute ; if they look forth for their justifying 
 Reality and end, they fling vain arms aloft and embrace a 
 vacancy. They cannot defend, yet cannot relinquish, their 
 own enthusiasm : they bear him forward upon heroic lines 
 that sweep wide of his own theory ; and, transcending their 
 own reputed origin and environment, they float upon 
 vapours and are empty, self-poised by their own heat. One 
 or two instances will illustrate f he way in which what is 
 best in our humanity is left, in the current doctrine, un- 
 supported by the real constitution of the world. 
 
 Compassion, the instinctive response to the spectacle of 
 misery, has a two-fold expressiveness : it is in us a pro- 
 testing vote against the sufferings we see ; and a sign of 
 faith that they are not ultimate but remediable. Its singu- 
 larity is, to be not one of these alone, but both. Were it 
 a simple repugnance, it would drive us from its object ; but 
 it is an aversion which attracts: it snatches us with a 
 bound to the very thing we hate, and not with hostile 
 rush, but with softened tread and gentle words and up- 
 lifting hand. And what is the secret of this transfigura- 
 tion of horror into love ? It could never be but for the 
 implicit assurance that for these wounds there is healing 
 possible, if the nursing care does not delay. Should we 
 not say then, if we trusted its own word about itself, that 
 this principle, so deep and intense in our unfolded nature, 
 is an evident provision for a world of hopeful sorrow ? It 
 is distinctly relative to pain, and would be out of place in 
 a scene laid out for happiness alone : yet treats that pain as 
 transient, and on passing into the cloud already sees the 
 opening through. It enters the infirmary of human ills with 
 the tender and cheerful trust of the young sister of mercy, 
 who binds herself to the perpetual presence of human 
 maladies that she mav be for ever giving them their dis-
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 187 
 
 charge. Compassion institutes a strange order of servitude: 
 it sets the strong to obey the weak, the man and woman 
 to wait upon the child, and youth and beauty to kneel and 
 bend before decrepitude and deformity. HOW then do the 
 drift and faith of this instinct agree with the method of 
 the outer world as now interpreted ? Do they copy it 
 exactly, and find encouragement from the great example ? 
 On the contrary, Nature, it is customary to say, is pitiless, 
 and, while ever moving on, makes no step but by crushing 
 a thousand-fold more sentient life than she ultimately sets 
 up, and sets up none that does not devour what is already 
 there. The battle of existence rages through all time and 
 in every field ; and its rule is to give no quarter, to de- 
 spatch the maimed, to overtake the halt, to trip up the 
 blind, and drive the fugitive host over the precipice into 
 the sea. Nature is fond of the mighty, and kicks the 
 feeble ; and, while for ever multiplying wretchedness, has 
 no patience with it when it looks up and moans. And so 
 all-pervading is this rule, that evil, we are told, cannot 
 really be put down, but only masked and diverted ; if you 
 suppress it here, it will break out there ; the fire of anguish 
 still rolls below and has alternate vents ; when you stop 
 up ^-Ktna, it will blot out Sodom and Gomorrha, and bury 
 the cities of the plain. Who can deny that such teachings 
 as these set the outer universe and our inner nature at its 
 best at hopeless variance with one another ? Do they not 
 depress the moral power to which we owe the most human- 
 izing features of our civilization ? We have not to go far 
 for a practical answer. Within a few weeks the question 
 has been raised whether the recent flow of commiseration 
 towards the famine-stricken districts of India does not 
 offend against the Law of Nature for reducing a superfluous 
 population ; and whether there were not advantages in the 
 old method of taking no notice of these things, and letting 
 Death pass freely over his threshing-floor and bury the 
 human chaff quietly out of the way. Moral enthusiasm 
 makes many a mischievous mistake in its haste and blind-
 
 1 88 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 ness, and greatly needs the guidance of wiser thought ; but 
 this tone of moral scepticism, which disparages the very 
 springs of generous labour, and treats them as follies 
 laughed at by the cynicism of Nature, is a thousand-fold 
 more desolating. For it carries poison to the very roots 
 of good. It is as the bursting out of salt-springs in the 
 valley of fruits ; it soaks through the prolific soil of all 
 the virtues, and turns the promise of Eden into a Dead 
 Sea shore. 
 
 Beyond the range of the merely compassionate impulse, 
 Self-forgetf ul/iess in love for others has a foremost place in 
 our ideal of character, and our deep homage as representing 
 the true end of our humanity. We exact it from ourselves, 
 and the poor answer we make to the demand costs us 
 many a sigh ; and till we can break the bonds that hold 
 us to our own centre, and lose our self-care in constant 
 sacrifice, a shadow of silent reproach lies upon our heart. 
 Who is so faultless, or so obtuse, as to be ignorant what 
 shame there is, not only in snatched advantages and ease 
 retained to others' loss, but in ungentle words, in wronging 
 judgment within our private thoughts alone ; nay, in simple 
 blindness to what is passing in another's mind ? Who 
 does not upbraid himself for his slowness in those sym- 
 pathies which are as a multiplying mirror to the joys of 
 life, reflecting them in endless play ? And the grace so 
 imperfect in ourselves wins our instant veneration when 
 realized in others. The historical admirations of men are 
 often, indeed, drawn to a very different type of character : 
 for Genius and Will have their magnificence as well as 
 Goodness its beauty : but before the eye of a purified 
 reverence, neither the giants of force nor the recluses of 
 saintly austerity stand on so high a pedestal as the devoted 
 benefactors of mankind. The heroes of honour are great ; 
 but the heroes of service are greater : nor does any appeal 
 5,] >eak more home to us than a true story of life risked, 
 of ambitions dropped, of repose surrendered, of temper 
 moulded, of all things serenely endured, perhaps un-
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM, 189 
 
 noticed and in exile, at some call of sweet or high affec- 
 tion. Is then this religion of Self-sacrifice the counterpart 
 of the behaviour of the objective world ? Is the same 
 principle to be found dominating on that great scale ? Far 
 from it. There, we are informed, the only rule is self- 
 assertion: the all-determining I^nv is relentless competition 
 for superior advantage ; the condition of obeying which is, 
 that you are to forego nothing, and never to miss an oppor- 
 tunity of pushing a rival over, and seizing the prey before 
 he is on his feet again. We look without, and see the 
 irresistible fact of selfish scramble : we look within, and 
 find the irresistible faith of unselfish abnegation. So here, 
 again, Morals- are unnatural, and Nature is unmoral ; and 
 if, beyond Nature, there is nothing supreme in both rela- 
 tions to determine the subordination and resolve the con- 
 tradiction, he who would be loyal to the higher call must 
 be so without ground of trust ; if he will not betray his 
 secret ideal, he must follow it unverified, as a mystic 
 enchantment of his own mind. 
 
 Once more ; the Sense of Duty enforces the suggestions 
 of these and other affections by an authority which we 
 recognize as at once within us and over us, and making 
 them more than impulses, more than ideals, and establish- 
 ing them in binding relations with our Will. The rudest 
 self-knowledge must own that the consciousness of Moral 
 Obligation is an experience sui generis, separated by deep 
 distinctions from outward necessity on the one hand and 
 inward desire upon the other ; and the only psychology 
 which can bridge over these distinctions is that which 
 escapes with its analysis into prehistoric ages, and finds it 
 easy to grow vision out of touch, and read back all differ- 
 entiation into sameness. No one would carry off the 
 problem into that darkness who could deal with it in the 
 present daylight : so, we may take it as confessed, that ta 
 us the suasion of Right speaks with a voice which no 
 charming of pleasure and no chorus of opinion can ever 
 learn to mimic. To disregard them is a simple matter of
 
 igo RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 courage ; we defy them, and are free : but if from it we 
 turn away, we hear pursuing feet behind : and should we 
 stop our ears, we feel upon us the grasp of an awful hand. 
 Moral good would, in our apprehension, cease to be what 
 it is, were it constituted by any natural good, or related to 
 it otherwise than as its superior. It is not a personal end, 
 one among the many satisfactions assigned to the sepa- 
 rate activities of our constitution : else, it would be at our 
 disposal, and we might forego it. Others are our partners 
 in it : for it sets up Rights as counterparts to Duties, 
 and widens by its reciprocity into a common element of 
 Humanity. Is that then its native home ? Have men 
 created it, as an expression of their general wish, a con- 
 centrated code of civic police ? We cannot rest in this : 
 for no aggregate of wills, no public meeting of mankind, 
 though it got together all generations and all contemporary 
 tribes, could by vote make perfidy a virtue and turn pity 
 into a crime. Moral Right is thus no local essence ; but 
 by its centrifugal force, relatively to our abode, slips off 
 the earth and assumes an absolute universality as the law 
 of all free agency. That it should present itself to us in 
 this transcendent aspect is intelligible enough, if it be 
 identified with the Universal Mind, and thence imparted 
 to dependent natures permitted to be like Him : for, in 
 that case, the related feelings and convictions are true : in 
 the order of reality, Righteousness is prior to the pains 
 and pleasures of our particular faculties and the natural 
 exigencies of our collective life ; and our allegiance is 
 due to an eternal Perfection which penetrates the moral 
 structure of all worlds. How then does this intuitive faith 
 of our responsible will, this worship of an eternally Holy, 
 stand with the cosmical conceptions now tyrannizing over 
 the imaginations of men ? It encounters the shock of 
 contemptuous contradiction. Ethically, we are assured, 
 the known world culminates in us. Before us, there was 
 nothing morally good : over us, there is nothing morally 
 better : Man himself is here the supreme being in the
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 191 
 
 universe. In the just, the beneficent, the true, there is 
 no pre-existence : they are not the roots of reality, but the 
 last blossoms of the human phenomena. And even there, 
 the fair show which gives them their repute of an ethereal 
 beauty is but the play of an ideal light upon coarse 
 materials ; rude pleasures and ruder constraints are all 
 that remain when the increments of fancy have fallen 
 away. The real world provides interests alone ; which, 
 when adequately masked, call themselves virtues and pass 
 for something new : and, duped by this illusion, we dream 
 of a realm of authoritative Duty, in which the earth is but 
 a province of a supramundane moral empire. And so, 
 we must conclude, the Conscience which lives on this 
 sublime but empty vision has transcended the tuition of 
 Nature, and, in growing wiser than its teacher, has lost its 
 foothold on Reality, only to lean on a phantom of Divine 
 support. 
 
 On the hypothesis of a Mindless universe, such is the 
 fatal breach between the highest inward life of man and 
 his picture of the outer world. All that is subjectively 
 noblest turns out to be the objectively hollowest ; and the 
 ideal, whether in life and character, or in the beauty of the 
 earth and heaven, which he had taken to be the secret 
 meaning of the Real, is repudiated by it, and floats through 
 space as a homeless outcast. Even in this its desolation a 
 devoted disciple will say, " I will follow thee whithersoever 
 thou goest " ; but how heavy the cross which he will have 
 to bear ! Religion, under such conditions, is a defiance of 
 inexorable material laws in favour of a better which they 
 have created but cannot sustain, a reaction of man against 
 Nature, which he has transcended, a withdrawal of the 
 Self which a resistless force pushes to the front, a preser- 
 vation of the weak whom Necessity crushes, a sympathy 
 with sufferings which life relentlessly sets up, a recogni- 
 tion of authoritative Duty which cannot be. Or will you 
 perhaps insist that, in this contrariety between thought 
 and fact, Religion must take the other side, discharge the
 
 192 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 6fla ovtipara as illusory, and in her homage hold fast to the 
 solid world ? This might perhaps in some sense be, if 
 you only gave us a world which it was possible to respect. 
 But, by a curious though intelligible affinity, the modern 
 doctrine allies itself with an unflinching pessimism ; it plays 
 the cynic to the universe, penetrates behind its grand 
 and gracious airs, and detects its manifold blunders and 
 impostures : what skill it has it cannot help ; and the only 
 faults and horrors that are not in it are those which are too 
 bad to live. Human life, which is the summit that has 
 been won, is pronounced but a poor affair at best ; and 
 the scene which spreads below and around is but as a 
 battle-field at night-fall, with a few victors taking their faint 
 shout away, and leaving the plain crowded with wounds 
 and vocal with agony. Existence itself, insists Hartmann, 
 is an evil, in proportion as its range is larger and you know 
 it more, and that of cultivated men is worst of all ;* and 
 the constitution of the world (so stupidly does it work) 
 would be an unpardonable crime, did it issue from a power 
 that knew what it was about.! How can these malcon- 
 tents find any Religion in obeying such a power ? Can 
 they approach it with contumely at one moment, and with 
 devotion at the next ? If they think so ill of Nature, there 
 can be no reverence in their service of her laws : on the 
 contrary, they abandon what they revere to bend before 
 what they revile. To this humiliation the more magnani- 
 mous spirits will never stoop ; they will find some excuse 
 for still clinging to the ideal forms they cannot verify ; will 
 go apart with them with a high-toned love which stops 
 short of faith but is full of faithfulness ; will linger near 
 the springs of poetry and art, and there forget awhile the 
 disenchanted Actual : and will wonder perhaps whether 
 this half-consecrated ground may not suffice, when the 
 temples are gone, to give an asylum to the worshippers. 
 Such loyalty of heart towards the harmonies that ought 
 
 * " Philosophic des Unbewussten," c. xii. p. 598. 
 
 t " Ap. Strauss : der alte und der neue Glaube," p. 223.
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 193 
 
 to prevail, with disaffection towards the discords that do 
 prevail, may indeed lift the character of a man to an eleva- 
 tion half divine ; and in his presence, Nature, were she 
 not blind, might start to see that she had produced a god. 
 But, for all that, she is not going to succumb to him ; she 
 can call up her lower brood to suppress him, or monsters 
 to chain him to her rock. He contends with the lower 
 forces, believing them to be the stronger, and fights his 
 losing battle against hordes of inferiors ever swarming to 
 overwhelm what is too good for the world. Such religion 
 as remains to him is a religion of despair, a pathetic 
 defiance of an eternal baser power. And if there be 
 anything tragic in earth or heaven, it is the proud desola- 
 tion of a mind which has to regard itself as Highest, to 
 know itself the seat of some love and justice and devotion 
 to the good, and to look upon the system of the Universe 
 as cruel, ugly, stupid and mean. The most touching 
 episodes of history are perhaps those which disclose the 
 life of genius and virtue under some capricious and ignoble 
 tyranny, asserting itself in the ostracism of an Aristides, 
 the hemlock-cup of Socrates, the blood-bath of Thrasea ; 
 and no other than this is the life of every man who, walk- 
 ing only by his purest inner lights, finds that they illumine 
 no nature but his own, and are baffled and quenched by 
 the outer darkness. 
 
 It cannot be denied that there does exist this contrariety 
 between the modern materialistic philosophy and religious 
 faith. It cannot be believed that this contrariety is charge- 
 able on any mutual contradiction among the human faculties 
 themselves. Were we really placed between two informants 
 that said " Yes" at the right ear and " No " at the left, we 
 should simply be without cognitive endowment at all, and 
 all the pulsations of thought would cancel each other and 
 die. Can we end the strife by separating the provinces of 
 the two opposites, and saying that the function of the one 
 is to know, of the other to create ? * Certainly, " creative " 
 * Professor Tyndall's Address, p. 64. 
 
 VOL. IV. O
 
 194 RELIGION AND MATERIALISM. 
 
 power is something grand, and Theology should perhaps 
 feel honoured to be invested with it. But, alas ! a known 
 materialism and a created God present a combination 
 which thought repudiates and reverence abhors ; and the 
 suggestion of which must be met with the counter affirma- 
 tions, that the atomic hypothesis is a thing not known but 
 created, while God is not created but known. The only 
 possible basis for a treaty of alliance between the tendencies 
 now in conflict is not in lodging the one in the Reason 
 and the other in the Imagination, in order to keep them 
 from quarrelling, but in recognizing a Duality in the func- 
 tions of Reason itself, according as it deals with pheno- 
 mena or their ground, with law or with causality, with 
 material consecution or with moral alternatives, with the 
 definite relations of space and time and motion, or with 
 the indefinite intensities of beauty and values of affection 
 which bear us to the infinitely Good. When once this 
 adjustment of functions has been considerately made, the 
 disturbed equilibrium of minds will be re-instated, the panic 
 and the arrogance of our time will disappear, and the pro- 
 gress of the intellect will no longer shake the soul from her 
 everlasting rest.
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM : 
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 A CRITIQUE AND DEFENCE.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IN reproducing the following Essay, I should gladly have 
 divested it of all controversial character. But though in sub- 
 stance it is independent of its immediate occasion, its form has 
 been so far shaped by the necessities of self-defence, as to 
 render the features of its history indelible. Whatever personal 
 element it contains will be found, I trust, strictly relevant to 
 the general argument, and even indispensable to the right 
 conception of the problem discussed. My sole object has been 
 to reduce that problem to its essential factors, and remove the 
 disguises thrown around it by ill-understood words. To the 
 demand for exactitude of method in dealing with the border- 
 land between Natural Knowledge and Theology I willingly 
 submit. It was indeed in the interest of such a method that 
 both this Essay and its predecessor were written : and it is to 
 the want of it that the prevalent misunderstandings are due 
 between the representatives of Science and the interpreters of 
 Religion. 
 
 LONDON, April 5, 1876.
 
 X. 2. 
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM: ITS ATTITUDE 
 TOWARDS THEOLOGY.* 
 
 AT the beginning of October, 1874, it was my duty, as 
 Principal of a Theological College, to open a new session 
 with an Address, which was afterwards published under 
 the title, " Religion as affected by Modern Materialism." 
 It raises the question whether the free and scientific methods 
 of study insisted on in the College involved results at 
 variance with its theological design. It states accordingly 
 three assumptions hitherto implied in that design : " That 
 the universe which includes us and folds us round is the 
 life-dwelling of an Eternal Mind ; that the world of our 
 abode is the scene of a moral Government incipient but 
 not yet complete ; and that the upper zones of human 
 affection, above the clouds of self and passion, take us into 
 the sphere of a Divine Communion." With regard to these 
 assumptions the thesis is maintained that they are beyond 
 the contradiction, because not within the logical range, of 
 the natural sciences. In support of this thesis the mischiefs 
 are shown, both to science and to theology, of confusing 
 their boundaries, and treating the discovery of Law as the 
 negation of God ; and the separating line is drawn, that in 
 their intellectual dealings with phenomena, science investi- 
 
 * Originally published in the Contemporary Review.
 
 198 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 gates the " how " and theology the " whence." Tempted 
 on by two of its indispensable conceptions, matter and forte, 
 science, overstepping this boundary, has of late affected to 
 know not only the order but the origin of things ; in the 
 one case starting them from atoms as their source, in the 
 other from mechanical energy. I try to show that neither 
 datum will work out its result except by the aid of logical 
 illusions. You will get out of your atoms by " evolution," 
 exactly so much and no more as you have put into them 
 by hypothesis. And with regard to force, it is contended 
 that observation and induction do not carry us to it at all, 
 but stop with movements ; that the so-called kinds of force 
 are only classes of phenomena, with the constant belief of 
 causality behind ; that of causality we have no cognition 
 but as Will, from which the idea of "physical force" is 
 simply cut down by artificial abstraction to the needs of 
 phenomenal investigation and grouping ; and that, in con- 
 ceiving of the single power hid in every group, we must 
 revert to the intuitive type, because the only authorized, 
 and to the highest, because alone covering the highest phe- 
 nomena. The attempt, under shelter of the unity of energy 
 behind all its masks, to make the lowest phrase, besides 
 playing its own part, stand for the whole, is described as a 
 logical sleight of hand by which a heedless reasoner may 
 impose upon himself and others. 
 
 After this defensive argument to show that the religious 
 positions are not displaced by natural science, they are 
 traced to their real seat in human nature, and treated as 
 postulates involved in the very existence and life of the 
 reason and conscience. In support of their natural claim 
 to our entire trust, it is contended that, for their ethical 
 power, they are absolutely dependent on their objective 
 truth ; and further, that our nature, in respect of its higher 
 affections, compassion, self-forgetfulness, moral obligation, 
 is constructed in harmony with a world Divinely ruled, and 
 in utter conflict with the Pessimist's picture of nature. 
 
 The Address thus epitomized has brought upon me the
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 199 
 
 honour and the danger of a critique by Professor Tyndall,* 
 marked by all his literary skill, and rendered persuasive by 
 happy sarcasm and brilliant description. One fault at least 
 he brings home to me with irresistible conviction. He 
 blames my mode of writing as deficient in precision and 
 lucidity. And I cannot deny the justice of the censure 
 when I observe that my main line of argument has left no 
 trace upon his memory, that its estimate of scientific doc- 
 trines is misconstrued, that my feeling towards the order of 
 nature is exhibited in reverse, that I am cross-questioned 
 about an hypothesis of which I never dreamt, and am 
 answered by a charming "alternative" exposition of ascend- 
 ing natural processes, which I follow with assent till it 
 changes its voice from physics to metaphysics, and from its 
 premisses of positive phenomena proclaims a negative onto- 
 logical conclusion. That at every turn I should have put 
 so acute a reader upon a totally false scent, rebukes me 
 more severely than any of his direct and pertinent criti- 
 cisms ; for, smartly as these may hit me, they fall chiefly 
 on incidental and parenthetical remarks which might have 
 been absent, or on mere literary form which might have 
 been different, without affecting the purport of my Address. 
 Whether the force of these minor thrusts is really disabling, 
 or is only a by-play telling mainly on the fancy of the 
 observer, a brief scrutiny will determine. 
 
 (i.) In saying that the College which I represent leaves 
 open to all new lights of knowledge " the special studies 
 which deal with our sources of religious faith," I expanded 
 this phrase by the words, " whether in the scrutiny of 
 nature or in the interpretation of sacred books." This 
 innocent parenthesis, which simply summarizes the growing- 
 grounds of all actual theology, produces in my critic an 
 effect out of all proportion to its significance. Twice he 
 challenges me to show how any '' religious faith " can be 
 
 * Fragments of Science : " Materialism " and its Opponents; and, 
 previously, Fortnightly Review > November i, 1875.
 
 200 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 drawn from "nature," which I regard, he says, as "base 
 and cruel." It suffices to say that " scrutiny of nature " 
 does not exclude " human nature," wherein the springs of 
 religion are afterwards traced to their intuitive seats ; and 
 that, in what are called my " tirades against nature " as 
 " base and cruel," I am describing, not my own view of the 
 order of the world, but one which I repudiate as utterly 
 sickly and perverse. Then, again, I am asked how, after 
 giving up the Old Testament cosmogony, I can any longer 
 speak of " sacred books," without informing my readers 
 where to find them. I have occasionally met with scientific 
 men whose ideas about the Bible, if going further than the 
 Creation, came to an end at the Flood, and who thought 
 it only loyal to Laplace and Lyell thenceforth to shelve 
 " Moses and the prophets " : but a judgment so borne I 
 should not expect from Professor Tyndall. Can a literature 
 then have nothing " sacred," unless it be infallible ? Has 
 the religion of the present no roots in the soil of the past, 
 so that nothing is gained for our spiritual culture by 
 exploring its history and reproducing its poetry, and 
 ascending to the tributary waters of its life ? The real 
 modern discovery, far from saying there is no sacred litera- 
 ture, because none oracular, assures us there are several ; 
 and, notwithstanding a deepened because purified attach- 
 ment to our own " Origines " in the Jewish and Christian 
 Scriptures, persuades us to look with an open reverence into 
 all writings that have embodied and sustained the greater 
 pieties of the world. But to my censor it appears a thing 
 incredible that I should find a sanctity in anything human; 
 or deem it possible to approach religion in its truth by 
 intercepting its errors as it percolates through history, and 
 letting it flow clearer and clearer, till it brings a purifying 
 baptism to the conscience of our time. 
 
 (2.) In order to give distinctness to that "Religion'" in 
 relation to which I proposed to treat of " Modern Material- 
 ism,'' I specified " three assumptions" involved in it, of 
 which the first and chief is the existence of the " Living
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 201 
 
 God." I am reproached with making no attempt to verify 
 them, but permitting them to "remain assumptions" "to 
 the end." Be it so, though the statement is not quite 
 exact : still, in every reasoned discourse assumptions have 
 their proper place, as well as proofs ; and the right selection 
 of propositions to stand in the one position or the other 
 depends on the speaker's thesis and the hearers' needs. My 
 thesis was, that natural science did not displace these 
 assumptions, because they lie beyond its range ; and the 
 proof is complete if it is shown that the logical limit of 
 inductive knowledge stops short of their realm, and is ille- 
 gitimately overstepped by every physical maxim which con- 
 tradicts them. To turn aside from this line of argument 
 in order to "verify" the primary matter of the whole dis- 
 cussion, would have been to set out for Exeter and arrive 
 at York. My hearers consisted of the teachers, supporters 
 and alumni of a Theological College ; and to treat them as 
 a body of atheists, and offer proofs of the being of a God, 
 would have been as impertinent as for Professor Tyndall 
 to open the session of a Geological Society with a demon- 
 stration of the existence of the earth. 
 
 (3.) A few reluctant words must suffice in answer to the 
 charge of " scorning the emotions." I say " reluctant 
 words " : for to this side of our nature it is given to speak 
 without being much spoken of; to live and be, rather than 
 be seen and known ; and when dragged from its retreat, it 
 is so hurt as to change its face and become something else. 
 
 Here, however, little more is needed than to repeat the 
 words which are pronounced to be so " rash " and even 
 "petulant," " I trust that when ' emotion \ proves empty,' we 
 shall stamp it out and get rid of it." Do I then " scorn " 
 the '' emotion " of any mind stirred by natural vicissitudes 
 or moving realities, the cry of Andromache, "Exrop, e'yo> 
 8va-TT)vos, at the first sight of her hero's dishonoured corpse ; 
 the covered face and silent sobs of Phcedon, when Socrates 
 had drained the cup ; the tears of Peter at the cock- 
 crowing ; or any of the fervent forms of mental life, the
 
 202 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 mysticism of Eckhart, the intellectual enthusiasm of Bruno, 
 the patriotic passion of Vane ? Not so ; for none of these 
 are " empty," but carry a meaning adequate to their inten- 
 sity. It is for " emotion " with a vacuum within, and 
 floating in vacuo without, charged with no thought and 
 directed to no object, that I avow distrust ; and if there 
 be an " overshadowing awe " from the mere sense of a 
 blank consciousness and an enveloping darkness, I can see 
 in it no more than the negative condition of a religion 
 yet to come. In human psychology, feeling, when it 
 transcends sensation, is not without idea, but is a type of 
 idea; and to suppose "an inward hue and temperature," 
 apart from any " object of thought,"' is to feign the im- 
 possible. Colour must lie upon form ; and heat must spring 
 from a focus, and declare itself upon a surface. If by 
 referring religion to the " region of emotion " is meant with- 
 drawing it from the region of truth, and letting it pass into 
 an undulation in no medium and with no direction, I must 
 decline the surrender. 
 
 In thus refusing support from " empty emotion," I am 
 said to "kick away the only philosophic foundation on 
 which it is possible to build religion." Professor Tyndall 
 is certainly not exacting from his builders about the solidity 
 of his " foundation " ; and it can be only a very light and 
 airy architecture, not to say an imaginary one, that can 
 spring from such base ; and perhaps it does not matter that 
 it should be unable to face the winds. Xor is the incon- 
 sistency involved in this statement less surprising than its 
 levity. Religion, it appears, has a " philosophical founda- 
 tion." But " philosophy " investigates the ultimate ground 
 of cognition and the organic unity of what the several 
 sciences assume. And a "philosophical foundation" is a 
 legitimated first principle for some one of these ; it is a 
 cognitive beginning, a datum of ulterior t/iursifa, and 
 nothing but a science can have it. Religion then must be 
 an organism of thought. Vet it is precisely in denial of 
 this that my censor invents his new "foundation." Here,
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 203 
 
 he tells us, \ve know nothing, we can think nothing ; the 
 intellectual life is dumb and blank : we do but blindly feel. 
 How can a structure without truth repose on philosophy in 
 its foundation ? 
 
 But do I not myself carry religious questions, in the last 
 appeal, to the inward consciousness of man, whether intel- 
 lectual for the interpretation of causality, or moral for the 
 interpretation of duty ? Undoubtedly : and Professor 
 Tyndall thinks it " highly instructive " that I " should have 
 lived so long, thought so much, and failed to recognize the 
 entirely subjective character of this creed." If I may omit 
 the word "entirely" (which implies a gratuitous exclusion 
 of " objective truth "), I not only recognize it, but every- 
 where insist upon it. The fundamental religious concep- 
 tions have no deeper validity than belongs to the very 
 frame of our faculties and the postulates of our thinking. 
 But as this equally holds of the fundamental scientific con- 
 ceptions, as matter and force have also to retire to con- 
 sciousness for their witnesses, nay, as objectivity itself is 
 but an interpretation by the subject of its own experience, 
 is it not " highly instructive " that a critic so compassionate 
 to my "subjective" position should be unaware of the 
 ideality of his own ? Or has he, perhaps, found some 
 " objective knowledge " which has not to fall back upon a 
 " subjective " guarantee ? 
 
 If, as I suspect, Professor Tyndall uses the word " sub- 
 jective," not in its strict sense, for what belongs to the 
 human subject at large, but to denote what is special to the 
 feeling of this or that individual, the question will then be 
 whether I mistake an exceptional personal experience for 
 a universal form of thought. This question is not settled 
 by saying that many able men find in themselves no such 
 inner experience. The eye for correct psychological read- 
 ing is not secured by great intellect or noble character, but, 
 like the organ of any other art, must be trained to quick- 
 ness and delicacy of insight ; and, while false or over- 
 culture exposes it to the danger of seeing what is not there,
 
 204 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 a failure of culture may prevent its seeing what there is. 
 Right interrogation and careful comparison alone can sift 
 out the essential from the accidental. Doubtless many a 
 principle once advanced as self-evident and universal sur- 
 vives only in the grotesque museum of philosophers' fancies. 
 But, on the other hand, whatever laws of thought are 
 now admitted as universal were at first propounded, and 
 often long resisted, as the expressions of individual reflec- 
 tion. 
 
 (4.) On one point more a personal cdaircissement is 
 needed as a condition of any profitable argument. I am 
 said to be " imperfectly informed regarding the position I 
 assail." If I am sensitive to this remark, it is not that I 
 cannot bear to be reminded of my ignorance, the sense of 
 which is a shadow that never quits my life, but that, as no 
 man has a right to attack doctrines which he has not taken 
 the pains to understand, the statement carries in it a moral 
 imputation, and calls on me either to clear it away or to 
 confess a wrong. What then is the " position " which, 
 under the name of " materialism," I intended to assail, and 
 ought, perhaps, to have fixed by exact definition ? Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall supposes it to be his position, regarding 
 which undoubtedly I am very imperfectly informed ; for 
 the indications of it, though clear enough for assent or 
 criticism when taken one by one, appear to me so shifting 
 and indeterminate in their combination, as to afford no 
 means of testing it. Except in the two or three passages 
 where it is quoted, the Belfast Address was no more in my 
 view than the writings to which it referred and others 
 belonging to the literature of the subject ; and did not 
 supply the form of doctrine to which my argument was 
 addressed. The only question therefore is whether that 
 form of doctrine really exists. If it can be shown that I 
 have misconceived the materialists' position, and fastened 
 upon them any thesis which is without eminent repre- 
 sentative in their school, I must accept my rebuke. But if 
 no part of my sketch is unsupported by adequate authority.
 
 /7'S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 205 
 
 it will remain true, though it should conflict with sentences 
 in the "Fragments of Science." 
 
 Probably the chief instance of " imperfect information " 
 is this, that I suppose the materialist doctrine to be 
 offered as an explanation of the order of things ; for my 
 censor contrasts with this " travesty " of the scheme his 
 own statement, that the materialist's " molecular groupings 
 and movements in reality explain nothing," and that " the 
 utmost he can affirm is the association of two classes of 
 phenomena, of whose real bond of union he is in absolute 
 ignorance." But surely, if this is all that he can affirm, he 
 gives the materialism nothing to do, and is as well off 
 without it as with it : in order simply to see that two series 
 of phenomena run parallel, and correspond term for term, 
 he needs no more than methodized observation, possible 
 and identical on every theory or no theory about the sub- 
 stratum of the phenomena. If the human mind could be 
 content with this spectacle of unexplained concomitance, 
 the very impulse would be wanting from which materialism 
 has sprung. Its fundamental proposition, common, as 
 Lange remarks, to all its forms, ancient and modern, 
 " that the universe consists of atoms and empty space,"* 
 is an hypothesis devised for the express purpose of estab- 
 lishing a " bond of union " between lines of succession 
 previously detached i.e., of giving the mind a bridge of 
 passage other than that of " association " from the one to 
 the other i.e., of explaining the second by the first. An 
 hypothesis commends itself to us when (inter alia) it offers 
 a higher conception from which, as an assumption, we can 
 deduce both sets of previously separate facts ; and so far as 
 it fails to do this, it is self-condemned. There may be 
 other defects in hypotheses ; but if their data do not logic- 
 ally lead to the quccsita, they break their primary promise ; 
 and to see whether they are water-tight throughout, or are 
 leaky at the joints, is an efficient test of their pretensions. 
 A materialist who knows what he is about would not dis- 
 * " Gcschichte des Materialismus, 2tes Buch," p. 181.
 
 206 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 own the words which I put into his mouth, " Matter is all 
 I want ; give me its atoms alone, and I will explain the 
 universe " ; -but would assuredly be offended were he told, 
 and that by a " candid friend," that his doctrine " explains 
 nothing." 
 
 As it is impossible to come to close quarters with a see- 
 saw doctrine, which now touches solid ground and now 
 escapes it, I naturally addressed myself to thorough-going 
 materialists, without presuming to commit Professor Tyn- 
 dall to their consistency. That there have been and are 
 such persons, persons who have undertaken, by denning 
 the essence of matter and fixing it in atoms, " to explain 
 the enigmatical by the clear, the intricate by the simple, 
 the unknown by the known," * he cannot deny, after 
 having himself introduced us to the thesis of Democritus,t 
 
 * "Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, ites Buch, ; ' pp. 8, 9. 
 
 + In connection with this name there is an historical error in the 
 Belfast Address which I should hardly notice were it not likely to be 
 perpetuated by the just reputation of the author, and did it not appar- 
 ently fall back for support upon Lange. This writer, noticing that 
 Democritus makes no attempt to explain the appearances of adaptation 
 out of the blind power of natural necessity, adds, " Whether this gap 
 lay in his system itself, or only in the tradition of it, we do not know ; 
 but we do know that the source of even this last principle of all mate- 
 rialism, rudely shaped, it is true, yet with perfect precision of idea,- 
 is to be found in the philosophic thought of the Hellenic race. What 
 Darwin, with the support of vast stores of positive knowledge, has 
 effected for the present time, Empedocles offered to the thinkers of 
 antiquity, the simple and penetrating thought that if adaptations 
 preponderate in the world, it is because it lies in their very nature to 
 maintain themselves ; while that which fails of adaptation has perished 
 long ago." (I. pp. 22, 23.) Misled by the order of this passage, which 
 gives the missing thought after naming the "gap " which it might have 
 filled, Dr. Tyndall has described Empedocles as intentionally making 
 good a defect in Democritus, "Noticing this gap in the doctrine of 
 Democritus, he (Empedocles) struck in with the penetrative thought," 
 &c. This is an inversion of the chronology. Empedocles preceded 
 Democritus by at least a generation, being bom about B.C. 490, and 
 dying B.C. 430; whilst Democritus, whom we find at Thurii shortly 
 after the foundation of the colony in B.C. 443, died at a very advanced
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 207 
 
 the reasonings of Lucretius, and the method of Gassendi.* 
 The "atomists," says Lange, "attributed to matter only 
 the simplest of the various properties of things, those, 
 namely, which are indispensable for the presentation of a 
 something in space and time ; and their aim was to evolve 
 from these alone the whole assemblage of phenomena." 
 " They it was," he adds, " who gave the first perfectly clear 
 notion of what we are to understand by matter as the 
 basis of all phenomena. With the positing of this notion 
 materialism stood complete, as the first perfectly clear and 
 consequent theory of all phenomena."! If there is any 
 difference between this statement of the problem and my 
 " travesty '' of it, I cannot discern it. 
 
 The indistinctness of which I ventured to complain in 
 Dr. Tyndall's account of his " primordial " datum, I do not 
 find removed by my pleasant journey with him to the 
 Caribbean Sea and the Alpine snows, or his graceful pic- 
 tures of Cingalese ferns, and of nascent infant life. The 
 whole exposition appears to be dominated by the tacit 
 maxim, " No matter without force, no force without 
 matter," i a maxim which may be true in fact, but does 
 not dispense with the necessity of investigating the relation 
 between two fundamental ideas which are not identical or 
 interchangeable. Tn the natural sciences no harm is done 
 by running them both together, or resorting in varying 
 proportions to the one and to the other. Experimental 
 research and mathematical deduction may go on undis- 
 turbed, by mere use of them as provisional conceptions, and 
 without even suspecting that they carry in them any ulte- 
 rior problem. But it is not by thus picking them up in 
 
 age, B.C. 357. Diog. Laert. viii. 52, 56, ix. 41. Comp. Arist. Met. 
 A. 4, p. 985, b. 4. 
 
 * Starting from the fundamental assumption, " Principio ergo Uni- 
 versum ex corpore et inani constat, neque enim tertia natura concipi 
 mente pntterea potcst. r) Phil. Epicur. Syntagma, Op. T. iii. II. 
 
 t "Geschichte des Materialismus, i. pp. 8, 9. 
 
 I Buclmer : " Kraft und Stoff," p. 2 (Aufi. 4).
 
 208 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 mediis rebus, and taking them as they happen to come, that 
 we can reach any philosophical view of the world, or esti- 
 mate the theories which strive to interpret its unity and 
 meaning. In spite of the cheap wit expended in derision 
 of metaphysics, and the brave preference avowed for terra 
 firma, you can escape them only by not knowing where 
 you are. In their embrace you live and move and have 
 your being ; and, however fast your foot may cling to the 
 earth, none the less do you swim with it through the infi- 
 nite space which, even in its emptiness, is yet the condition 
 of all solidity. 
 
 At a first glance, nothing looks more hopeful to the 
 enthusiast for simplification than the reduction of " matter " 
 to " force.'' Two or three easy equations will carry him 
 through the problem. Matter is known to us only by its 
 " properties/' and, relatively to us, is tantamount to them. 
 Its properties, again, are only its ways of affecting ourselves, 
 either directly or through operations on other portions of 
 matter. That is, it is represented to us wholly by the 
 effects which it has power to produce, and resolves itself 
 into an aggregate of forces. Make its essence what you will, 
 extension, with Descartes ; or palpableness, with Fechner, 
 it is still as acting on the eye or the touch or the muscles 
 that this essence reaches our apprehension ; it is the cause 
 of sensations to us, and anything that should cause such 
 sensations would be identical with it. Is it not plain 
 therefore that matter is simply power locally lodged ? and 
 that when pursued to its smallest conceivable elements, it 
 merges into dynamic points, unextended centres of attrac- 
 tion and repulsion ? Such a course of thought has again 
 and again led to theories of dynamic idealism, like Bosco- 
 vich's, Ampere's, and Cauchy's, in which the dimensions of 
 the atoms whence molecular action proceeds not simply are 
 small relatively to the distances which separate them, but 
 absolutely vanish. Such theories, by isolating the elements 
 needed for calculation, offer advantages for mathematical 
 physics. But there will always be found an irresolvable
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 209 
 
 residue which declines to melt away into force. When you 
 have construed the atom's solidity into repulsion, and 
 reduced its extension to nothing, there remains imposition, 
 and this "whereabouts" of a power is other than the power 
 itself; and secures to it a Zto-seyn or objective existence 
 in space. Nor is the conception of motion adequately 
 provided for in these schemes of abstraction. As geome- 
 trical points themselves cannot be moved, the phenomenon 
 becomes a translation of a cluster of attractions and repul- 
 sions to new centres. But attraction with nothing to be 
 attracted, repulsion with nothing to be repelled, motion 
 with nothing to be moved, are presentable in language only, 
 not in thought. The running of one eddy round another 
 or into another is intelligible so long as there is a medium, 
 be it of ether, however rare ; but in vacua, not so. A 
 material nidus is indispensable as the seat of every motory 
 change. The reason of this lies in the very structure of 
 the human understanding, which supplies us with the 
 category of Attribute or Property only in combination 
 with that of Substance or Thing as its abiding base. The 
 relation between the attribute which speaks to you pheno- 
 menally, and the substance which is given intellectually, 
 is indissoluble : and analyse the phenomena as you may, 
 so as to turn them from one type of predicate to another, 
 you cannot cut them off from their persistent and unyield- 
 ing seat, so as to have left on your hands a set of predicates 
 without any subject. Thus the idea of " matter " vindicates 
 itself against every attempt to get rid of it by transfor- 
 mation. 
 
 The simplification has also been attempted by the inverse 
 method of dispensing with " force," and making " matter " 
 do all the work. In physics, it is said, we know what we 
 perceive or generalize from perception : " we observe what 
 our senses, armed with the aids furnished by science, enable 
 us to observe nothing more."* Movements, however, are 
 all that we perceive, and if at first this fact escapes us when 
 
 * " Materialism and its Opponents," Fortnightly AVt'/Vr; 1 , p. 595. 
 
 VOL. IV. P
 
 210 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 we hear and see, it is because our organs are not fine 
 enough to read the undulations which deliver to them tones 
 and tints. Submit their sensibility to adequate magnifying 
 power, and all that is observable would resolve itself into 
 local changes, molecular or molar. It is the same in the 
 celestial mechanics as in the scene of daily experience. We 
 say that the moon goes through its lunations, and up- 
 heaves the tidal wave on the earth spinning beneath it, by 
 the constant force of gravitation. But the real facts 
 noticed are simply the presence, now here, now there, of 
 two visible and solid globes, and of some piled-up water 
 upon one of them, and a certain rule according to which 
 these changes recur. Were these the only phenomena 
 within our ken, this rule would be all that we mean by the 
 " force '' of which we speak. But as there are countless 
 others which we have found to follow the same rule, we 
 cannot speak of it without tacit reference to these, so that 
 the word covers indefinitely more than the facts imme- 
 diately in view. Still, it takes in nothing in any part of 
 its field but movements and their law. And nothing 
 moves but matter. The natural sciences would thus re- 
 solve themselves into a register of co-existent and sequent 
 positions of bodies, expressed in formulas as comprehen- 
 sive as the state of analysis allowed and in this form, as 
 Comte and Mill justly insist, they would fulfil all the con- 
 ditions of phenomenal knowledge, and secure that power 
 of prevision which is the crown and reward of scientific 
 labour. 
 
 This reduction of everything to matter, motion, and law, 
 would be unimpeachable, were our intelligence somewhat 
 differently constructed. Matter, as these expositors set 
 out by observing, speaks to our perceptive senses alone ; 
 and we should still know it, had we no more than these, 
 and the ability to retain their vestiges and set them in 
 order. Let us only see how things like and unlike lie and 
 move in place and time, and the history of matter is all 
 before us. For this purpose we need not go, among the
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 211 
 
 forms or data of the understanding, beyond the relations 
 of objectivity, succession, and resemblance. But over and 
 above these, we are subject to another determinate condi- 
 tion of thought, the principle of causality, in virtue of 
 which there can be no cognition of phenomenon, except as 
 relative to power that issues it, any more than there can be 
 a cognition of a here without a there, or a before without an 
 after. This intellectual law leaves us unsatisfied with 
 merely reading the order of occurrence among the changes 
 we perceive ; it obliges us to refer movement to a motor, 
 to look beyond the matter stirred to a force that stirs it, 
 be the force without, as in the expansive energy which pro- 
 pels a loaded shell, or within, as in that which ultimately 
 bursts it. In any case, you have here a clear dynamic 
 addition to that scheme of regimented and marshalled 
 phenomena which results from the lonely conception of 
 matter. Will you rid yourself of the dualism by insisting, 
 while you concede the power, that it is only a property of 
 the matter ? 
 
 " See," says Lange, " whether here you are not in danger of 
 a logical circle. A ' thing ' is known to us through its pro- 
 perties, a subject is determined by its predicates. But the 
 ' thing ' is in fact only the resting-point demanded by our 
 thought. We know nothing but the properties and their con- 
 currence in an unknown object, the assumption of which is a 
 figment of our mind (Gemiith\ a necessary one it seems, rendered 
 imperative by our organization, .'' * 
 
 Another answer may be given thus : ' You may make 
 anything a predicate of matter which you can observe in it, 
 i.e., all its movements ; but not what you cannot observe, 
 therefore not \\~\epoiver which issues the movements; for 
 this is not seen in the phenomenon ; it is supplied by a 
 necessity of thought, not as an element in it, but as a con- 
 dition of it.' 
 
 Inasmuch then as both "' matter " and " force " are intel- 
 
 * "Geschichte dcs Materialismus," ii. p. 214. 
 
 P 2
 
 212 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 lectual data (noihtiend), involved respectively in the prin- 
 ciple of Objectivity and in that of Causality, neither can 
 be substituted for the other. For ages each has been 
 trying to end the divided sway : but the rival, though often 
 driven from the front, has always found at last an im- 
 pregnable retreat, whence its rights return to recognition 
 when the usurping rage is past. The present tendency in 
 natural science is so strongly in favour of force as the better 
 known term, that, according to Lange, " the untrue element 
 in materialism, viz., the erecting of matter into the prin- 
 ciple of all that exists, is completely, and it would seem 
 definitively, set aside."* 
 
 From these two roots have arisen two forms of natural- 
 ism, capable no doubt of a balanced co-existence in the 
 same mind, but often unharmonized, and expressing them- 
 selves in doctrines doubtfully related to each other. The 
 material theory works out the conception of Atoms. The 
 dynamic relies on that of the Conservation of energy. As 
 a means of intellectually organizing ascertained facts, and 
 holding them together in a tissue of conceivable relations, 
 these conceptions possess a high value, and are indispen- 
 sable to the reaching of any generalizations yet higher. In 
 the one, the multiple proportions of chemistry and the laws 
 of elastic diffusion find an adequate vehicle of expression 
 and computation. In the other, a common measure is set 
 up for variations of heat and mechanical work and chemical 
 decomposition and electrical intensity, bringing several 
 special provinces into a federal affinity. Dr. Tyndall mis- 
 construes me when he imputes to me any disparagement of 
 these conceptions, in their scientific use, for formulating, 
 linking, and anticipating phenomena. It is not till they 
 break these bounds, and, mistaking their own logical 
 character, set ^philosophical pretensions as adequate data 
 for the deductive construction of a universe without mind, 
 that I venture to resist their absolutism, and set them back 
 
 * "Geschichte des Materialismus,' 1 ii. p. 215.
 
 773" ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 213 
 
 within their constitutional rights. It is no wonder, per- 
 haps, that many an enthusiast in the study of nature, 
 excited by the race of rapid discovery, should lose count of 
 his direction as he sweeps along, and, mounted upon these 
 hobbies, should fancy that he can ride off into the region 
 of ontology, and finding nothing, because never really 
 there, should mistake his own failure for its blank. But 
 the calmer critics of human thought know how to dis- 
 tinguish between the physical and the metaphysical use of 
 these conceptions. 
 
 " There is scarcely a more naive expression of the materialism 
 of the day," says Lange, " than escapes from Biichner, when he 
 calls the atoms of modern times ' discoveries of natural science,' 
 while those of the ancients are said to have been ' arbitrary 
 speculative representations.' In point of fact, the atomic doc- 
 trine to-day is still what it was in the time of Democritus. It 
 has still not lost its metaphysical character ; and already in 
 ancient times it served also as a scientific hypothesis for the 
 explanation of natural processes."* 
 
 And respecting the law of Conservation of energy, Lange 
 observes that, taken in its "strictest and most consequent 
 meaning, it is anything but proved : it is only an ' Ideal of 
 the Reason, ' perhaps however indispensable as a goal for all 
 empirical research. "f It is from no want of deference for 
 science proper that I pass again under review the com- 
 petency of these two doctrines to work out, ab initio, a 
 blind cosmogony. 
 
 I. THK ATOMIC MATERIALISM. 
 
 The material hypothesis, as I read it, and as alone I 
 propose to comment on it, maintains that, with ultimate 
 inorganic atoms to begin with, the present universe could 
 be constructed. Before it can be tested, its datum (inor- 
 
 * " Geschichte ties Materialismus, " ii. 181. 
 t Ibid. p. 213.
 
 214 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 ganic atoms) must be pressed into more determinate form 
 by an explanation of the word "atoms." "Things which 
 cannot be cut " might be all alike ; or they might be 
 variously different inter sc : and before we start, we must 
 know on which of these two assumptions we are to pro- 
 ceed. The former is the only admissible one, so long as 
 you credit the materialist with any logical exactness. 
 When he asks for no more than matter for his purpose, he 
 must surely be understood to require nothing but the 
 essentials of matter, the characters which enter into its 
 definition ; and to pledge himself to deduce out of these 
 all the accessory characters which appear here and not 
 there, and which discriminate the several provinces of 
 nature. The idea of atoms is indeed simply the idea of 
 " matter" in minimis, arising only from an arrest, by a sup- 
 posed physical limit, of a geometrical divisibility possible 
 without end ; and the attributes which suffice to earn the 
 one name give the meaning of the other. When in mathe- 
 matical optics the investigator undertakes, from the condi- 
 tions afforded by an undulatory elastic medium, to deduce 
 the phenomena of refraction and polarization, he is not 
 permitted to enlarge the data as he proceeds, and surrepti- 
 tiously import into his ether chemical or other characters 
 unnamed at first. Just as little can one who proposes to 
 show the way from simple atoms to the finished world be 
 allowed to swell the definition of those atoms at his con- 
 venience, and take on fresh attributes which change them 
 from matter, UTT\WS, and make them now this sort of 
 matter, now that. Whatever he thus adds to his assump- 
 tion is filched from his (jiursita, to the relief of his problem 
 and the vitiation of its proof : and if the whole fulness of 
 the qiufsita is so withdrawn, and turned back to be con- 
 densed into datum, all deduction is given up, and the 
 thesis is simply taken for granted. 
 
 In precisely this plight, unless there is some reasoning 
 between the lines which I am too dull to see, Professor 
 Tyndall leaves his case. He ridicules me for defining the
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 215 
 
 assumed atoms as " homogeneous extended solids," on the 
 ground that a phrase thus restricted to the " requisites of 
 body" gives only "a metaphysical body."* Everything 
 which you define is, in the same sense, a " metaphysical "' 
 (more properly, a " logical ") subject. The object of the 
 definition is to specify the attributes which alone are to be 
 considered in giving the name, and in reasoning from it. 
 The atomist who is not content with my account of his 
 premisses should oblige me with a better, instead of stop- 
 ping short with the discovery that a definition of a class is 
 not a full description of its individuals. When, however, I 
 look about for my critic's correcter version of "matter" or 
 its atoms, it is long before I learn more than that " we 
 must radically change our notions " of it, an injunction 
 upon which, without further help, it is difficult to act. At 
 length, however, on the concluding page of the critique, 
 the missing definition turns up. " Matter I define as that 
 mysterious thing by which all this has been accomplished,'' 1 i.e., 
 the whole series of phenomena, from the evaporation of 
 water to self-conscious life of man. Need I say that such 
 a proposition is no definition, and dispenses with all proof ; 
 being simply an oracle, tautologically declaring the very 
 position in dispute, that matter carries in it '" the promise 
 and potency of all terrestrial life " ? The whole of the pic- 
 turesque group of descriptive illustrations which lead up to 
 this innocent dictum are only an expansion of the same 
 petitio principii : they simply say, over and over again, the 
 force immanent in matter is matter ; they are identical ; 
 or if not so as hitherto understood, we will have a new 
 definition to make them so. This is not a process of rea- 
 soning, but an act of will, a decretal enveloped in a scien- 
 
 * It becomes still more metaphysical in the hands of an eminent 
 teacher of physical science. " L'impenetrabilite," says Pouillet, " c'est 
 la matiere. On n'a pas raison cle dire que la matiere a deux proprietes 
 essentielles, fct endue et fintpctietrabilite; ce ne sont pas des proprietes, 
 c'est une definition.'' And again, "L'impenetrabilite inseparable est 
 ce qu'on appelle un atjine." Elements de Physique experimental,:, 
 Tom. i. p. 4.
 
 216 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 tific nimbus. Nothing can be less relevant than to show 
 (and nothing else is attempted) that the forces of heat, of 
 attraction, of life, of consciousness, are attached to material 
 media and organisms, which they move and weave and 
 animate : this is questioned by no one. In the sense of 
 being immanent in matter, and manifesting themselves by 
 its movements, they are material forces ; but not in the 
 sense of being derivable from the essential properties of 
 matter, qua matter. And this is the only sense on which 
 philosophies divide, and reasoning is possible. 
 
 If the essence of the materialist hypothesis be to start 
 with matter on its lowest terms, and thence work up into 
 its highest, I did it no wrong in taking "homogeneous 
 extended solids " as its specified datum, and its only one ; 
 so that it constituted a system of " monism." Dr. Tyndall 
 asks me " where and by whom " any such datum is " speci- 
 fied." In the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, June, 1872, Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer contends that " the properties of the dif- 
 ferent elements " (i.e., chemical elements, hydrogen, carbon, 
 &c.) "result from differences of arrangement, arising by 
 the compounding and recompounding of ultimate homo- 
 geneous units." Here, totidem verbis, is the monism which 
 I am charged with "putting into the scheme." As my 
 critic is evidently anxious to disclaim the monistic datum, 
 I conclude that he owns the necessity of heterogeneous ele- 
 ments to begin with, and feels with me the insecurity of 
 Mr. Spencer's deduction of chemical phenomena from 
 mechanical. Though I have the misfortune, in the use of 
 this same argument, that you cannot pass from the homo- 
 geneous to the heterogeneous, to incur the disapproval of 
 two great authorities, it somewhat relieves the blow to find 
 Mr. Spencer at one with the premiss, and Dr. Tyndall 
 ratifying the conclusion. 
 
 Before I quit this point I ought perhaps to explain, in 
 deference to Mr. Spencer, why I venture to repeat an argu- 
 ment which he has answered with care and skill. In com- 
 mon with all logical atomists, he appeals to the case of
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 217 
 
 isoineric bodies, and especially to the allotropic varieties of 
 carbon and phosphorus, to prove that, without any change 
 of elements in kind or proportion, and even without any 
 composition at all, substances present themselves with 
 marked differences of physical and chemical property. 
 There are several distinct compounds formed out of the 
 same relative weights of carbon and hydrogen. And the 
 simple carbon itself appears as charcoal, as black-lead, and 
 as diamond ; and phosphorus, again, in the yellow, semi- 
 transparent, inflammable form, and as an opaque, dark-red 
 substance, combustible only at a much higher temperature. 
 In the absence of any variation in the material, these dif- 
 ferences in the product are attributed to a different group- 
 ing of the atoms ; and whatever their form, it is easy, 
 within certain limits, to vary in imagination the adjust- 
 ments of their homologous sides so as to build molecules 
 of several types, and ultimately aggregates of contrasted 
 qualities. 
 
 I admit that, on the assumption of homogeneity, we may 
 provide a series of unlike arrangements to count off against 
 a corresponding number of qualitative peculiarities, though 
 it is doubtful whether the conceivable permutations can be 
 pushed up through the throng of cases presented by 
 organic chemistry. But the morphological differences, if 
 adequately obtained, contribute no explanation of the 
 observed variations of attribute. What is there in the 
 arrangement a l> c to occasion "activity" in phosphorus, 
 while the arrangement b a c produces " inertness " ? 
 Where the products differ only in geometrical properties, 
 and consequently in optical, the explanation may be admis- 
 sible, the form and the laving of the bricks determining the 
 
 ^ O O 
 
 outline and the density of the structure. But the deduc- 
 tion cannot be extended from the physical to the chemical 
 properties, so as to displace the rule that to these hetero- 
 geneity is essential. To treat the cases of allotropy as 
 destructive of a rule so broadly based, and fly off to a con- 
 jectural substitute, is surely a rash logic. In these cases
 
 218 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 certainly we know of no difference of composition. But 
 neither do we know of any difference of arrangement. 
 The first, if we could suppose it latently there, would be a 
 vera causa of the unexplained phenomena ; the second, 
 though its presence were ascertained, would still rank only 
 as a possible cause of them. If, therefore, an inquirer 
 chose to say, " From this difference of property I suspect a 
 difference of composition," what answer could we give him 
 from Mr. Spencer's point of view ? Could we say, '' We 
 finally know carbon to be simple " ? On the contrary, we 
 are warned that " there are no recognized elementary sub- 
 stances, if the expression means substances known to be 
 elementary. What chemists for convenience call element- 
 ary substances are merely substances which they have thus 
 far failed to decompose." If we are to stand ready to see 
 sixty-two out of the sixty-three " elements " fall analytically 
 to pieces before our eyes, how can we feel so confident of 
 the simplicity of phosphorus or carbon, as to make it 
 answerable for a hypothetical reconstruction of chemical 
 laws ? 
 
 Even in the last resort, if we succeed in getting all our 
 atoms alike, we do not rid ourselves of an unexplained 
 heterogeneity ; it is simply transferred from their nature as 
 units to their rules of combination. Whether the qualita- 
 tive difference between hydrogen and each of the other ele- 
 ments is conditional upon a distinction of kind in the 
 atoms, or on definite varieties in their mode of numerical 
 or geometrical union, these conditions are not provided for 
 by the mere existence of homogeneous atoms ; and 
 nothing that you can do with these atoms, within the limits 
 of their definition, will get the required heterogeneity out 
 of them. Make them up into molecules by what grouping 
 or architecture you will : still the difference between hydro- 
 gen and iron is not that between one and three, or any 
 other number ; or between shaped solids built off in one 
 direction and similar ones built off in another, which may 
 turn out like a right and a left glove. If hydrogen were
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 219 
 
 the sole "primordial," and were transmutable, by select 
 shuffling of its atoms, into every one of its present sixty-two 
 associates, both the tendency to these special combina- 
 tions, and the effects of them, would be as little deducible 
 from the homogeneous datum as, on the received view, are 
 the chemical phenomena from mechanical conditions. I still 
 think, therefore, that if you assume atoms at all, you may 
 as well take the whole sixty-three sorts in a lot. And this 
 startling multiplication of the original monistic assumption 
 I understand Professor Tyndall to admit as indispensable. 
 Next, in the striking words of Du Bois-Reymond, I had 
 pleaded the impossibility of bridging the chasm between 
 Chemistry and Consciousness. The sensations of warmth, 
 of sound, of colour, are facts sui generis, quite other than 
 the undulations of any medium, the molecular movements 
 of any structure ; known on different evidence, compared 
 by different marks, needing a different language, affections 
 of a different subject ; and defying prediction and inter- 
 pretation, on the part of a stranger to them, out of any 
 formulas of physical equilibrium and motion, or of 
 chemical affinity and composition. They, with all the 
 higher mental conditions, belong to a world beyond the 
 bounds of the natural sciences, a world into which they 
 can never find their way, its phenomena being intrinsically 
 inappreciable by their instruments of research. Here, 
 then, in this establishment of two spheres of cognition, 
 separated by an impassable gulf, we surely have a breach 
 in the continuity of our knowledge : on the one side, all the 
 phenomena of matter and motion ; on the other, those 
 of living consciousness and thought. Step by step, the 
 " Naturforscher '' may press his advance, through even the 
 contiguous organic provinces ; but at this line his move- 
 ment is arrested ; he stands in presence of that which his 
 methods cannot touch : an intellectual necessity stops 
 him, and that for ever, at the boundary which he has 
 reached. With this doctrine I invited my readers to com- 
 pare the statement of Professor Tyndall, that, relying on
 
 220 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 " the continuity of nature," he " cannot stop abruptly 
 where microscopes cease to be of use," but " by an in- 
 tellectual necessity crosses the boundary," and "discerns 
 in matter the promise and potency of all terrestrial life,'' 
 including, therefore, conscious life. This statement appeared 
 to me inconsistent with Du Bois-Reymond's " limit to 
 natural science," and still appears so. What is my critic's 
 reply ? He cites another statement of his own, which is 
 quite consistent with the doctrine of the eminent Berlin 
 Professor and anticipates it ; a procedure by which he 
 answers himself, not me ; and, instead of removing the 
 contradiction, takes it home. If, as the earlier passage 
 says, " the chasm between the two classes of phenomena " 
 (physical processes and facts of consciousness) " remains 
 intellectually impassable," the " intellectual necessity of 
 crossing the boundary " is not easy to understand. In 
 order to " discern in matter the promise " of conscious life, 
 you must be able, by scrutiny of its mere physical move- 
 ments, to forecast, in a world as yet insentient, the future 
 phenomena of feeling and thought. Yet this is precisely 
 the transition which is pronounced "unthinkable"; "we 
 do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any 
 rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by 
 a process of reasoning, from the one to the other." If 
 between these statements " nothing but harmony reigns," 
 then indeed I am justly charged with being "inaccurate." 
 
 How then does the case stand with the atomic hypo- 
 thesis, as a starting-point of scientific deduction ? In 
 Dr. Tyndall's latest exposition we have it admitted (i) 
 that the monistic doctrine of homogeneous units will not 
 work, and that the assumption must be enlarged to include 
 heterogeneous chemical atoms ; (2) that nothing which we 
 can do with this magnified datum will prevent our being 
 finally stopped at the boundary of consciousness. As 
 these two positions are precisely those which I had taken 
 up against the speculative materialist, it is an infinite relief 
 to discover, when the mask of controversy is removed, the
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 221 
 
 features of a powerful ally. The whole argument sums 
 itself up in Sir William Thomson's remark, "The assump- 
 tion of atoms can explain no property of body which has 
 not previously been attributed to the atoms themselves." 
 
 That the totality of sensible and deducible phenomena 
 is produced by a constant amount of forces in a given 
 quantity of matter, is a legitimate principle of modern 
 science, and an adequate key for the interpretation of 
 every proved or probable evolution. And in order to see 
 what is comprised in changes that are intricately woven or 
 fall broadly on the eye, it is often needful to take them to 
 pieces and microscopically scrutinize them. We thus 
 discover more exactly what they are, and how at the 
 moment they are made up ; and by doing likewise with 
 the prior and posterior conditions of the same group, we 
 learn to read truly the metamorphoses of the materials 
 before us. But this is all. To suppose that by pulverizing 
 the world into its least particles, and contemplating its com- 
 ponents where they are next to nothing, we shall hit upon 
 something ultimate beyond which there is no problem, is 
 the strangest of illusions. There is no magic in the super- 
 latively little to draw from the universe its last secret. 
 Size is but relative, magnified or dwindled by a glass, 
 variable with the organ of perception : to one being, the 
 speck which only the microscope can show us may be a 
 universe ; to another, the solar system but a molecule 
 and in passing from the latter to the former you reach no 
 end of search or beginning of things. If in imagination 
 you simply recede from the molar to the molecular form of 
 body, you carry with you, by hypothesis, all the properties 
 of the whole into the parts where your regress ceases, 
 and merely substitute a miniature of nature for its life-size 
 without at all showing whence the features come. If r 
 on the other hand, you drop attributes from the mass in 
 your retreat to the elements, on your return you can never 
 pick them up again : starve your atom down to a hard, 
 geometrically perfect minimum, and you have parted with
 
 222 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 the possibility of feeding it up to the qualitative plenitude of 
 our actual material forms ; for in mere resistance, which is 
 all that is left, you have no source of new properties, only 
 the power of excluding other competitors for its place. 
 
 Accordingly, the " atom " of the modern mathematical 
 physics has given up its pretension to stand as an absolute 
 beginning, and serves only as a necessary rest for exhausted 
 analysis, before setting forth on the return journey of de- 
 duction. " A simple elementary atom," says Professor 
 Balfour Stewart, " is probably in a state of ceaseless activity 
 and change of form, but it is, nevertheless, always the 
 same."* "The molecule" (here identical with "atom," 
 since the author is speaking of a simple substance, as 
 hydrogen) " though indestructible, is not a hard rigid 
 body," says Professor Clerk Maxwell, " but is capable of 
 internal movements, and when these are excited it emits 
 rays, the wave-length of which is a measure of the time of 
 vibration of the molecule."! "Change of form" and 
 " internal movements " are impossible without shifting 
 parts and altered relations ; and where, then, is the final 
 simplicity of the atom ? It is no longer a pure unit, but a 
 numerical whole. And as part can separate from part, not 
 only in thought but in the phenomenon, how is it an 
 "atom" at all? What is there, beyond an arbitrary 
 dictum, to prevent a part which changes its relation to 
 its fellows from changing its relation to the whole, re- 
 moving to the outside ? Such a body, though serving as 
 an element in chemistry, is mechanically compound, and 
 has a constitution of its own, which raises as many ques- 
 tions as it answers, and wholly unfits it for offering to the 
 human mind a point of ultimate rest. It has accordingly 
 been strictly kept to a penultimate position in the con- 
 ception of philosophical physicists like Gassendi, Herschel, 
 and Clerk Maxwell, and of masters in the logic of science, 
 like Lotze and Stanley Jevons. 
 
 * " The Conservation of Energy," p. 7. 
 t " A Discourse on Molecules/' p, 12.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 223 
 
 It is a serious question whether, in our time, atomism 
 can any longer fulfil the condition which all the ancient 
 materialism was invented to satisfy. The Ionian cosmo- 
 gonies sprang from a genuine intellectual impulse ; the 
 desire to conquer the bewildering multiplicity of nature, 
 and find some pervading identity which should make a 
 woven texture of the whole ; and whether it was moisture, 
 or air, or the ether-fire, which was taken as the universal 
 substratum, it was regarded as a single datum, on the 
 simplicity of which the mind might disburden itself of an 
 oppressive infinitude. The intention of these schemes was 
 to unify all bodies in their material, and in some cases all 
 minds as well, so as not even to allow two originals at the 
 fountain-head, but to evolve the All out of the One. This 
 aim was but an overstraining of the permanent effort of all 
 scientific interpretation of the world. It strives to make 
 things conceivable by simplification, to put what was 
 separate into relation, what was confused into order ; to 
 read back the many and the different into the one and the 
 same, and so lessen, as far as possible, the list of unat- 
 tached and underived prindpia. The charm of science to 
 the imagination and its gain to life may be almost 
 measured by the number of scattered facts which its 
 analysis can bring into a common formula. The very 
 sand-grains and rain-drops seem to lose in multitude, when 
 the morphological agencies are understood which crystallize 
 and mould them. The greatness of Newton's law lies in 
 the countless host of movements which it swept from all 
 visible space into one sentence and one thought. No 
 sooner does Darwin supply a verified conception which 
 construes the endless differences of organic kinds into a 
 continuous process, than the very relief which he gives to 
 the mind serves, with others if not with himself, as an 
 equivalent to so much evidence. The acoustic reduction 
 of sounds, in their immense variety, to the length, the 
 breadth, and the form of a wave, is welcomed as a happy 
 discovery from a similar love of relational unity. To
 
 214 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 simplify is the essence of all scientific explanation. If it 
 does not gain this end, it fails to explain. Its speculative 
 ideal is still, as of old, to reach some monistic priniciple 
 whence all may flow ; and in this interest it is, especially to 
 get rid of dualism by dissolving any partnership with mind, 
 that materialism continues to recommend its claims. Does 
 it really bring in our day the simplificatin at which it aims ? 
 Under the eye of modern science, Matter, pursued into 
 its last haunts, no longer presents itself as one undivided 
 stuff, which can be treated as a continuous substratum 
 absorbent of all number and distinction : but as an infini- 
 tude of discrete atoms, each of which might be though all 
 the rest were gone. The conception of them, when pushed 
 to its hypothetical extreme, brings them no nearer to unity 
 than homogeneity, an attribute which itself implies that 
 they are separate and comparable members of a genus. 
 And what is the result of comparing them ? They " are 
 conformed," we are assured, " to a constant type with a 
 precision which is not to be found in the sensible proper- 
 ties of the bodies which they constitute. In the first 
 place, the mass of each individual," " and all its other pro- 
 perties, are absolutely unalterable. In the second place, 
 the properties of all " "of the same kind are absolutely 
 identical." * Here, therefore, we have an infinite assem- 
 blage of phenomena of Resemblance. But further, these 
 atoms, besides the internal vibration of each, are agitated 
 by movements carrying them in all directions, now along 
 free paths and now into collisions. f Here, therefore, we 
 have phenomena of Difference in endless variety. And so 
 it comes to this, that our unitary datum breaks up into a 
 genus of innumerable contents, and its individuals are 
 affected both with ideally perfect correspondences and with 
 numerous contrasts of movement. What intellect can pause 
 
 * " Discourse on Molecules," by J. Clerk Maxwell, M.A., F.R.S., 
 p. II. 
 
 t "Theory of Heat," by J. Clerk Maxwell, M.A., LL.U., F.R.SS. 
 London and Eclin., pp. 310, 311.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 225 
 
 and compose itself to rest in this vast and restless crowd of 
 assumptions ? Who can restrain the ulterior question 
 whence then these myriad types of the same letter, im- 
 printed on the earth, the sun, the stars, as if the very 
 mould used here had been lent to Sirius and passed on 
 through the constellations ? Everywhere else the like- 
 nesses of individual things, especially within the same 
 " species," of daisy to daisy, of bee to bee, have awakened 
 wonder and stimulated thought to plant them in some 
 uniting relation to a cause beyond themselves ; and not till 
 the common parentage refers them to the same matrix of 
 nature does the questioning about them subside. They 
 quietly settle as derivative where they could never be 
 accepted as original. Some chemists think, as Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer reminds us,* that in the hydrogen atom we have 
 the ultimate simple unit. By means of the spectroscope, 
 samples of it, and of its internal vibrations, may be brought 
 from Sirius and Aldebaran, distances so great that light 
 itself needs twenty-two years to cross the lesser of them, 
 into exact comparison with our terrestrial specimens ; and 
 were their places changed, there would be nothing to betray 
 the secret. So long as no a priori necessity is shown for 
 their quantity of matter being just what it is, and always 
 the same at incommunicating distances, or for their elasti- 
 city and time of pulsation having the same measure through 
 myriads of instances, they remain unlinked and separate 
 starting-points ; and if they explain a finite number of 
 resemblances and differences, it is only by assuming an 
 infinite. 
 
 But even the approach to simplicity which homogeneity 
 would afford fails us. Notwithstanding the possibility, in 
 the case of certain carbonates, of substituting isomorphous 
 constituents for one another, it cannot be pretended that 
 any evidence as yet breaks down the list of chemical 
 elements : and, should some of them give way before 
 further attempts at analysis, they are more likely, if we 
 
 * Contemporary Krviav, June, 1872, p. 142. 
 VOL. IV. Q
 
 226 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 may judge of the future from the past, to grow to a hun- 
 dred than to dwindle to one : to say nothing of the proba- 
 bility, already suggested by the star-spectroscope, that in 
 other regions of space there exist elements unknown to us. 
 At present, in place of a single type of atom, we have to 
 set out with more than sixty, all independent, and each 
 repeating the phenomenon of exact resemblance among its 
 members wherever found. Perhaps you see nothing incon- 
 ceivable in the self-existence of ever so many perfect fac- 
 similes ready everywhere for the making of the worlds, and 
 may treat it as a thing to be expected that, being there at 
 all, they should be all alike. So much the more certain, 
 then, must be your surprise on rinding them not all alike, 
 but ranging themselves under sixty heads of difference. 
 If the similars are entitled to the position of dpxai, the dis- 
 similars are not : and if neither can prefer the claim, 
 the atomic doctrine, when pushed into an ultimate theory 
 of origination, extravagantly violates the first condition of a 
 philosophical hypothesis. 
 
 Nor is its series of assumed data even yet complete. For 
 these sixty kinds of atoms are not at liberty to be neutral 
 to one another, or to run an intermediate round of experi- 
 ments in association, within the limits of possible permu- 
 tation. Each is already provided with its select list of 
 admissible companions ; and the terms of its partnership 
 with every one of these are strictly prescribed ; so that not 
 one can modify, by the most trivial fraction, the capital it 
 has to bring. Vainly, for instance, does the hydrogen atom, 
 with its low figure and light weight, make overtures to the 
 more considerable oxygen element : the only reply will be, 
 Either none of you or two of you. And so on throughout 
 the list. Among the vast group of facts represented by 
 this sample, I am not aware of more than one set, the 
 union of the same combining elements in multiple doses 
 for the production of a scale of compounds, of which the 
 atomist hypothesis can be said to render an account. 
 Everything else, the existence of " affinity ;: at all, its limi-
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 227 
 
 tation to particular cases so far short of the whole, the 
 original cast of its definite ratios, its preference for unlike 
 elements, stands unexplained by it, or must be carried 
 into it as a new burden of primordial assumptions. This 
 chasm between the facts of chemistry and its speculations is 
 clearly seen by its best teachers. Kekule" treats the symbolic 
 notation of chemical formulas as a means of simply 
 expressing the fact of numerical proportion in the com- 
 bining weights. 
 
 " If to the symbols in these formulas " (he adds) " a different 
 meaning is assigned, if they are regarded as denoting the atoms 
 of the elements with their weights, as is now most common, the 
 question arises, ' What is the relative size or weight of the 
 atoms ? ' Since the atoms can be neither measured nor 
 weighed, it is plain that to the hypothetical assumption of deter- 
 minate atomic weights we have nothing to guide us but specula- 
 tive reflection." * 
 
 The more closely we follow the atomist doctrine to its 
 starting-point, and spread before us the necessary outfit for 
 its journey of deduction, the larger do its demands appear ; 
 and when, included in them, we find an unlimited supply 
 of absolutely like objects, all repeating the same internal 
 movements, an arbitrary number of unlike types, in each 
 of which this demand is reproduced, and a definite selec- 
 tion of rules for restricting the play of combination among 
 these elements, we can no longer, in the face of this 
 stock of self-existent originals, allow the pretence of sim- 
 plicity to be anything but an illusion. 
 
 Large as the atomist's assumptions are, they do not go 
 one jot beyond the requirements of his case. He has to 
 deduce an orderly and determinate universe, such as we 
 find around us, and to exclude chaotic systems where no 
 equilibrium is established. In order to do this he must 
 pick out the special conditions for producing this particular 
 cosmos and no other, and must provide against the turning 
 
 " Lehrbuch dor organischcn Chemie, ap. Lange, Gcschichtc des 
 Materialismus," ii, p. 191. 
 
 2
 
 228 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 up of any out of a host of equally possible worlds. In 
 other words, he must, in spite of his contempt for final 
 causes, himself proceed upon a preconceived world-plan, 
 and guide his own intellect as, step by step, he fits it to the 
 universe, by the very process which he declares to be 
 absent from the universe itself. If all atoms were round 
 and smooth, he thinks no such stable order of things as we 
 observe could ever arise ; so he rejects these forms in favour 
 of others. By a series of such rejections he gathers around 
 him at last the select assortment of conditions which will 
 work out right. The selection is made, however, not on 
 grounds of a priori necessity, but with an eye to the 
 required result. Intrinsically the possibilities are all equal 
 (for instance), of round and smooth atoms, and of other 
 forms ; and a problem therefore yet remains behind, short 
 of which human reason will never be content to rest, 
 viz. : How came they to be so limited as to fence off com- 
 peting possibilities, and secure the actual result ? Is it an 
 eternal limitation, having its " ratio sufficiens " in the un- 
 caused essence of things ; or superinduced by some power 
 which can import conditions into the unconditioned, and 
 mark out a determinate channel for the " stream of ten- 
 dency " through the open wilds over which else it spreads 
 and hesitates ? It was doubtless in view of this problem, 
 and in the absence of any theoretic means of excluding 
 other atoms than those which we have, that Herschel 
 declared them to have the characteristics of "manufactured 
 articles." This verdict amuses Dr. Tyndall ; nothing more. 
 He twice * dismisses it with a supercilious laugh ; for 
 which perhaps, as for the atoms it concerns, there may be 
 some suppressed " ratio sufficiens. " But the problem 
 thus pleasantly touched is not one of those which solventur 
 risu ; and, till some better-grounded answer can be given 
 to it, that on which the large and balanced thought of 
 Herschel and the masterly penetration of Clerk Maxwell 
 have alike settled with content, may claim at least a pro- 
 visional respect. 
 * Ik-lfast Address, p. 26. Fortnightly /ur/t-r; 1 , Nov. 1875, p. 598.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 229 
 
 Having confined myself in this section to the Atomic 
 Materialism, I reserve for the next the consideration of 
 the Dynamic Materialism, and the bearings of both on 
 the primary religious beliefs. To those, doubtless the 
 majority in our time, who have made up their minds that 
 behind the jurisdiction of the natural sciences no rational 
 questions can arise, and from their court no appeal be 
 made, who will never listen to metaphysics except in dis- 
 proof of their own possibility, I cannot hope to say any 
 useful word : for the very matters on which I speak lie 
 either on the borders of their sphere, or in quite another. 
 I am profoundly conscious how strong is the set of the 
 Zeitgeist against me, and I should utterly fail before it, did 
 it not sweep by me as a mere pulsation of the Ewigkeits- 
 geist that never sweeps by. Nor is it always, even now, 
 that physics shut up the mind of their most ardent and 
 successful votary within their own province, rich and vast 
 as that province is. " It has been asserted," says Professor 
 Clerk Maxwell, " that metaphysical speculation is a thing 
 of the past, and that physical science has extirpated it. The 
 discussion of the categories of existence, however, does not 
 appear to be in danger of coming to an end in our time ; 
 and the exercise of speculation continues as fascinating to 
 every fresh mind as it was in the davs of Thales."* 
 
 II. THE DYNAMIC MATERIALISM. 
 
 It is curious to observe how little able is even exact 
 science to preserve its habitual precision, when pressed back- 
 ward past its processes to their point of commencement, 
 and brought to bay in the statement of their "first truth." 
 The proposition which supplies the initiative is sure to con- 
 tain some term of indistinct margin or contents : and 
 usually it will be the term least suspected, because most 
 familiar. The student of nature takes as his principle that 
 all phenomena arise from a fixed total of force in a given 
 * Experimental Physics, Introductory Lecture, ad fincin.
 
 230 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 quantity of matter ; and assumes that, in his explanations, 
 he must never resort to any supposed addition or subtrac- 
 tion of either element. In adopting this rule he must 
 know, you would say, what he means by "matter," and 
 what by " force," and that he means two things by the two 
 words. Ask him whence this principle has its authority. 
 If he pronounces it a metaphysical axiom, you may let him 
 go till he can tell you how there can be not simply an 
 a priori notion of matter and notion of force, but also an 
 a priori measure of each, which can guarantee you against 
 increase or diminution of either. As standards of quantity 
 are found only in experience, he will come back with a 
 new answer, fetched from the text-books of science : that 
 his principle is inductively gathered ; in one half of its 
 scope viz., that neither matter nor force is ever destroyed, 
 proved by positive evidence of persistence ; in the 
 other half, viz., that neither is ever created, proved by 
 negative evidence, of non-appearance. If now you beg 
 him to exhibit his proof that matter is indestructible, he 
 will in some shape reproduce the old experiment of weigh- 
 ing the ashes and the smoke, and re-finding in them the 
 fuel's mass : his appeal will be to the balance, his witnesses 
 the equal weights. Weight, however, is force : and thus, to 
 establish the perseverance of matter, he resorts to equality of 
 force. Again, when invited to make good the correspond- 
 ing position, of the conservation of force, he will show you 
 how, e.g., the chemical union of carbon and oxygen in the 
 furnace is followed by the undulations of heat, succeeded 
 in their turn by the molecular separation of water into 
 steam, the expansion of which lifts a piston, and institutes 
 mechanical performances : i.e., he traces a series of move- 
 ments, each replacing its predecessor, and leaving no link 
 in the chain detached. M~ovements, however, are material 
 phenomena : so that to establish the persistence of force, he 
 steps over to take counsel of matter. He makes assertions 
 about each term, as if it were an independent subject : but 
 if his assertion respecting cither is challenged, he invokes
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 231 
 
 aid from the other : and he holds, logically, the precarious 
 position of a man riding two horses with a foot on each, 
 hiding his danger by a cloth over both, and saved from a fall 
 by dexterous shifting and exchange. 
 
 Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than a scientific pro- 
 position, the terms of which stand in this variable relation 
 to each other. The first of them has been sufficiently 
 fixed in discussing the Atomic conception. It remains to 
 give distinctness to the second. In order to do so, it will 
 be simplest to follow into their last retreats of meaning the 
 parallel doctrines of the " Indestructibility of Matter " and 
 of the " Conservation of Energy." If our perceptions were 
 so heightened and refined that nothing escaped them by its 
 minuteness or its velocity, what should we see, answering 
 to those doctrines, during a course of perpetual observa- 
 tion ? 
 
 1. We should see the ultimate atoms ; and if we singled 
 out any one of them, and kept it ever in view, we should 
 find it, in spite of "change of form," "always the same." 
 "A simple elementary atom," says Professor Balfour 
 Stewart, '' is a truly immortal being, and enjoys the privi- 
 lege of remaining unaltered and essentially unaffected by the 
 most powerful blows that can be dealt against it."* Here, 
 then, we have alighted upon the " Matter " which is " inde- 
 structible." 
 
 2. These atoms might have been stationary ; and we 
 should still have seen them in their " immortality." But 
 they are never at rest. They fly along innumerable paths : 
 they collide and modify their speed and their direction : 
 they unite : they separate. However long we look, there 
 is no pause in this eternal dance : if one figure ceases, 
 another claims its place. As in the atoms, so in the mole- 
 cules which are their first clusters, there is a " state of 
 continual agitation," "vibration, rotation, or any other kind 
 of relative motion";! "an uninterrupted warfare going on, 
 
 * "The Conservation of Energy," p. 7. 
 
 f " Theory of Heat," by J. Clerk Maxwell, p. 306.
 
 232 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 a constant clashing together of these minute bodies."* In 
 this unceasing movement among the " immortal " atoms we 
 alight upon the phenomenon, or series of phenomena, 
 described by the phrase " Conservation of Energy." So 
 far as the law thus designated claims to be an observed law, 
 gathered by induction from experience, this is its last and 
 whole meaning. We have only to scrutinize its evidence 
 with a little care, in order to see that it simply traces a few 
 transmutations of the perpetual motions attributed to atoms 
 and molecules. 
 
 If we chose to shape it thus : " For every cancelled 
 movement or element of movement there arises another, 
 which is equivalent " ; everything would be expressed to 
 which the evidence applies. Had we to look out for a 
 proof of such a proposition, we should first consider what 
 it is that makes two movements equivalent : and, in the 
 simplest case, of homogeneous elements, we should 
 find it in equal numbers with the same velocity ; so that 
 the direct demonstration would require that we should 
 count the atoms and estimate their speed. As we cannot 
 count them, one by one, we weigh them in their masses; 
 an operation which has the advantage of reckoning at one 
 stroke, along with their relative numbers, also the most 
 important of their velocities. The atoms being all equal, 
 the greater mass expresses the larger number. And weight 
 is only the arrested velocity with which, in free space, they 
 move to one another : it is prevented motion, in the shape 
 of pressure. In order to measure it, i.e., to express it 
 in terms of space and time, we might withdraw the 
 prevention, and address ourselves to the path that would 
 then be described. But it is more convenient to test it by 
 taking it in reverse, and trying what other prevented 
 motion will avail to stop it and hold it ready to turn back. 
 Thus even statical estimates of equilibrium are but a 
 translation of motion into more compendious terms. 
 
 If this is a true account of common weights, it still more 
 * " Conservation of Energy," by Dr. Balfour Stewart, p. 7.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 233 
 
 evidently applies to the process which gives us the foot- 
 pound, or " unit of work " ; for this is found by the actual 
 lifting of one pound through one vertical foot, i.e., by 
 moving it through a space in a time. And as in this, which 
 is the standard, so in all the changes which it is employed 
 to measure, the fundamental quantity is simply movement, 
 performed, prevented, or reversed. 
 
 This fact is easily traced through the proofs usually 
 offered of the Conservation of Energy. The essence of 
 them all is the same : for each extinguished " unit of 
 work," they find a substituted equivalent movement, molar 
 or molecular. Dr. Joule, for instance, establishes for us a 
 common measure of heat and mechanical work. How 
 does he accomplish this ? By applying the descent of a 
 weight to create in moving water friction enough to raise 
 the temperature i Fahrenheit ; and finding that this result 
 corresponds with a fall of the water through 772 feet. 
 Here, on one side of the equation, we have the movement 
 of the mass through its vertical path ; on the other, the 
 molecular movement that constitutes heat, measured by 
 a third movement of an expanding liquid in the thermo- 
 meter. Where the first is arrested, the second takes its 
 place : and to double one would be to double both. 
 
 If heat is made to do chemical work, its undulations are 
 similarly expended in setting up a fresh order of move- 
 ments ; of atomic combination, when burning coal unites 
 with oxygen ; of separation, when the fire of a lime-kiln 
 drives its carbonic acid from the chalk. The friction which 
 parts the electricities, the spark which attends their re- 
 union ; the crystallization of liquids by loss of temperature, 
 and their vaporization by its increase ; the waste of animal 
 tissue by action, and its replacement by food ; all reduce 
 themselves to the same ultimate rule, the exchange of one 
 set of movements or resistances (i.e., stopped movements) 
 for another, which, wherever calculable, is found to be an 
 equivalent. 
 
 To a perfect observer, then, able to follow the changes
 
 234 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 of external bodies, in themselves and among one another, 
 to their last haunts, nothing would present itself but con- 
 secutions and assortments of phenomena, and arrests of 
 phenomena. And if he had noticed, and could name, 
 what on the subsidence of each group would emerge to 
 replace it, he would be master of the law of Conservation. 
 The sciences would distinguish themselves for him by 
 taking cognizance each of its special set of phenomena ; as 
 acoustics tell the story of one kind of undulations, optics 
 of another, thermotics of a third. And the law in question 
 would only carry his glance, as it chased the flight of 
 change, across the lines of this divided work, and show 
 him, on the desertion of this field, a new stir in that. 
 
 Though the whole objective world has thus been laid 
 bare before him, and he has read and registered its order 
 through and through, he has not yet, it will be observed, 
 alighted on a single dynamic idea : all that he has seen 
 (and nothing has been hid from him) may be stated with- 
 out resort to any term that goes beyond the relations of 
 co-existence and sequence. The whole vocabulary of 
 causality may absent itself from the language of such an 
 observer. < Were it even given to him, it would carry no 
 new meaning, but only tell over again in fresh words the 
 old story of regular time succession. He might, as Comte 
 and Mill and Bain truly contend, command the whole body 
 of science, including its latest law, without ever asking for 
 the origin (other than the phenomenal predecessor) of any 
 change. 
 
 By no such ideal interpreter of nature, however, have 
 our actual books of science been written. Never more 
 than now have they abounded in the language which, we 
 have seen, would be superfluous for him. The formula of 
 the new law contains it : for it is the conservation of 
 " Energy," or the correlation of " Forces," which it an- 
 nounces. Are these then some new-comers that we have 
 got to know ? or, have we encountered them before under 
 other names, and only found out some new thing about
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 235 
 
 them? "Energy," says Professor Balfour Stuart, "is the 
 power of overcoming obstacles or of doing work."* I see 
 a flash of lightning pierce a roof and kill a man, and 
 plunge into the earth : the obstacles overcome, the work 
 done, are visible enough ; but where is the power ? " what 
 does it add to the phenomenon, over and above these 
 elements? Besides the flash of lightning first, and then 
 the changes in the roof and the man, is there something 
 else to be searched for, and entered, as an object of know- 
 ledge, under a separate name? If there be such a thing, 
 by what sense am I to apprehend it ? through what aids 
 of art can I penetrate to it ? It is obvious that it has no 
 perceptible presence at all ; and that its name stands in 
 the definition and in every inductive equation, as an x, an 
 unknown quantity, which itself has to be found before it 
 can add any new relation to the known. " Force," says 
 Professor Clerk Maxwell, " is whatever changes or tends to 
 change the motion of a body, by altering either its direc- 
 tion or its magnitude."! The shot fired from a gun at a 
 moderate elevation is scarcely out of the muzzle before it 
 quits the straight line for the parabola, and slackens its 
 initial velocity, and soon alights upon the ground. We 
 say the deflection is due to " gravitation." But, if so, this 
 is an invisible part of the fact : no more is observable than 
 the first direction and subsequent curvature of the ball's 
 path, the changing speed, and the final fall, in presence of 
 the earth. The "force" which we superadd in thought is 
 not given in the phenomenon as perceived : and if we 
 know the movements accomplished, prevented, modified, 
 we know everything that is there. 
 
 One interpretation, indeed, may be given to these mys- 
 terious words, which makes them not superfluous, in a 
 methodized account of the order of nature. " Gravitation " 
 perhaps may mean only the rule of happening which, along 
 with the deflection of the shot, describes also several other 
 
 * " Conservation of Energy,'' p. 13. 
 t " Theory of Heat," p, 83.
 
 236 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 cases of movement ; and if it enables us to advert to these 
 while in presence of the immediate fact, it performs a truly 
 scientific function. It is plain, however, that this is not 
 what our Dynamic writers mean. A rule does not " change 
 the motion of a body," does not " overcome obstacles and 
 do work " ; nor would anyone dream of attaching such 
 predicates to mere similarities of occurrence. 
 
 Our instructors then suppose themselves acquainted 
 with more than phenomena, more than the laws of them ; 
 and believe that inductive analysis has carried them behind 
 these to " the hiding-place of power." They tell us, with 
 much ease and unanimity, what they have found there : so 
 that the story is familiar to every advanced schoolboy, and 
 reproduced in hundreds of examination papers every year. 
 They have found, as sources of the phenomena, a consider- 
 able number of " Energies " of nature, which they distin- 
 guish from one another in various ways, as " strong " or 
 " weak," as stretching far or keeping near, as demanding 
 the unlike or content with anything, as single or splitting 
 into opposites, as inorganic or organic. In every text-book 
 of science a complete list of these is presented ; and the 
 student, as he learns how to discriminate them, cannot 
 doubt that he is dealing, in each instance, with a separate 
 unit of objective knowledge, which is the inner fountain of 
 a definite set of outward changes. He thus is brought to 
 conceive of nature as having many springs. Its multitu- 
 dinousness is commanded by a senate of powers. 
 
 Further, it is impossible, on looking at the faces of these 
 assembled forces, to assign the same rank to all, or miss 
 the traits of graduated dignity which make them rather a 
 hierarchy than a committee. The delicate precision with 
 which chemical affinity picks its selecting way among the 
 atoms, is an advance upon the indiscriminate grasp of 
 gravitation at them all. The architecture of a crystal can- 
 not vie with that of a tree. The sentiency of the mollusk 
 is at an immeasurable distance from the thought which 
 produces the Mechanique Celeste. Hence, in the company
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 237 
 
 of powers that conduct the business of nature, a certain 
 order of lower and higher establishes itself, which, without 
 settling every point of precedency, at least marks a few 
 steps of ascent, from the mechanical at the bottom to the 
 mental at the top. All equally real, all equally old, they 
 are differenced by the quality of the work they have to do. 
 
 On the imagination thus prepared, a new discovery is 
 now flung. Keenly watch the face of any one of these 
 forces ; its features will change into those of another. You 
 cannot fix its identity in permanence ; it migrates from 
 species to species. Now it is mechanical energy; in a 
 minute it will be heat ; if a tourmaline is near, it will turn 
 up as electricity ; and so on ; for no part of the cycle is 
 closed against it. You look, in short, upon a row of masks, 
 behind which the " unknown power," slipping from one to 
 another with magic agility, seems to multiply itself, but is 
 found, on closer scrutiny, never to quit its unity. The 
 senate of nature does but administer a monarchy. 
 
 And so, the plurality of forces disappears from the ulti- 
 mate background, and comes to the front as a mere sem- 
 blance. This brings up a new problem. What stands in 
 the dynamic place thus vacated ? How is it related to the 
 disguises it assumes ? Do they in any way represent it ? 
 or do they only hide it ? To this question there are three 
 answers given, (i.) The One Power is indifferently related 
 to all its masks, but is like none of them ; they are opaque 
 and let no lineament shine through. (2.) The "phases" 
 are not on an equal footing, but consecutive in their 
 genesis, the lowest being the oldest. With that the One 
 Power was at first identical, and that is what truly repre- 
 sents its essence. (3.) The " phases " are consecutive in 
 their genesis, the highest being the oldest. With that the 
 One Power is for ever identical ; all else is its action, but 
 not its image. The second of these is the materialist's 
 answer. His preference for it is mainly determined by 
 two reasons. In the first place, since the several forces, 
 A. I), C, I), &c., are all interchangeable, it suffices to allow
 
 238 MODERN MATERIALISM 
 
 A (the mechanical), and all the rest are provided for. In 
 the second place, the traces of actual evolution follow this 
 order, conducting us back past the dawn of life, and even 
 the combinations of chemistry, to a period of purely 
 mechanical energy. In estimating these reasons I will 
 step for a moment on to their own ground, and postpone 
 all objection to the theory of " energies " on which they rest. 
 
 It is true that, among a number of interchangeables, if 
 the first be given, the others are potentially there. But it 
 is no less true that if the last be given, or any intermediate, 
 there is provision for the rest. The possibility of reciprocal 
 transmutation all round, determines no preference of any 
 member as having priority over the rest, and cannot be 
 pleaded as an excuse for selecting the rudest mask of 
 nature as the most faithful likeness of its inner essence. 
 The law of Conservation is impartial, and tells in both 
 directions, exhibiting the elements of the world, here living 
 up into the self-conscious, there dying down into the inor- 
 ganic, and suggesting, rather than any initial point, circling 
 currents of crossing change. 
 
 But further, there is not the slightest ground, in the 
 present transmutations, for treating the lowest phase of force 
 as adequate to the production of the highest. Though 
 mechanical energy, HOAV that it stands in presence of the 
 several chemical elements, may pass into chemical form, it 
 does not follow that it could do so in their absence ; for 
 this would be to predicate of homogeneous atoms what we 
 know only of heterogeneous. And the same consideration 
 applies to the places higher in the scale. Gii'cn, the exist- 
 ing materials and conditions of life and mind, and the 
 circulation and equivalence of forces may take place as 
 alleged ; but that the order could be inverted, and the 
 equivalence avail to provide the conditions, cannot be in- 
 ferred. Take, on the other hand, any higher "phase" as 
 first, and it carries all below it. Chemical force presup- 
 poses mechanical (as cohesion), and acts at its expense ; 
 and vital presupposes and modifies the inorganic chemical.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 239 
 
 In this order of derivation, therefore, the original datum 
 would yield what is required by divesting itself of certain 
 conditions admitted to be there, while in the opposite order 
 it would have to take on fresh conditions assumed to be 
 absent at its start. If, in choosing from the phases of force 
 the fittest representative form, we are to be guided by the 
 possibility of deduction, the supreme term must surely be 
 taken as First. 
 
 The second plea of the " materialist," viz., that the vista 
 of evolution recedes into the simply mechanical, and is 
 intersected at dimly seen stages, by entering lights, first of 
 chemical affinity, then of life, and finally of consciousness, 
 it is the less " necessary to qualify as a statement of fact, 
 because it is destitute of logical cogency. Granted that 
 at successive eras these new forces appeared upon the 
 scene, this supplies the "when," but not the "whence" of 
 each. Something more is needful, if you would show that 
 it is the product of its predecessor. Instead of advancing 
 from behind, it may have entered from the side. You can- 
 not prove a pedigree by offering a date. Since these several 
 forces are but secondary phases of a Unitary Power, what 
 obliges us to derive them one from another, instead of letting 
 them all stand in equal and direct relation to their common 
 essence ? On this point the first answer to the inquiry after 
 the One Power has a conclusive advantage over the second. 
 
 Such, it seems to me, would be the logical position of 
 the materialist's case, on the assumption that separate 
 kinds and transmutations of energy are known to us, over 
 and above the resulting phenomena, as discoveries of natu- 
 ral science. That assumption, hitherto conceded, I must 
 now withdraw. Xo " energy'' has ever come under human 
 notice, and disclosed its marks, so as to discriminate itself 
 from others, similarly apprehended. This is not simply 
 true thus far as a matter of fact : it is true permanently as 
 a matter of necessity. We might watch for ever the rela- 
 tions of bodies and their parts inter se. and though we had 
 eyes that ranged from the microscopic minimum to the
 
 240 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 analysis of the milky way, we should fetch no force into 
 the field of view : and the whole story of what was laid 
 open to us would be a record of interminable series and 
 eddies of change. What are called the " transmutations of 
 energy" are nothing but transitions from one chapter of 
 that record to another. A certain catena of phenomena 
 runs to an end ; the first link of a new one is ready to take 
 its place : a body's fall is stopped ; its temperature rises ; 
 the thermometer in the kettle ascends to 212 Fahrenheit 
 and stays there ; the water turns to steam ; this is observed, 
 and no more than this. And the list of metamorphosed 
 energies deceives us, if we take it for anything beyond an 
 enumeration of these junctures between class and class of 
 consecutive movements. Did we bring to the contempla- 
 tion of nature no faculties but those which constitute our 
 scientific outfit, I see no reason to believe that it would 
 come before us under any other aspect ; or that we should 
 ever be tempted to paint its picture or tell its history in 
 dynamic terms. 
 
 Are such terms then illusory ? Are they susceptible of 
 no meaning? or of only a false meaning? Far from it. 
 The thought that is in them we cannot indeed fetch out of 
 nature ; but we are obliged to carry it into nature. To 
 witness phenomena, and let them lie and dispose them- 
 selves in the mere order of time, space, and resemblance, 
 is to us impossible. By the very make of our understand- 
 ing we refer them to a Power which issues them : and no 
 sooner is perception startled by their appearance than the 
 intellect completes the act by wonder at their source. This 
 " power," however, being a postulate intuitively applied to 
 phenomena, and not an observed function found in them, 
 does not vary as they vary, but mentally repeats itself as the 
 needed prefix to every order of them : and though it 
 may thus migrate, now into this group, now into that, it is 
 the dwelling alone which changes, and that which is im- 
 manent is ever the same. You can vary nothing in the 
 total fact, except the collocations of material conditions ;
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 241 
 
 out of which, as each new adjustment emerges, the per- 
 sistent Power elicits a different result. Instead of first 
 detecting many forces in nature and afterwards running 
 them up into identity, the mind imports one into many col- 
 locations : never allowing it to take different names, except 
 for a moment, in order to study its action, now here, now 
 there. If this be true, if causality be not seen, but thought, 
 if the thought it carries belongs to a rule of the under- 
 standing itself, that every phenomenon is the expression of 
 power, two consequences follow : the plurality of forces 
 disappears : and, to find the true interpretation of the One 
 which remains, we must look not without but within ; not 
 on the phenomena presented, but on the rational relations 
 into which they are received. Power is that which we 
 mean by it ; nor have we any other way of determining its 
 nature than by resort to our self-knowledge. The problem 
 passes from the jurisdiction of natural science to that of 
 intellectual philosophy. Thither let us follow it. 
 
 I have already hinted that if we were mere passive, 
 though thinking, observers of the world around us, we 
 should witness phenomena without asking for a power : 
 the principle of causality would remain latent in the in- 
 tellect : the occasion would be wanting which permits it 
 to awake. That occasion is furnished by the active side of 
 our nature, by our own spontaneous movement from 
 its inner centre out upon objects near its circumference. 
 Being conscious as originators of the exercise of power, we 
 admit as recipients its exercise upon us : nor is causality 
 conceivable except upon these meeting lines of action and 
 reaction ; any more than, in the case of position, a here is 
 conceivable without a there. Both pairs, the dynamic and 
 the geometrical, are functions of the same fundamental 
 antithesis, of subject and object, which is involved in every 
 cognitive act. Till we disengage ourselves from nature, we 
 do not think, though we may feel ; and when we disengage 
 ourselves from nature, we are self-conscious subjects and 
 objects of causal operation. The idea of power coming in 
 
 VOL. !V. R
 
 242 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 this dual form, as out from us and on to us, its two sides 
 are reciprocally related ; and that which the inner side is to 
 the object, the same is the outer side to the sidyect. With 
 the inner side, however, we are intimately familiar : it is the 
 one thing which we immediately know ; unless, indeed, 
 it sits so near our centre as rather to regulate our knowing 
 than stand off enough to become itself the known : but in 
 any case we have to mark it by a name, as the inmost 
 nucleus of dynamic thought : we call it living Will. This 
 is our causality ; it is what we mean by causality : in the 
 absence of this, no other source for the idea, in the 
 presence of this, no other meaning for it can be found. It 
 is true, that of the reciprocal propositions, " We push 
 against the wind," "The wind pushes against us," we know 
 the force named in the first with a closeness not belonging 
 to our knowledge of the other. We cannot identify our- 
 selves with the wind as our own nisus is identified with us. 
 We go out on an energy : we return home on a thought. 
 But that thought is only the reflex of the energy ; it has, 
 and can have, no other type. Our whole idea of Poiver 
 is identical with that of Will, or reduced from it. That 
 which, in virtue of the principle of causality, we recognize 
 as immanent in nature, is homogeneous with the agency of 
 which we are conscious in ourselves. Dynamic conceptions 
 have either this meaning, or no meaning : cancel this, and 
 you cut them at the root, and they wither into words ; and 
 your knowledge, cast out into dry places, has to take refuge 
 again with co-existences and successions. Whatever autho- 
 rity attaches to the law of causality at all, attaches to it, 
 presumably at least, in its intuitive form, phenomena are 
 the expression of living energy ; and cannot be reduced 
 within narrower limits, unless by express disproof of coin- 
 cidence between its natural range and its real range. Till 
 that disproof is furnished, the One Power stands as the 
 Universal Will. 
 
 I am aware what courtesy it would require in a modern 
 savant, whether of the Nescient or of the Omniscient
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 243 
 
 school, to behave civilly to such folly as this must seem to 
 him : nor can I pretend to find his laughter a pleasant 
 sound : for I honour his pursuits, and sorrowfully dispense 
 with his sympathy. It makes amends, however, that even 
 among the most rigorous scientific thinkers, some curious 
 testimony or other from time to time turns up to the cor- 
 rectness of the interpretation just given of the idea of 
 power. Even Gassendi, the modern Epicurus, the eager 
 disciple of Copernicus and Galileo, cannot refrain from 
 resorting to living and conscious action, in explanation of 
 physical. To render the earth's attraction intelligible, he 
 has two favourite devices. He lays it down that every 
 whole nature has a sort of clinging affection for all its 
 parts, and resists their being torn or kept away from it ; 
 so that the earth sends out invisible arms or tentacula to 
 fetch back objects detached from it ; and hence the fall of 
 the rain, the hail, the stone from the sling.* And he insti- 
 tutes a double comparison : first assimilating the earth to 
 a magnet ; and then the magnet's force to the fascinating 
 or repulsive influence of objects upon the senses, the 
 sweetness of the rose which draws us to it, the noisome- 
 ness of a drain, that drives us away.f In this appeal to 
 "sympathy" and "antipathy" we see again, as already in 
 the <iAt'a of Democritus, how inevitably the imagination, 
 even when most intent on keeping within physical limits, 
 is betrayed into mental analogies. Not a few, indeed, of 
 the most clear-sighted men of science have been well 
 aware of the real source of our dynamic conceptions ; in 
 some cases accepting it as authoritative, in others being 
 ashamed of it as a mere occasion of superstition. Redten- 
 bacher, in his " Principles of Mechanical Physics," refers 
 our knowledge of "the existence of forces to the various 
 effects which they produce, and especial/y to the feeling and 
 
 * De motu impresso a Motore translate, xii. Opera, Lugcl. 1658, 
 torn. iii. p. 491. 
 
 t Syntagma Philos. Fhys. sect. iii. mem. I. lib. iii. p. ii. Op. 132; 
 
 and De motu impresso, xiii. torn. iii. p, 492. 
 
 R 2
 
 244 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 consciousness of our oivn forces."* And in conversation with 
 Fechner, Professor E. H. Weber laid stress on the fact, that 
 in the will to move the body occurs the only case of im- 
 mediate consciousness of power operative on matter ; and 
 he accordingly identified the essence of power with that of 
 will, and from this principle worked out his religious 
 ideas.! That it is not, however, in the mere interest of a 
 religious theory that this doctrine finds its strength, is 
 evident from its hold on Schopenhauer, who, in virtue of 
 it, would call the inward principle of nature nothing but 
 will, though striking out from that name whatever makes 
 its meaning divine. Herschel's judgment, often criticized 
 but never shaken, was deliberately pronounced : 
 
 " That it is our own immediate consciousness of effort when 
 we exert force to put matter in motion, or to oppose and 
 neutralize force, which gives us this internal conviction of 
 poiucr and causation so far as it refers to the material world, 
 and compels us to believe that whenever we see material 
 objects put in motion from a state of rest, or deflected from 
 their rectilinear paths and changed in their velocities if already 
 in motion, it is in consequence of such an effort somehow 
 exerted, though not accompanied with our consciousness. "J 
 
 With the tone of this memorable statement it is interesting 
 to compare the feeling of one who, owning the same 
 psychological fact, treats it as an infirmity, instead of 
 accepting it as a guide. 
 
 " Power, regarded as the cause of motion, is nothing," says 
 Du Bois-Reymond, ' : but a more recondite product of the irre- 
 sistible tendency to personify \\\i\z\\ is impressed upon us; a 
 rhetorical artifice, as it were, of our brain, snatching at a 
 figurative turn of thought, because destitute of any conception 
 clear enough for literal expression. In the notions of Power 
 
 * " Das Dynamiclensystem, Grundztige eir.er mechanischen Fhysik, r> 
 p. 12, ap. Lange ; "Gesch. d. Materialismu?,'' ii. p. 2O>. 
 
 t Fechner, " Ueber die physikalische und philosophische Atomen- 
 lehre ; 2te And.," p. 132 (note). 
 
 ^: "Treatise on Agronomy, 1833"; Ch. vii. 370.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 245 
 
 and Matter we find recurring the same dualism which presents 
 itself in the ideas of God and the world, of soul and body ; the 
 same want which once impelled men to people bush and 
 fountain, rock, air, and sea, with creatures of their imagination. 
 What do we gain by saying it is reciprocal Attraction whereby 
 two particles of matter approach each other ? Not the shadow 
 of any insight into the nature of the process. But, strangely 
 enough, our inherent quest of causes is in a manner laid to 
 rest by the involuntary image tracing itself before our inner 
 eye, of a hand which gently draws the inert matter to it, 
 or of invisible tentacles, with which the particles clasp together, 
 try to seize each other, and at last twine together into a knot."* 
 
 This outburst of exasperation against all dynamic concep- 
 tions, for to that length it really goes, is justified if the 
 human mind has nothing to do but to become an accom- 
 plished Naturforscher. It is quite true that " insight into 
 the nature of a process " is gained only by a closer reading 
 of its steps in their series and in their analogies, and is in 
 no way aided by passing behind the movements they com- 
 prise. What then ? Shall we be angry at our propensity 
 to look behind them, and tear it from our nature under 
 vows to reach a stainless intellect ? We shall but emascu- 
 late the mind we wish to purify : for what is the nerve of 
 its vigour but the very Wonder which is for ever seeking 
 an unattainable rest ? If we incessantly press into nature, 
 it is in hope of finding what is beyond nature : and all 
 that we have learned of the finite world indirectly comes 
 from our affinity with the embracing Infinite. It would be 
 strange if the Causal appetency, which no disappointment 
 wears out, should be at once our greatest strength and our 
 most fatal illusion. It is admitted to be " irresistible " : 
 it is admitted to carry the belief of personality : but these 
 features, which induced Herschel to yield to it and trust in 
 it, are reasons with I)u Bois-Reymond for resisting and 
 despising it. I need hardly say that, when he calls its
 
 246 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 language " figurative " and its conception a " personifica- 
 tion," he oracularly assumes the very point at issue. To 
 " personify " is to invest with personality that which has 
 it not : and to tell anyone with Herschel's belief that he 
 does this, is only to contradict him. So again, if you know 
 that there are two things of different type, living power 
 and dead power, and then transfer to the second the marks 
 of the first, your language is " figurative " : but if to you 
 the types are identical, the second coinciding with the first, 
 you speak with literal exactitude ; and to charge you with 
 rhetoric is only to beg the question in dispute. Probably 
 the writer was the less conscious of any dogmatism here, 
 from his thoughts already running upon the stock example 
 of belief in the Pagan gods of "rock and air and sea,"- 
 fairly enough adducible as a departed superstition. But 
 the dying-out of Polytheism is misconceived if it be re- 
 garded as an expulsion of every Conscious Presence from 
 venerated haunts, and the substitution of a dead for a 
 living world. It was a fusion, not an extinction, of Will : 
 as the little cantons of nature, once under independent 
 guardians, melted into ever wider provinces, and clans of 
 men clustered into confederated nations, the detected har- 
 mony of the cosmos and the felt unity of humanity carried 
 with them the enthronement of a single Divine Mind in 
 place of the vanished local gods. It is not that other and 
 other powers have been discovered, but that fewer and 
 fewer have been needed, till the plurality is lost in One 
 Supreme. And as, with the widening scope of the natural 
 order, the many wills lapsed into one, so, among mono- 
 theists, did the many motives of that One, once so freely 
 attributed, more and more merge themselves in the recog- 
 nition of an all-comprehending scheme, whose thoughts 
 were not acts but laws, and whose purpose flowed into the 
 inlets of individual life from an ocean of universal rela- 
 tions. By this surrender of providences in exiguis we drop 
 the quest of design in events taken one by one, and learn 
 to speak of the power which produces them, and to divide
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 247 
 
 it into lots, not according to their supposed aims, but 
 according to their visible kinds : and thus it is that by 
 suspending the idea of an end in view, the full-bodied 
 notion of Will is attenuated to that of Force. How imper- 
 fectly, even then, the life is driven out of it, may be seen 
 from Du Bois-Reymond's expostulation with it. And the 
 suspended idea only flits away to settle upon a higher point. 
 Instead of having discovered that purpose is not there, we 
 have simply learned that purpose takes in more ; and the 
 little pulses of separate volition are lost in the mighty move- 
 ments of Eternal Thought. 
 
 In the remarkable passage which I have quoted, and in 
 the argument of which it forms a part, Du Bois-Reymond 
 puts Matter and Force on the same footing, and discharges 
 the former as well as the latter from the realm of reality, 
 by reducing it also to an empty abstraction. He is led to 
 this position by that just logical appreciation which gives 
 to his writings, as to those of Helmholtz, a high philoso- 
 phical rank, in addition to their value as models of scientific 
 exposition and research. The equipoise, true enough, is 
 perfect, in respect to validity, between the ideas of Matter 
 and of Power ; and the only question is, whether both are 
 to be dismissed as illusions, or both retained as intuitive 
 data of thought, the conditions of all construed experience. 
 To reject them both is practically impossible, though logi- 
 cally necessary if you part with either. To retain them 
 both is simply to accept the fundamental relation of object 
 and subject under its two constitutive functions instead of 
 treating our only modes of knowing as snares of ignorance. 
 The existence of a Universal Will and the existence of 
 Matter stand upon exactly the same basis, of certainty if 
 you trust, of uncertainty if you distrust, the principia of 
 your own reason. For my part, I cannot hesitate. Shall 
 I be deterred by the reproach of "anthropomorphism"? 
 If I am to see a ruling Power in the world, is it folly to 
 prefer a man-like to a brute-like power, a seeing to a blind ? 
 The similitude to man means no more and goes no further
 
 248 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 than the supremacy of intellectual insight and moral ends 
 over every inferior alternative : and how it can be con- 
 temptible and childish to derive everything from the 
 highest known order of power rather than the lowest, and 
 to converse with Nature as embodied Thought instead of 
 taking it as a dynamic engine, it is difficult to understand. 
 Is it absurd to suppose mind transcending the human ? or, 
 if we do so, to make our own Reason the analogical base 
 for intellect of wider sweep ? How is it possible to look 
 along any line of light traced by past research, and, esti- 
 mating the contents which it reveals, and leaves still 
 unrevealed, to remember that along all radii to which we 
 may turn, a similar infinitude presents itself to any faculty 
 that seeks it, and yet to conceive that this mass of truth 
 to be known has only our weak intelligence to know it ? 
 And if two natures know the same thing, how can they be 
 other than like ? Nay, Du Bois-Reymond himself takes up 
 the magnificent fancy of Laplace, of a "mind cognizant of 
 all forces operating in nature at a given moment, and all 
 mutual relations among the beings composing it. Such a 
 mind, if in other respects capacious enough to subject these 
 data to analysis, would comprise in the same formula the 
 movements of the greatest masses in the universe, and of 
 the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to him ; 
 and to his glance future and past would alike be present. 
 The human understanding presents, in the perfection to 
 which it has brought astronomy, a feeble image of such a 
 mind.'' 4 Here is reproduced the very thought which, in 
 his ignorance of differential equations, Plato expressed by 
 saying that God was the supreme Geometer ; simply 
 taking to the summit-level the analogy which Laplace leaves 
 floating at some indefinite height above the human. Is 
 the conception, then, vitiated because it is " anthropomor- 
 phic''? Let Du Bois-Reymond answer: " Wir gleichen 
 diesem Geist, denn wir begreifen ihiv't If to have the 
 
 * " Ucber die Grenzen des Xaturerkennens," p. 6. 
 t Ibid. p. 10.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 249 
 
 idea of a diviner nature is to resemble him, and if resem- 
 blance must be reciprocal, what can be more futile than 
 the reproach that men attribute to God what is highest 
 in humanity ? 
 
 It may be doubted, indeed, whether the analogy might 
 not be pressed further, without overstraining its truth. If 
 the collective energies of the universe are identified with 
 Divine Will, and the system is thus animate with an eternal 
 consciousness as its moulding life, the conception we frame 
 of its history will conform itself to our experience of 
 intellectual volition. Its course is ever from the indeter- 
 minate to the determinate ; and as the passage is made by 
 rational preference among possibilities, thought has its 
 intensity at the outset, and action in the sequel. It is in 
 origination, in disposing of new conditions, in setting up 
 order by differentiation, that the mind exercises its highest 
 function. When the product has been obtained, and a 
 definite method of procedure established, the strain upon 
 us is relaxed, habit relieves the constant demand for 
 creation, and at length the rules of a practised art almost 
 execute themselves. As the intensely voluntary thus works 
 itself off into the automatic, thought, liberated from this 
 reclaimed and settled province, breaks into new regions, 
 and ascends to ever higher problems : its supreme life being 
 beyond the conquered and legislated realm, while a lower 
 consciousness, if any at all, suffices for the maintenance of 
 its ordered mechanism. Yet all the while it is one and the 
 same mind that, under different modes of activity, thinks 
 the fresh thoughts and carries on the old usages. Does 
 anything forbid us to conceive similarly of the cosmical 
 development ; that it started from the freedom of indefinite 
 possibilities and the ubiquity of universal consciousness ; 
 that, as intellectual exclusions narrowed the field, and 
 traced the definite lines of admitted movement, the tension 
 of purpose, less needed on these, left them as the habits of 
 the universe, and operated rather for higher and ever higher 
 ends not yet provided for ; that the more mechanical,
 
 250 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 therefore, a natural law may be, the further is it from its 
 source ; and that the inorganic and unconscious portion of 
 the world, instead of being the potentiality of the organic 
 and conscious, is rather its residual precipitate, formed as 
 the Indwelling Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim 
 on the upper margin of the ordered whole, and especially 
 on the inner life of natures that can resemble him ? I am 
 aware that this speculation inverts the order of the received 
 cosmogonies. But, in advancing it, I only follow in the 
 track of a veteran physiologist and philosopher, whose 
 command of all the materials for judgment is beyond ques- 
 tion, the author of " Psychophysik." Fechner insists that 
 protoplasm and zoophyte structure, instead of being the 
 inchoate matter of organization, is the cast-off residuum of 
 all previous differentiation, stopping short of the separation 
 of animal from plant and of sex from sex, and no more 
 capable of further development than is inorganic matter, 
 without powers beyond its own, of producing organization.* 
 And, far from admitting that the primordial periods had 
 few organisms, which time increased in number, he contends 
 that the earth was formerly more rich in organisms than 
 now, and that the inorganic realm has grown at the expense 
 of the organic.! 
 
 The resolution of all power into Will is met by the 
 thorough-going objection, that Mind is not energy at all, 
 and can never stir a particle of matter. "Were it possible," 
 says Lange, " for a single cerebral atom to be moved by 
 ' thought ' so much as the millionth of a millimetre out of 
 the path due to it by the laws of mechanics, the whole 
 ' formula of the universe ' (i.e., as imagined by Laplace) 
 would become inapplicable and senseless."! "Suppose," 
 he adds, " two worlds, both occupied by men and their 
 doings, with the same course of history, with the same 
 
 * " Einige Ideen zur Schopfungs-und Entwickelungsgeschichte der 
 Organismen," p. 73. 
 t Ibid. pp. 77, 78. 
 J " Geschichte des Materialismus," ii. p. 155.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 251 
 
 modes of expression by gesture, the same sounds of voice, 
 for him who could hear them i.e., could not simply have 
 their vibrations conveyed through the auditory nerve to 
 the brain, but be self-conscious of them. The two worlds 
 are therefore to be absolutely alike, with only this difference : 
 that in the one the whole mechanism runs down like that 
 of an automaton, without anything being felt or thought, 
 whilst the other is just our world ; then would the formula 
 for these two worlds be completely the same. To the eye 
 of exact research they would be indistinguishable."* 
 
 So much the worse, are we not tempted to say, for " exact 
 research"? If, with all its keenness and precision, it 
 misses half the universe, and identifies diametrical oppo- 
 sites, it will be a calamity rather for it than for us, that 
 its " formula " should prove less applicable than had been 
 supposed. The extension to man, in an exaggerated form, 
 of Descartes' doctrine of animal automatism marks, perhaps, 
 the lowest point which the falling barometer of philosophy 
 has reached. By him it was propounded for the express 
 purpose of finishing off the mechanical modes of action, 
 even when strained to their maximum, short of the human 
 characteristics ; and of opening in these a second and 
 sharply contrasted world, containing another hemisphere 
 of phenomena, with their own lines of causality and relations 
 of affinity. Though by his absolute separation of matter 
 and mind he cut the problem of the world in two, he at 
 least embraced the whole of it, and attempted to solve it 
 by a double formula. "But his modern interpreters do not 
 see why one half of his theory should not be stretched to 
 do the work of the whole : they have only to ignore his 
 unmechanical part of the world and leave it out in the 
 cold, and in place of his contrast they will get an identity. 
 For his maxims, Movement is the cause of movement, 
 Thought of thought, but neither of the other, they sub- 
 stitute the rule, that Movement is the cause of both, but 
 Thought of neither : so that there is no longer any counter- 
 * " Gcschichte ties Materialismus," ii. p. 156.
 
 252 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 part to the mechanism of nature, or any work done beyond 
 it ; and whatever puffs of thought and screeches of feeling 
 there may be, it is only that the engine is blowing off its 
 steam : nothing comes of it, and it may be treated as 
 waste. This theory is founded on the analysis of reflex 
 action in the nervous apparatus, in which the sensory 
 conductor having delivered its stimulus in the ganglion, 
 the motory takes up the sequence and contracts the muscles 
 requisite for action in response. If the brain be kept from 
 interfering, the circuit is completed in unconsciousness ; 
 and its series, though determining the subject to all sorts 
 of clever and congruous movements, is composed of 
 molecular changes unattended by feeling or design. When 
 the scene is transferred to the brain or connected with it, 
 the story, we are assured, is still the same, only with the 
 added phenomenon of consciousness. In the one case, 
 the subject acts : in the other, he acts and knows it. But 
 this new fact is inoperative, and leads to nothing : were it 
 absent, he would figure away as a molecular automaton all 
 the same, and not a scene or a word would be altered in 
 the five-act comedy of life. Comparing in this view the 
 reflex and the cerebral activities, we might say that the 
 former resembles a clock with one beat viz., movement 
 only ; the latter, a clock with two beats viz., movement 
 fins consciousness. 
 
 By the extent of this increment, the second does more 
 work than the first. What, then, becomes of the difference ? 
 Where are we to look for it at its next stage ? We are 
 expressly told it has no next stage, and things will go on 
 exactly as if it had not been there. Then a portion of 
 work has perished, and the Conservation of energy is con- 
 tradicted. 
 
 The only escape from this conclusion would be by deny- 
 ing that consciousness produced is "work done." This, 
 however, is to admit that it is not an effect of molecular 
 forces ; to exempt it altogether from the range of physical 
 law ; and to throw it into an independent world of its own,
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 253 
 
 beyond the jurisdiction of the natural philosopher. Such a 
 position would be an unconditional relapse into the two- 
 armed embrace of Descartes, from which the whole doctrine 
 is a struggle to escape. 
 
 It is said that if thought can move a single molecule, the 
 law of causality is at an end. Why is it not equally at an 
 end if, conversely, molecular movement can wake a single 
 thought ? Either way, causality alike steps out of the 
 material series, and crosses over to the other, now last, 
 now first. And only on the assumption that, being a 
 monopoly of Physics, it cannot do this, has the objection 
 any sense. 
 
 This doctrine, that the most important elements of life, 
 all that constitute experience, and embody themselves in 
 language, art, religion, are so much surplusage, that the 
 mental phenomena are collectively a cul-de-sac, leading 
 nowhither, comes with a singular irony from men who by 
 force of intellect, knowledge, and character are in many 
 ways changing the conceptions of their time, and whose 
 most signal triumph it will be to convince us that, if they 
 never felt or thought at all, or stirred emotion and idea in 
 us, it would make no difference to our history, and the 
 senseless pantomime of our life would fit into the same 
 niche in the world's " formula." Such paradoxical triumphs 
 are occasionally won by planting the old nightmare of 
 necessity closely on our breast. But not for long : and the 
 first of us that, feeling cold, spreads his hands before the 
 fire, or, struck with grief, wrings them over the lifeless 
 features of a friend, will here break the spell, and restore 
 the faith that to be conscious, to think, to love, is to have 
 power. 
 
 But then, it is said, this mental power, even if we con- 
 cede it, is found only in connection with definite material 
 conditions ; in the absence of which, as in the structure of 
 plants, we have no grounds for admitting any conscious 
 life. 
 
 "' What can you say then to the student of nature if, before
 
 254 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 he allows a Psychical principle to the universe, he asks to be 
 shown, somewhere within it, embedded in neurine and fed with 
 warm arterial blood under proper pressure, a convolution of 
 ganglionic globules and nerve-tubes proportioned in size to the 
 faculties of such a Mind ?" :; 
 
 " What can we say ? " I say, first of all, that this demand 
 for a Divine brain and nerves and arteries comes strangely 
 from those who reproach the Theist with "anthropo- 
 morphism." In order to believe in God, they must be 
 assured that the plates in " Quain's Anatomy " truly repre- 
 sent him. If it be a disgrace to religion to take the human 
 as measure of the divine, what place in the scale of honour 
 can we assign to this stipulation ? Next, I ask my 
 questioner, whether he suspends belief in his friends' 
 mental powers till he has made sure of the contents of 
 their crania ? and whether, in the case of ages beyond 
 reach, there are no other adequate vestiges of intellectual 
 and moral life in which he places a ready trust ? Immediate 
 knowledge of mind other than his own he can never have : 
 its existence in other cases is gathered from the signs of 
 its activity, whether in personal lineaments or in products 
 stamped with thought : and to stop this process of inference 
 with the discovery of human beings, is altogether arbitrary, 
 till it is shown that the grounds for extending it are 
 inadequate. Further, I would submit that, in dealing with 
 the problem of the Universal Mind, this demand for 
 organic centralization is strangely inappropriate. It is 
 when mental power has to be localized, bounded, lent out 
 to individual natures and assigned to a scene of definite 
 relations, that a focus must be found for it and a molecular 
 structure with determinate periphery be built for its lodg- 
 ment. And were Du Bois-Reymond himself ever to alight 
 on the portentous cerebrum which he imagines, I greatly 
 doubt whether he would fulfil his promise and turn Theist 
 at the sight : that he had found the Cause of causes would 
 
 * Du Bois-Reymoncl, " Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens," 
 P- 37-
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 255 
 
 be the last inference it would occur to him to draw : rather 
 would he look round for some monstrous creature, some 
 cosmic megatherium, born to float and pasture on the 
 fields of space. The great " energies " which we recognize 
 as modes of the Universal Power are not central but 
 ubiquitous : gravitation reports itself wherever there is a 
 particle of matter ; heat and light spread with the ether 
 whose undulations they are ; and electricity, at one 
 moment gathered into poles, at another sweeps in the 
 aurora over half the heavens. But if still my questioner 
 cannot dispense with some visible structure as the organ 
 of the Ever-living Mind, I will ask him, in his conception 
 of the brain, to take into account these words of 
 Cauchy's : 
 
 " Ampere has shown . . . that the molecules of different 
 bodies may be regarded as composed each of several atoms, 
 the dimensions of which are infinitely small relatively to their 
 separating distances. If then we could see the constituent 
 molecules of the different bodies brought under our notice, 
 they would present to our view sorts of constellations ; and in 
 passing from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, we 
 should find, in the ultimate particles of matter, as in the 
 immensity of the heavens, central points of action distributed 
 in presence of each other."* 
 
 If then the invisible molecular structure and movement 
 do but repeat in little those of the heavens, what hinders 
 us from inverting the analogy, and saying that the ordered 
 heavens repeat the rhythm of the cerebral particles ? You 
 need an embodied mind ? Lift up your eyes, and look 
 upon the arch of night as the brow of the Eternal, its con- 
 stellations as the molecules of the universal consciousness, 
 its space as their possibility of change, and the ethereal 
 waves as the afferents and efferents of Omniscient Thought. 
 Even in the human nerves, the solid lines are but conduct- 
 ors, and the granules but media of movement ; and science 
 
 * Cited from " Moigno's Cosmos," torn. ii. p. 374, by Fechner : 
 Atomenlehre, xxvi. p. 232.
 
 256 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 is ever on the search for some subtler essence that is thus 
 sheathed and transmitted. In the cosmos, then, think of 
 that essence as unsheathed and omnipresent, with light for 
 its messenger and space for its scope of perception, and 
 your material requisition is not wholly a dream. 
 
 Quite in the sense of Du Bois-Reymond's objection was 
 the saying of Laplace, that in scanning the whole heaven 
 with the telescope he found no God ; which again has its 
 parallel in Lawrence's remark that the scalpel, in opening 
 the brain, came upon no soul.* Both are unquestionably 
 true, and it is precisely the truth of the second which 
 vitiates the intended inference from the first. Had the 
 scalpel alighted on some perceptible ^x 7 ?; we might have 
 required of the telescope to do the same ; and, on its bring- 
 ing in a dumb report, have concluded that there was only 
 mechanism there. But, in spite of the knife's failure, we 
 positively know that conscious thought and will were pre- 
 sent, yet no more visible, yesterday : and so, that the tele- 
 scope misses all but the bodies of the universe and their 
 light, avails nothing to prove the absence of a Living Mind 
 through all. If you take the wrong instruments, such 
 qucesita may well evade you. The test-tube will not detect 
 an insincerity, or the microscope analyse a grief. The 
 organism of nature, like that of the brain, lies open, in its 
 external features, to the scrutiny of science ; but, on the 
 inner side, the life of both is reserved for other modes of 
 apprehension, of which the base is self-consciousness and 
 the crown is religion. 
 
 The contempt or sorrow with which the claim of design 
 is struck out from the interpretation of the world, results in 
 like manner from a false start in construing the dynamic 
 idea. We are supposed to have made acquaintance, in the 
 laboratory, the botanic garden, the aquarium, and among 
 
 * Both these dicta I quote from memory, without at the moment 
 being able to verify the citations. An equivalent passage to the latter 
 occurs in the "Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural 
 History of Man/' p. S, 1819.
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 257 
 
 the stars, with a set of blind forces, to which a happy hit 
 and a stupid blunder are indifferent and possible, alike ; 
 and then, by way of supplement to these, to introduce into 
 the thus prepared scene the action of intellectual purpose. 
 The former is treated as the sphere of determinate caus- 
 ality ; the latter, of teleological government. It is plain 
 that, under these conditions, nothing is left to the second 
 agency except the residue unexplained by the first ; nor 
 does anything suit its character except the fitnesses which 
 (inter alia) are not impossible to the other also. Unless, 
 therefore, it invades and interrupts the series otherwise 
 inevitable, it is liable to be deposed and " mediatized " by 
 advancing knowledge ; its troop of anomalies filing off by 
 degrees into the drilled army of necessity ; and the adap- 
 tations it had claimed being traced to the forces which 
 cannot think. With these logical preconceptions, it is no 
 wonder that the naturalist directs a professional enmity 
 against the doctrine of design, and meets it as the oppo- 
 nent he is for ever beating back : and as he is certainly not 
 only in his right, but at his duty, in pushing to the utmost 
 his researches into the physical history of the forms and 
 phenomena he studies, it is a venial impatience with which 
 he resents attempts to stop him by " supernatural phan- 
 toms " across his path. If he can display the mechanism 
 by which the heliotrope turns to the sun, or the chemistry 
 by which in a few hours the turbot assumes the colour of 
 the ground over which it swims, or tell the whole story 
 which, beginning with a jelly-point tingling in the sun- 
 shine, ends with the completed human eye, let his work 
 have all sympathy and honour. But if he imagines that 
 he is displacing Thought from nature by discovering caus- 
 ality, he is the subject of the very same illusion which 
 would cry him down and arrest his course. The cases do 
 but present the two sides of one superstition. 
 
 The dispute between acting Force and intending Mind 
 is as unmeaning as the quarrel of a man with his own 
 image. The two are identical, expressions, now in all 
 
 VOL. IV. S
 
 258 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 dimensions, now in some, of the same nature. Causal 
 power other than Will being an unknown quantity, nay, 
 absolutely out of the sphere of thought, teleology and caus- 
 ality are incorporated in one ; and mechanical necessity, 
 instead of being the negation of purpose, is its persistence, 
 the declining, no doubt, of this or that possible diversion 
 to minor ends, but in subservience to the stability of a 
 more comprehensive order. The inexorability of nature is 
 but the faithfulness of God, the maintenance of those un- 
 swerving habits in the universe, without which it could 
 train no mind and school no character : and that it is hard 
 and unbending to us does not prevent its being fluid to 
 Him. To affirm purpose, therefore, in the adjustments of 
 the world, is not to set up a rival principle outside their 
 producing force, but to plant, or rather to leave, an inte- 
 grating thought within it. And, conversely, to trace those 
 adjustments to their " physical causes/'' is not to withdraw 
 them from their ideal origin, but only to detect the method 
 of carrying the inner meaning to its realization. Who will 
 venture to say, what nevertheless is constantly imagined, 
 that to find how a change comes about is to prove that it 
 was never contemplated ? If it were contemplated, it would 
 have to be executed somehow ; if, the moment you read the 
 machinery provided for this purpose, the purpose itself is 
 quenched from your view, is this the discovery or the loss 
 of a reality ? 
 
 This treatment of determinate causation as incompatible 
 with conscious aims is the more curious, as proceeding 
 from a school which, as necessarian, is constantly labouring 
 to show the co-existence of the two in human nature. If 
 man is only a sample of the universal determinism, yet 
 forms purposes, contrives for their accomplishment, and 
 executes them, definite causality and prospective thought 
 can work together, and the field which is occupied by the 
 one is not pre-occupied against the other. 
 
 The frequent plea " See, there is no mind here, for all is 
 necessary causation," tacitly concedes that, in order to have
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 259 
 
 mind, there must be exemption from necessity ; and can be 
 consistently urged only by one who attributes this exemp- 
 tion to the human will. Is the argument conclusive from 
 his point of view? It would be so, were it possible to 
 prove his premiss, viz., the universality, in the cosmos, of 
 necessary causation. But this is plainly out of the ques- 
 tion, because his amplest science carries the induction, such 
 as it is, only skin-deep into the universe ; because he would 
 have to show that the present fixity was not determined by 
 a past exercise of will ; because Mind, in proportion as it 
 is orderly and exact in its methods, may assume the sem- 
 blance of necessity, and be the less suspected that its free- 
 dom works by rule. He knows how he himself, though 
 conscious of self-disposal as well as of subjection to nature, 
 presents to the determinist the aspect of a machine ; and 
 how can he be secure against a similar illusion in his in- 
 terpretation of the world ? What is to prevent the same 
 combination of free and necessary causality which he finds 
 in himself from existing also beyond ? Nay, if there were 
 only mind-excluding force in nature, how could there arise 
 a force-resisting mind in him ? He could not carry in him- 
 self new causal beginnings, if in the cosmos whence he 
 comes the lines of possibility were definitely closed. 
 
 I revert, then, after weighing these objections, to my 
 " unwiderstehlicher Hang zur Personification," and persist 
 in regarding that which the natural philosopher calls force, 
 and Professor Tyndall raises to an immanent life, as Causal 
 Will, manifesting itself, not in interference with an estab- 
 lished order, but in producing it. As it builds and weaves 
 and quickens all matter, and could not otherwise work 
 before us at all, the structures and growths of the material 
 world are its seat, and their phenomena its witnesses : so 
 that the very story, of saline crystals, and ice-stars, and 
 fern-fronds, and human birth, which Professor Tyndall 
 tells in order to exclude it, is to me a continuous report of 
 its agency and laws. He asks, what else is there here than 
 matter ? I answer, the movements of matter, with their 
 
 S 2
 
 260 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 disposing and "formative/<??ew,"the attracting and repelling 
 energies, which, dealing ivith molecules and cells, are not 
 molecules and cells. " Mens agitat molem." Whoever 
 finds this incredible, will soon have to make friends with 
 some abstraction which is but a ghastly mimicry of it ; for 
 some conception over and above that of " pure matter," is 
 indispensable to the accurate representation of the simplest 
 facts. If in the typical " oak-tree " the vitality suddenly 
 ceased, the " matter " of it would at the next moment still 
 be there, as certainly as that of a clock which had run 
 down : it would weigh the same as before, and so stand the 
 admitted test of the indestructibility of matter. Yet some- 
 thing is gone which was previously there, and that some- 
 thing has to be described otherwise than in terms of 
 " matter." The droll " hypothesis " which my critic amuses 
 himself with conjecturally attributing to me, " of a vegeta- 
 tive soul," wedded to the tree at a definite date, and quitting 
 it when its term was up, certainly does not help us ; and is 
 set up on my behalf, I presume, simply from the facility of 
 knocking it down. But are we any better served by the 
 " alternative " conception of a " formative power," long 
 latent and "potential," i.e., not forming anything, but only 
 going to do so ? I see that the conception contradicts 
 Biichner's dictum, " A power not expressing itself has no 
 existence " ; yet am at a loss to know how, during its 
 latency, its presence is ascertained, and to exercise with 
 regard to it ''that Yorstellungs-fahigkeit with which, in my 
 efforts to think clearly, I can never dispense." Whilst it 
 lies in wait behind the scenes, before the time for the 
 deposit of the crystal or the germination of the acorn, 
 where is it ? behind what molecules does it hide ? through 
 what space is it invisibly present ? What shape has it, 
 enabling it to lay its building particles and to agglutinate 
 cells ? How does it know the right moment of temperature 
 for stepping on to the stage, and declaring itself without 
 further reserve ? In short, all the questions addressed to 
 me respecting the " formative soul " invented for me. I
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 261 
 
 refer back to be answered on behalf of my critic's " poten- 
 tial power." " Potentiality " is an intelligible fact in a 
 being consciously able to act or to refrain. But when the 
 idea is carried into a system of necessitated phenomena, 
 it means nothing in them, but something in us, as their 
 observers viz., that we conditionally anticipate a future 
 change, foreseeing a distant term of a series which would 
 be certain, provided the nearer ones were not obscure. To 
 plant this subjective suspense out into the field of nature 
 to do objective work there, now alighting visibly upon the 
 earth, and then hidden again in " an ambrosial cloud," is a 
 sort of intellectual illusion which modern logic might have 
 been expected to cast out. 
 
 In truth, the nearer I approach the Power which Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall pursues through nature with so subtle and 
 brilliant a chase, and the more I try, by combining the 
 predicates which he gives and withholds, to think it out 
 into the clear, the less distinct does this " ideal somewhat " 
 become, not simply to the imagination, but to intellectual 
 apprehension. A power which is not Mind, yet may be 
 " potential " and exist when and where it makes no sign ; 
 which is " immanent " in matter, yet is matter ; which " is 
 manifested in the universe," yet is not " a Cause,'' therefore 
 has no effects ; presents to me, I must confess, not an over- 
 shadowing mystery, but an assemblage of contradictions. 
 I have always supposed that " Power " was a relative word, 
 and that the correlative was found in the " work done " : 
 take away the latter by denying the causation, and the term 
 drops into five letters which might as well be arranged in 
 any other order. 
 
 Vet elsewhere this negative language is balanced by 
 such large affirmative suggestions that I almost cease to 
 feel the interval between my critic's thought and my own. 
 Of the inorganic, the vegetable, and the animal realms, he 
 says : 
 
 "From this point of view all three worlds would constitute a 
 unity, in which I picture life as immanent everywhere. Nor
 
 262 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 am I anxious to shut out the idea that the life here spoken of 
 may be but a subordinate part and function of a higher life, as 
 the living, moving blood is subordinate to the living man. I 
 resist no such idea, as long as it is not dogmatically imposed. 
 Left for the human mind freely to operate upon, the idea has 
 ethical vitality ; but stiffened into a dogma, the inner force dis- 
 appears, and the outward yoke of a usurping hierarchy takes 
 its place."* 
 
 Bidding God-speed to this sudden flank-attack upon usurp- 
 ing hierarchies and dogmas, I pursue only the main line of 
 march in the free " idea." Whither does it lead me ? It 
 shows me the three provinces which make up our cosmos 
 blended into one organism by an all-pervading life, which 
 conducts all their processes, from the flow of the river to 
 the dynamics of the human brain. This alone brings me 
 to a pause of solemn wonder, a single power through the 
 whole, and that a living one ! But there is more behind. 
 This power, co-extensive though it is with nature, is not 
 all : beyond her level we are to think of a " higher life," to 
 which her laws and history do but give functional expres- 
 sion. May we then really think out this " idea " of a life 
 " higher " than what is supreme in the world, higher, 
 therefore, than the human ? But scale of height above 
 that point we do not possess, except in gradation of intel- 
 lectual and moral sublimity ; and either that Ideal Life 
 must cease to live, or must come before our thought as 
 transcendent Mind and Will, on a scale comprehending as 
 well as permeating the universe. With any guide who 
 brings me hither I sit down with joy and rest. It is the 
 mountain-top, which shows all things in larger relations and 
 through a more lustrous air ; and every feature, the great 
 build of the world close at hand ; the thinning of the ever- 
 lasting snows, as they stoop and melt towards human life; 
 the opening of sweet valleys below the earlier and wilder 
 pines ; and the final plains, teeming in their silence with 
 industry and thought, is better understood than from
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 263 
 
 level points of view, where the scope is narrowed or the 
 calm is lost. But my guide seems less content than I to 
 rest here, and deserts me, not, so far as I can trace him, to 
 reach a brighter point, but rather to descend into the mists. 
 To the " higher life," transcending our highest, he dares 
 not give the predicate "Mind," or apply the pronoun of 
 Personality.* On what scale, then, is it "higher"? If 
 not on the intellectual and moral, then there is that in 
 man which rises above it ; for the power of attaining truth 
 and goodness is ideally supreme. If Professor Tyndall can 
 reveal to us something which is higher than Mind and 
 Free Causality, by all means let us accept it at his hands 
 and assign it to God. But in order to profess this, and 
 therefore to deprecate as an " anthropomorphism " the 
 ascription of mind to Him, one would have, I think, to 
 be one's self something more than man. Only such a 
 one could cast a look above the level of Reason, to see 
 whether it was overtopped : and so, this fashionable re- 
 proach against religion is virtually an arrogating of a 
 superhuman position. As we cannot overfly our own /one, 
 no beat of our wings availing to lift us out of the atmo- 
 sphere they press, surely, if that " higher life " speaks to 
 us in idea at all, it can only be as Perfect Reason and 
 Righteous Will. Those who find this type of conception 
 not good enough for them, do they succeed in struggling 
 upwards to a better ? Rather, I should fear, does a persis- 
 tent gravitation gain upon them, till they droop and sink 
 into the alternative faith of blind force which leaves their 
 own rank supreme. 
 
 Professor Tyndall sets the belief in " unbroken causal 
 connection " and the " theologic conception " over against 
 each other as " rivals " ; and says that an hour's reasoning 
 will give the first the victory.! The victory is impossible, 
 because the rivalry is unreal. Why should not a Mind of 
 
 * Fortnightly Review t November, 1875, p. 596. 
 t Ibid.
 
 264 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 illimitable resources, such as " the theologic conception " 
 enthrones in the universe, conduct and maintain " un- 
 broken causal connection " ? Is not such connection con- 
 genial with the relations of thought and the harmony of 
 intellectual life ? Do not you, the student of nature, your- 
 self admire it ? Is it not the theme of your constant 
 praise ? Do you not speak with contemptuous aversion of 
 alleged deviations from the steadfast tracks of order ? and 
 would you not yourself maintain those tracks, if you were 
 at the head of things ? To this attitude you are impelled 
 by a just jealousy for the coherent beauty and worth of 
 science as a whole. If, then, these unswerving lines so 
 dignify the investigating intellect which regressively traces 
 them up, how can it be out of character with the Mind of 
 minds to think them progressively forth ? 
 
 In the discussion which here reaches its close, my object 
 has been simply defensive, to repel the pretension of 
 speculative materialism to supersede " the theological con- 
 ception," by tracing that pretension to an imperfect appre- 
 ciation of the ultimate logic of science. But the idea of 
 Divine Causality which is thus saved, though an essential 
 condition, is not the chief strength of religion ; giving 
 perhaps its measure in breadth, but not in depth. Were the 
 physical aspects of the world alone open to us, we should 
 doubtless gain, by reading a divineness between the lines, 
 for beauty a new meaning, for poetry a fuller music, for art 
 a greater elevation ; but hardly a better balance of the 
 affections or more fidelity of will. It is not till we cross, 
 the chasm which stops the scientific continuity, not till we 
 make a new beginning on the further side, that the " idea 
 of a higher life," emerging now in a far different field, can 
 claim its " ethical value." The self-conscious hemisphere of 
 inner experience, which natural philosophy leaves in the 
 dark, this it is which turns to its Divine Source : and. 
 finds, not in any vacant " mystery," but in the living sym- 
 pathy of a supreme Perfection, " the lifting power of an
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 265 
 
 ideal element in human life." Only by converse with our 
 own minds can we, to use the words of Smith of Cam- 
 bridge, "steal from them their secrets," and "climb up to 
 the contemplation of the Deity." * It is but too natural that 
 this inner side of knowledge, this melior pars nos/ri, should 
 be unheeded by those who look on it as the mere accessory 
 fringe of an automatic life, gracefully hanging from the 
 texture, but without a thread of connection beyond ; and 
 that with them the word "subjective" should be tanta- 
 mount to "groundless." They confess the "mystery" of 
 this interior experience only to fly from it and refuse its 
 light. Yet here it is that at last light and vision lapse into 
 one, and supply the qXtoetSeoraroj/ TWI> opydi/coi/t for the appre- 
 hension of the first truths of physical and the last of hyper- 
 physical knowledge. Till we accept the "faiths " which 
 our faculties postulate, we can never know even the sensible 
 world ; and when we accept them, we shall know much more. 
 Short of this firm trust in the bases whereon our nature is 
 appointed to stand, a trust which, if destroyed by a half- 
 philosophy, must be restored by a whole one, the grandest 
 " ideas " flung out to play with and turn about in the 
 kaleidoscope of possibilities, or work up as material of 
 poetry and rhetoric, can no more " lift " a human will than 
 the gossamer pluck up the oak on which it swings. Unless 
 your " ideal " reveals the real, it has no power, and its 
 " ethic value " is that of a dissolving image or a passing 
 sigh. You must " believe," ere you can "remove moun- 
 tains : " if you only fancy, they sit as a nightmare on your 
 breast. And if man does nothing well, till he ceases to 
 have his vision, and his vision rather has him and wields 
 him for action or repose ; and if then he astonishes you 
 with his triumphs over " nature " and her apparent real, is. 
 he the only being who thus rides out upon a thought, and 
 
 * Discourse iii. p. 66, ap. " Tulloch's Rational Theology," vol. ii. 
 p. 158- 
 
 t Plato de Rep. 508, A.
 
 266 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 makes the elements embody it ? Have not these elements 
 already learned their obedience, and grown familiar with 
 the intellectual mandate to which they yield ? A man 
 truly possessed, ethically moulded by the pressures of 
 reverence and love, you can never persuade that the beauty, 
 the truth, the goodness which kindles him is but his private 
 altar-lamp : it is an eternal, illimitable light, pervading and 
 consecrating the universe. Unless it be so, it fires him no 
 more : and, instead of utterly surrendering his will to it in 
 trust and sacrifice, he begins to admire it as a little mimic 
 star of his own, a phosphorescence of matter set up by 
 the chemistry of nature, not to see things by, but to glisten 
 on the darkness of himself. It is vain to expatiate on the 
 need of religion for our nature, and on the elevation of 
 character which it can produce, and in the same breath bid 
 it begone from the home of truth and seek shelter in the 
 tent of romance. If its power is noble, its essence is true. 
 And what that essence comprises has been worked fairly 
 out in the long experiment of Christianity on human nature; 
 which has shown that, in its purest and strongest phase, 
 religion is a variety and last sublimity of personal affection 
 and living communion with an Infinitely Wise and Good 
 and Holy. The expectation that anything will remain if 
 this be dropped, and that by flinging the same sacred vest- 
 ments of speech round the form of some empty abstraction 
 you can save the continuity of piety, is an illusion which 
 could never occur except to the outside observer. Look at 
 the sacred poetry and recorded devotion of Christendom : 
 how many lines of it would have any meaning left, if the 
 conditions of conscious relationship and immediate con- 
 verse between the human and the Divine Mind were with- 
 drawn ? And wherever the sense of these conditions has 
 been enfeebled, through superficial " rationalism " or ethical 
 self-confidence, " religious sterility " has followed. To its 
 inner essence, thus tested by positive and negative ex- 
 perience, Religion will remain constant, taking little notice
 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 267 
 
 of either scientific forbearance or critical management; and, 
 though left, perhaps, by temporary desertions to nourish its 
 life in comparative silence and retirement, certain to be 
 heard, when it emerges, still speaking in the same simple 
 tones, and breathing the old affections of personal love, and 
 trust, and aspiration.
 
 XI. 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 " THEOLOGY," after ranking for many centuries as the 
 noblest branch- of human learning, and even receiving 
 homage " as the Queen of Sciences," has at last fallen 
 upon an age which not only disputes its traditional pre- 
 eminence, but would send it, discrowned and outlawed, 
 into irreversible banishment. In order to judge aright 
 between the old estimate of it and the new, we must look 
 at its supposed contents, and consider what Theology 
 essentially is. The word itself, belonging as it does to 
 a well-known group of compounds, indicates its own 
 central conception. As Geology is the methodical know- 
 ledge of the earth's crust, Physiology, of living organisms, 
 Psychology, of the self-conscious mind, Ethnology, of the 
 races of mankind, so is Theology the doctrine or rational 
 apprehension of God. He is its object ; and those who 
 teach it assume that our faculties can take cognizance of 
 Him, no less than the Cosmologist assumes that he can 
 intelligently construe the variety and unity of the world. 
 The methods of seeking Him have indeed changed with the 
 genius of the thinker and the temper of his age. But 
 whether he has proceeded (with Descartes) from the Idea 
 to the infinite Reality, or (with Wolff) from the contingency 
 of the universe to its necessary Source, or (with Paley) from 
 the skill and beauty of nature to its intellectual Inventor, or 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 1879.
 
 270 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 (with Kant) from the moral law to its righteous Legislator, 
 or (with Chalmers) from the records of past revelations to 
 the character of the Revealer, in every instance the light 
 from afar which has sustained the inquirer's zeal has been 
 still the same, the assured Divine knowledge in which 
 the toil shall end. This is the inspiration of Theology ; 
 and if that living breath departs, it collapses and dies. 
 
 By watching the gradual change in the choice and com- 
 plexion of words, we gain a kind of Nilometer, which 
 shows the shifting levels and gathering floods of thought, 
 and warns us of the season's work. And it is not without 
 significance that, in place of what used to be called 
 the study of Theology, we now more often hear of the 
 " Science of Religions" i.e., the systematic knowledge of 
 what men have believed and felt on things sacred to them. 
 The difference is obvious : it drops us down from a Divine 
 to a Human object, from the yearning of Reason after its 
 transcendent Reality to the history and critique of ethnic 
 mythologies. As an element in the study of man, rich in 
 psychological instruction, there is every ground for wel- 
 coming the new expansion recently given to this order of 
 inquiries, and for rendering all honour to the leaders who 
 open the way through them. And the treatment of them 
 in the pure historical spirit, unperverted by theoretic pre- 
 conceptions or apologetic interests, places them for the 
 first time in their true position : for, as long as ancient 
 and foreign religions had no reporter but the Christian 
 theologian, it was vain to expect for them a sympathy 
 adequate to their interpretation. Still, the importance of 
 these studies is wholly anthropological. They tell the gro- 
 tesque and pathetic story of our struggling race, the 
 dreams of its darkness, the guesses of its wonder, the 
 surmises of its sin ; but supply no selective rule for saving 
 the true while pitying the false, and yield no Divine 
 knowledge but what we bring to them. If, in pursuing 
 them, we are already and independently furnished with 
 our theology, they will reflect perhaps some rays of it here
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 271 
 
 and there, and so adorn it with a fresh illustration : but, 
 in themselves, they will merely pass before us strange 
 forms of thought, on which we gaze as from an outside 
 station, and which we treat only as phenomena of the world. 
 They cannot therefore claim the place of the old 
 "Theology." 
 
 Whence this change in the aspect and method of reli- 
 gious theory ? Why has it parted with its Infinite Object, 
 and taken up instead with men's poor fancies about it ? 
 Can the broken lights of primeval superstitions render a 
 truer image of things Divine than immediate intellectual 
 vision ? Have we really come to that last resort of super- 
 annuated philosophy, an eclectic commonplace-book of 
 favourite beliefs ? No doubt the reason is, that our age 
 finds it easier to feel sure of what Religion is in man, than 
 of what it says of God ; and can treat it therefore with 
 tenderness and respect as a subjective phenomenon, but 
 hesitates to follow its daring launch-out on the ocean of 
 real being. Its power as an element of character, as an 
 inspiration in art, as a federator of nations and factor of 
 history, is freely admitted ; and no place that it can fairly 
 claim in the genesis of society and the regulation of life, is 
 denied to it. But that it knows its own meaning, and that 
 that meaning is true ; that what it sees is really there and 
 no phantasm of the mind ; that, when its mythical drapery 
 is stripped off, anything substantive remains within ; on 
 all this our generation, dazzled by its discoveries and de- 
 serted by its simplicity, feels bewildered and insecure. Yet 
 we are naturally averse to supposing that mere emptiness 
 and illusion can have a dominant influence in the educa- 
 tion of mankind: so we try to find some solid little nucleus 
 secreted at the centre of this brilliant nebula, and to make 
 out that, if we could not lodge there now, it has belonged, 
 or is going to belong, to some less erratic and more habit- 
 able world ; and we insist that, though in itself it cannot 
 pretend to much reality, it may symbolically stand for a 
 good deal, if we do but construe it aright. We readily per-
 
 272 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 ceive that the higher forms of Religion assume (inter alia} 
 some rule of human experience, e.g., that the wicked lay 
 snares for themselves ; or some attitude of the moral con- 
 sciousness, e.g., the felt transcendency of duty over per- 
 formance ; and, seizing upon these included postulates, 
 we say, " Here is the key : this is the whole story : we 
 have got it now in the plain demotic character ; and the 
 hieroglyphics may be rubbed out." What is the result ? 
 Much, I think, what we should expect, where the text is 
 disparaged to glorify the interpreter : its thought is twisted 
 into a mask, through which his eyes look out ; and under 
 the guise of ancient sage or prophet, we are confronted by 
 the commonplaces of to-day. Isaiah turns out to be a 
 Martin Tupper. 
 
 Of this rationalistic reduction of religion to formulas of 
 experience there are so many examples now-a-days as to 
 indicate a general tendency of our time. Amid their varie- 
 ties there is one cry in which all their voices concur. It 
 is raised in Holland, but echoed everywhere. " No Meta- 
 physics ! " which means, taken in the foreign sense of the 
 word, " No inquiry into any Real Being beyond the phe- 
 nomena of the world : that is a problem which, whether 
 admitting of solution or not, is indifferent to the spiritual 
 life of humanity : either way, Religion remains a personal 
 and social fact, the contents and significance of which we 
 may examine." In other words, " It is nothing to Religion 
 whether or not there be a God! We may give theology 
 its discharge and let it carry off all its beliefs, without 
 prejudice to human trust and piety ; these have ample 
 support from the laws of our nature and the order amid 
 which we are placed, without seeking any deeper base.'' 
 It is no wonder that when this one common clement of all 
 known religions (for even Buddhism does not answer to 
 the demand, " No Metaphysics \ ") is removed, very diver- 
 gent accounts should be given of what the residuary essence 
 really is. In this indeed they do agree ; that Moru/i/y, 
 as next of kin to Religion, must succeed to its inheritance
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 273 
 
 and take its name ; only, as they have hitherto existed 
 both together on domains by no means co -extensive and 
 with followers far from identical, it is necessary, if the 
 world is to feel no bereavement, to devise some transfor- 
 mation for morality, to give it a step of preferment from 
 the temporal to the spiritual peerage, and decorate it with 
 the ostensible symbols of sanctity. The delicate question 
 is, what these shall be. What shall we do to morality in 
 order to turn it into religion ? " Touch it with emotion," 
 says Mr. Matthew Arnold, and " fix its eye on the stream 
 of tendency as that continuous not-ourselves which makes for 
 Righteousness." Mr. Frederick Harrison has no objection 
 to the " emotion " ; but prefers, as a Supreme Being, the 
 idea of collective Humanity which claims the individual's 
 service and weaves it into its texture for ever. The newest 
 philosophy of Holland deems it enough that the morality 
 shall be ideal ; not the prosaic will of duty that toils under 
 the burden and heat of the day, but the free flight towards 
 visionary perfection to which midnight contemplation 
 invites. Religion, we are assured, is " Moral Idealism." ^ 
 In this definition the modern tendency finds perhaps its 
 most exact expression ; and in the following comments upon 
 the general doctrine, its terms will be prevailingly in my 
 thoughts. 
 
 Let it be admitted at the outset that, within the limits of 
 Ethics, if that were all the ground they claimed, each 
 of these teachers emphasizes an important truth. That 
 on this scene of our life the course of things " makes for 
 righteousness," that in " the stream of tendency " the 
 defiling contents gradually subside and leave the waters 
 purer as they flow, that history, through all its tragedies, 
 contains the promise of Right, and that a firm trust in 
 this ascending future is an indispensable support for human 
 culture, is a lesson so momentous, that his appreciation 
 
 * See the discussion on " Godsdienst zonder metaphysica " and on 
 the " Zedelijk Ideaal," in the Thcologisch Tijdschrift, 1874-5-6, by 
 Hooykaas, Van Bell, Hugenholtz, Van Hamel, Kuenen, and others. 
 
 VOL. IV. T
 
 274 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 of it may well place Mr. Arnold high among moralists, if 
 only it is not used as his passport of entrance among the 
 prophets. So, again, nothing can be more seasonable 
 than the counterpoise by which Mr. Harrison checks the 
 sophistical egoism of the preceding English philosophers. 
 In proof of their dictum that Pleasure is the ultimate good 
 and the end of all action, they have usually put the case 
 of a solitary person set up in an empty universe, and 
 insisted that if, on arising, he had one pleasant sensation 
 and then passed away, it would have been worth his while 
 to exist ; but if the sensation were painful, he had better 
 not have been ; so that there is nothing eligible but 
 pleasure. The absurdity of the argument lies in its quiet 
 assumption (under the conception of loneliness) of Indi- 
 vidualism, and its reduction of life to mere sentiency. 
 This creature floating in vacancy is, by hypothesis, out of 
 relation to anything but himself: all objects, all com- 
 panions, are kept out of his way : there is nothing for him 
 to go to or to act upon : he is a self-concentrated focus, 
 surrendered to passivity, which has only a sensitive value. 
 On these terms he is not a man at all ; nor even so much 
 as a sponge in the sea, which at least does something with 
 the water around it. The human being is first constituted 
 by precisely the system of relations which are all here 
 omitted : we are what we are by reciprocation : the 
 individual is not the factor, but the product, of society ; 
 and, to understand our nature, we must reckon with 
 humanity first as a collective and dominant organism, 
 whence he starts forth and differentiates himself. This 
 independence and ascendency of the altruistic relations, 
 with the reverent self-subordination which they enjoin to 
 the abiding and growing life of society, are vindicated with 
 a just enthusiasm by our eloquent Positivist ; with an 
 effect, however, which might have been greater, had not 
 his afflatus carried him over from philosophy to allegory, 
 and mystified his doctrine by expressing it in terms of 
 " the Soul and the Future Life." A still deeper truth it is
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 275 
 
 which has led the extreme school in Holland to resolve 
 religion into " Moral Idealism." They have certainly hit 
 upon the very experience which occupies the border-ground 
 between ethics and faith, and carries the conscience over 
 from rules of life to inward worship. On the one hand, 
 do I not know that, in every alternative offered to my 
 choice, I can both see the higher course and take it, and 
 am solemnly bound to take no other? On the other hand, 
 do I not also know, from the sad lessons of the past, that 
 I shall not persistently do so and that the will always 
 pure and unselfish, just and true, though for ever possible, 
 will be for ever unrealized ? This conflict between charac- 
 ter and conception is doubtless the cradle of religion : the 
 interval between what we are and what we are guilty for 
 not being, is that which turns our look upwards, to see if 
 there be hope beyond these shadows of reproach, and 
 which makes the heart low and tender to yield to any 
 heavenly promise that may descend. The spirit that has 
 set into this attitude, and, in the daily round of duty, is 
 secretly drawn on by an infinite aspiration, already waits at 
 the gate of heaven. 
 
 But it is one thing to be brought to the verge of 
 Religion by sympathy with this or that part of its con- 
 tents ; it is another, to penetrate to its interior essence. 
 And inasmuch as it is the aim of all these interpreters to 
 retain the pieties of human character, while excusing them- 
 selves and us from any conscious relations with the Living 
 God, I submit that they attempt what is impossible, and 
 that the very life of Religion centres precisely in that which 
 they discard. They feel the elevation and beauty of the 
 best type of spiritual growth, but would fain dispense with 
 its secret aliment and conditions. They look with wonder 
 at the stately stem, as it springs aloft : they love the shade 
 of the foliage : they admire the blossom ; but they cut 
 the root. It is a repetition at a higher level, of the mis- 
 take which the Individualists commit. These try to make 
 a whole of the single person, and from his nature, measured 
 
 T 2
 
 276 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 in itself, to deduce a theory of his existence, though that 
 existence is entirely made up of a tissue of relations with 
 his kind and his theatre of being. Humanism corrects 
 this error ; yet again renews it, when it shuts up mankind 
 within their reciprocal relations, and cuts them off from 
 diviner affinities beyond. Neither ourselves, nor our race, 
 surveyed as an island, can ever be interpreted aright : to 
 understand what we are, and even what we contain, we 
 must venture the embracing seas and integrate our lives 
 with the unmeasured sphere of being. 
 
 Do I then restrict the conception of Religion to the sen- 
 timents awakened by the presence of Infijiite Perfection, 
 and say that, short of this point, its characteristic spirit 
 fails ? On the contrary, I trace its secret power in all 
 human relations where affection and duty are concerned. 
 Reverence for character above us, at whatever height it 
 may be, is the posture of a religious nature ; and the 
 aspiration it sustains, the trust it fosters, the self-sacrifice it 
 renders possible and light, fling into our life its fairest 
 colours and tincture it all with sacredness. Let this de- 
 voutness of heart be free as you will : let it go everywhere 
 and touch everything : the finite also is open to it as well 
 as the infinite ; and the minor pieties are not to retire or 
 renounce their name before the greater. But then, for 
 both there is this indispensable condition ; viz., that the 
 inward homage, whatever its direction, shall alight upon a 
 real object, and not lose itself in the dilution of an endless 
 search. When I am awed and subdued before the grace 
 and grandeur of a moral superior, it is not because he 
 suggests, but because he realizes, a higher conception of 
 excellence : it is as a living agent, as a personal embodi- 
 ment, of righteousness, that he wields authority over my 
 conscience. Take away this element, tear the picture out 
 of the volume of true history and cast it to the transient 
 winds of imagination, and all is immediately changed. 
 The image remaining the same, I may still admire ; but no 
 longer in grave silence, rather with outspoken praise : of
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 277 
 
 my compunction I am relieved : the strength of resolution 
 is relaxed : the " lifting power " of a devout enthusiasm is 
 gone ; and if I have gained any new variety of thought, it 
 is simply added to my culture, but does not transform 
 my life. A conception which reports itself as empty of 
 reality, even if it startles us into a momentary awe, can no 
 more receive our reverent embrace than the shade of a 
 departed ancestor or guide : 
 
 Frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, 
 Par levibus ventis, volucrique simillima somno. 
 
 There is nothing to sustain the worshipful influence of its 
 presence : we cannot venerate our own idea. Here it is 
 that " Moral Idealism " falls short of the conditions of 
 Religion ; not because it is ethical, while religion is some- 
 thing else ; not because it works among finite relations, 
 while religion is concerned only with the infinite ; but 
 because its ideal perfection is known to be only in our 
 heads, while the ideal of religion must be also real. Strauss 
 himself makes the memorable confession, that " none but a 
 book-student could ever imagine that a creation of the 
 brain, woven of poetry and philosophy, can take the place 
 of real Religion."* 
 
 To mark then the step of thought that crosses the line 
 into the hemisphere of Religion : it is made when we 
 affirm that over us and in relation to us the All-perfect 
 Mind exists. Devout faith is a belief of real Being on the 
 strength of what ought to be. If you look at it from the 
 outside, you may call it the apotheosis of moral aspiration : 
 if you name it from the interior, you will say it is the 
 revelation of God in the conscience. The former expres- 
 sion describes the ascent of my thought to its object ; the 
 latter, the descent of its object into my thought. As my 
 purpose is at present only to clear the meaning and scope 
 of words which are made mischievous by indeterminate 
 
 * Kaiser Julien ; tier Romantikcr auf dem Throne der Casaren, 
 S. 12.
 
 278 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 use, I will not pause to vindicate the drawing of an onto- 
 logical conclusion from a moral premiss. It is not the 
 only paradox of reason into which we are irresistibly 
 borne away by that wonderful conception of what ought 
 to be. It introduces many convictions against which the 
 logic of physical science is for ever chafing ; but which 
 take no notice of the rebuff, and continue to be bases of 
 social law and the invisible bonds of human life. To these 
 criticisms, if time permits, I will devote a few words 
 before I close. Just now I rest on the position that 
 " Moral Idealism " is not Religion, unless the ideal is held 
 to be Real as well as Divine. 
 
 To test this position, suppose the element of Reality to 
 be now admitted, and now removed ; and compare the 
 natural working of the moral ideal under the two condi- 
 tions, to see whether in both instances alike it is marked 
 by the effects which experience shows to be characteristic 
 of religion. 
 
 Ever since the Epistle to the Romans was written, it has 
 become a Christian commonplace that, in all moral ex- 
 perience, I am divided against myself; inwardly identified 
 with a superior call that beckons me ; outwardly liable to 
 take my lot with the inferior inclination that clings to me. 
 In such conflict, whatever be its issue, the raz/self is always 
 that which votes for the good ; conformably with Plato's 
 rule, that no man, of his own will (though, possibly, of 
 blind impulse), ever decides for the worse. If I choose 
 aright, the previous strife is laid to rest, and my nature is 
 at one with itself and its own ends. If I choose amiss, the 
 storm within is fiercer than before ; I rage against my own 
 temptation ; and if the fact be known, I am ashamed to 
 walk abroad and carry about so false an image of myself. 
 And thus it is with all men, so far as the moral life has 
 developed its history in them. Set before them a just and 
 righteous claim that demands them, and. if only you get 
 the conception clear into their hearts, they are caught up 
 into one spirit at the appeal, and muster as an army fresh
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 279 
 
 from sleep. They feel, perhaps for the first time, that they 
 are themselves, that they never knew themselves before. 
 They have emerged from a disguising cloud, and beneath 
 the sunshine their very essence has found them out. With 
 all of us, then, in some deep sense, the ideal self is the 
 truly Real ; and we disown as foreign whatever contra- 
 dicts it. 
 
 Yet, in another sense, it is just this which is unreal : for 
 it is never realized : it is something still to be, which not 
 yet is. If you ask for the actual self, now and here, to- 
 day and to-morrow, of each individual, it will be precisely 
 that which he repudiates as the false one ; wherein the 
 struggle is not 'over, the temptation not banished, the unity 
 not attained. Unless therefore fact itself is illusion, this 
 other and relatively evil self is that which really is, both in 
 each of us and in society. Yet, strange to say, it encoun- 
 ters a fate which befalls no other fact. Its right to be 
 a phenomenon is disputed. Real as it is, it is condemned 
 for being there, and has to skulk before an eternal pro- 
 test, which treats it as marring reality, and bids it take it- 
 self away. 
 
 What meaning then is to be put upon these two aspects 
 of Reality, leading us at once to affirm and to deny it of the 
 same object? To the Theist, the paradox easily resolves 
 itself. That the moral consciousness on the one hand, and 
 observation of fact on the other, should give two measures 
 of reality, does not surprise him. He sees in them only 
 reflections in little of two corresponding functions of the 
 universe at large, \\v.., indwelling thought, ideal purpose, 
 free creativeness, determining it towards all beauty and 
 good ; and finite material conditions for the externalization 
 and progressive expression of its spiritual origin and end : 
 i.e.. Mind, eternally perfect ; and Nature, perfectible by 
 transition, the one for ever being, the other only becoming 
 (therefore partly not being) what it ought to be. Where the 
 great whole consists of this permanent essence of reality 
 and its partial negation, it is intelligible that both should
 
 280 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 report themselves in our derivative nature, and in their 
 very lineaments claim their respective parentage, and by 
 their native sympathies tend towards their home. In such 
 a world there is no uncertain meaning in that consciousness 
 of a higher that possesses me, that sense of authority 
 which every opening of duty brings, that almost speaking 
 appeal to my will that tells me, "This alone is right, and 
 thou canst do it," that terrible conviction incurred by all 
 wrong-doing, that I have lost myself and become alienated 
 from an infinitely better than myself. These experiences 
 necessarily belong to the relation between the opening con- 
 science of an incipiently free humanity and the righteous- 
 ness of an eternally free and holy God. We simply accept 
 them, therefore, as telling us the truth : we believe our com- 
 punction, and have nothing to explain away in it : we do 
 not construe it into a vain and illusory regret for what had 
 to be, or think to rid ourselves of its demands by some 
 apology or reparation to our fellows ; but own to the full 
 its grievous charge of a dereliction of a Divine trust, and 
 shrink abashed before the eye of the Supreme Perfection. 
 
 At the same time, the consciousness that what I have 
 realized in act is not the true Real, assures me that it has 
 no roots and cannot stand ; and that, just because I know 
 this, I am not without the idea and love of that to which I 
 have been faithless : so that the sacred affinity remains ; 
 the relation is not abolished : and hope springs up afresh. 
 The local clouds of violated conscience cannot blot out the 
 steadfast expression of eternal Will, all-embracing as the 
 heavens : its everlasting eyes are over all, and know how to 
 find the visual points in every answering mind. This 
 objective persistence of a living Holiness is just the one 
 steadying and sustaining power which condenses flying 
 humours into force of conscience, and animates the waking 
 toils of life with the glow of its divinest dreams. The 
 women whom you could not frighten, and the men whom 
 you could not move to say the false or to do the wrong,-- 
 have they not been pre-eminently (I do not say exclusivelv)
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 281 
 
 those who stood face to face with the Living Judge of 
 Right, and in their own incorruptible perception heard His 
 voice, "Stand fast, for I am with you "? a voice which at 
 once guarantees the possibility and completes the sanctity 
 of the felt duty. Is it possible to deny that such conviction, 
 with the habits of inward piety which it creates, naturally 
 imparts stability to the will and elevation to the affections ? 
 But this conviction, we are told, is " Metaphysical " : it 
 affirms an existence beyond phenomena ; and from our 
 religion we are to take all Metaphysics away. Be it so : 
 then our " Moral Idealism " loses its objective hold, and 
 becomes a mere subjective exercise of imagination : and 
 the question is whether this will serve as well. The change 
 (may we not say?) amounts to a removal of the ideal from 
 the moral to the aesthetic field ; whereby, though it may 
 fix my admiration, it parts with all immediate relation to 
 my will : for it contains in it no assurance of either its 
 authority or its possibility, any more than is contained 
 in the artist's dream of a statue nobler than the Apollo, or 
 a picture more touching than the San Sisto. The bare con- 
 ception of a better in character, rising in the imagination 
 and known to be an imagination, no more touches the 
 springs of action with the sense of what I ought to do and 
 be, than the conception of brighter wits or finer person or 
 happier lot. Any vain longing which it may excite is but 
 like the wish that last night's dream were not only a dream, 
 and is as likely to depress me with a nerveless feeling of 
 inferiority as to lift me into strenuous faith. It is the 
 peculiarity of the visions of conscience, that which marks 
 them off from all other play of ideality, that they cannot 
 be purely egoistic, and in becoming such would drop their 
 very essence ; that to a lonely, unrelated mind they would 
 be intrinsically impossible : that they profess to come to us 
 upon a mission, to destroy our absolutism and plant us 
 beneath a higher which has a right to the homage of our 
 will. If this profession be not true, the moral insight itself 
 becomes illusory : and to detect the fraud thus put upon us
 
 282 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 is simply to break the back of all moral power, and release 
 the will from every pressure graver than the light weights 
 of fancy. What seemed to be looking at us with such 
 Divine appealing eyes is but a flattered portrait of our- 
 selves : the tones that so deeply pierced us are but our own 
 falsetto voice : there is neither substance in the sight, nor 
 truth in the sound : let us pass on, as though they were 
 not. Life, upon such terms, would be like one of those 
 dual games, of chess or cards, in which a solitary player 
 cheats his loneliness by personating the pair, and suffers a 
 factitious defeat by his own intentional mistake, and wins a 
 hollow triumph by outwitting himself. It no less takes 
 two to deliver the game of Duty from trivial pretence and 
 give it an earnest interest. How can I look up to myself 
 as the higher that reproaches me ? issue commands to my- 
 self which I dare not disobey ? ask forgiveness from 
 myself for sins which myself has committed ? surrender to 
 myself with a martyr's sacrifice ? and go through all the 
 drama of moral conflict and enthusiasm between myself in 
 a mask and myself in propria persona ? How far are these 
 " emotional " semblances, these battles in the clouds, to 
 carry their mimicry of .reality ? Are we to worship the 
 self-ideality ; to pray to an empty image in the air ; to trust 
 in sorrow, a creation of thought which is but a phenomenon 
 of sorrow ? No, if religious communion is reduced to a 
 monologue, its essence is extinct audits soul is gone. It is 
 a living relation, or it is nothing; a response to the 
 Supreme Reality. And vainly will you search for your 
 spiritual dynamics without the Rock Eternal for your 
 
 TTOV CTTU. 
 
 But perhaps it will be said that the moral ideal, when 
 traced through its history, is not purely subjective, although 
 at present a phenomenon of the individual consciousness ; 
 since it comes to us from minds other than our own ; both 
 concentrating and reflecting the social sentiment by whose 
 light we see and in whose air we breathe; and also storing 
 up an indefinite inheritance of ancestral judgments of
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 283 
 
 character, not only transmitted by descent, but looking 
 down on us from the portrait-galleries of history and per- 
 meating the whole substance of literature. The standards 
 of excellence to which admiration and reverence turn have 
 actually formed themselves, it is urged, outside of us ; 
 they are not personal inventions which we might weave 
 in vacuo ; but are presented to us as the objective fruit of 
 human experience, the last distillation of good when all 
 foreign ingredients are left behind ; and it is not therefore 
 without reason that we refuse to interpret them as ego- 
 isms, and feel them as claims upon us rather than as 
 fancies within us. They do speak to us with an external 
 authority ; but' this authority it is enough to treat as 
 social, without attributing to it anything transcendental and 
 divine. Why may we not, it is asked, set our foot on 
 this reality, and so regain the missing power? This objec- 
 tion proceeds from those who regard the moral sentiment 
 as communicated rather than indigenous, as partly 
 borrowed in our own time from other minds, and partly a 
 legacy in our organism from a long past. They are ready 
 to assent to Mr. Sidgwick's statement that " on the con- 
 ception of the objectivity of duty the authority of the 
 moral sentiment depends ; ' ;* but think that, since they 
 have detected its rudiments and conditions of growth in 
 external experience, its conception of the objectivity of 
 duty is provided for and justified. The fallacy is obvious. 
 It is one thing for a sentiment to owe its existence to out- 
 ward conditions ; it is another to carry in its meaning an 
 objective reference : to grow from without inwards is not 
 to look from within outwards ; and the objectivity we here 
 investigate is not in the genesis of the conception, but in 
 its contents. Its inherent belief of an authority beyond us 
 is not explained by discovering for the sentiment a foreign 
 
 * " Methods of Ethics": Supplement to 1st Kdition, p. 45. See 
 also 1st 1-xl. p. 62. "That in us \vhich claims authority is never a 
 mere sentiment, but always a faculty cognizant of an objective rule or 
 imperative which exists independently of its effect on our feelings/'
 
 284 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 origin, physiological and psychological, of which we are 
 wholly unconscious. The discovery is yours not ours ; 
 and its very merit for your genius depends on its having 
 been a secret to our thought. The objective sources of 
 our moral feeling are absolutely hidden from it ; its objec- 
 tive authority is absolutely clear to it ; to identify the two 
 is to affirm that the same thing may be simultaneously in 
 consciousness and out of it. 
 
 Suppose, however, the fallacy removed from this analysis 
 by our becoming conscious of the actual origin of our 
 moral ideal, viz., progenitors in the past, society in the 
 present ; so that, thus far, there is no hindrance to our 
 finding in them the " objective authority,'' the " impera- 
 tive " rule independent of our own feelings, which the 
 sense of duty carries with it. Still, there is another fatal 
 disqualification in them for recognition as the real object 
 of our reverence and the ideal standard of our aspirations. 
 They are simply the general aggregate of social sentiment 
 in our own and prior generations, the average of expected 
 character through the ages of which we are the sons : for 
 no means are suggested for filtering the descending stream 
 and dropping its impurities as it flows, its animal taint, 
 its false admirations, its bitter selfishness, and securing 
 for us only the sweet waters of life. Can we say then that 
 what is thus presented to us is higher than we, higher, 
 moreover, than our noblest and best men, in whom also 
 and with intenser eye the conscience retains its upward 
 look ? No ; historical and actual Society constitutes, by 
 its opinions, a force larger indeed, stronger, more endur- 
 ing than we ; but not even approaching our own ideal, 
 much less passing away beyond it towards infinitude. 
 Nay more: social opinions are either the expression of 
 conscience already there, and then they are the effect of 
 the very ideal they are supposed to form ; or, they tell 
 simply what men like and dislike and mean to insist upon 
 with each other : and then they are not moral at all ; the 
 influence which proceeds from them is coercive only, not
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 285 
 
 sacred, compressing reluctant wills, but releasing none 
 into a free enthusiasm. The objectivity, therefore, which 
 is supplied to us by this doctrine is of the wrong kind for 
 drawing forth the homage of reverent affection, and can 
 offer only the blankest disappointment to any true moral 
 idealism. 
 
 Besides, if the object in which the authority rests is a 
 continuous and universal social will, it is for us a mere 
 abstraction, in resorting to which we are aware that it is 
 a figment or economy of thought, which cannot really 
 exercise rights over us or claim any rational veneration. 
 However subject we may be to impose upon ourselves by 
 giving substance to such mental creations, they can never 
 wield over us the power of concrete being, unless within 
 their epitome images gleam forth of individual persons and 
 visible scenes that have become endeared. Thus there is 
 a magic in such words as home and country, through the 
 generality of which faces look at us, and fields and villages 
 are seen : and these may become the occasion of some 
 minor idolatries of the heart, shaping themselves, however, 
 into the innocent forms of conscious personification and 
 fervent song. But abstractions which have no such con- 
 tents, e.g., Law, Reason, Wealth, Opinion, whatever 
 pranks they may play with our Logic, cannot persuade 
 us to bow down and worship them. If the only object you 
 have to offer for human homage be an impersonal concep- 
 tion of this kind, it is easy to see what will become of our 
 religion under the change. We have only to substitute 
 for the familiar terms of personal piety, which speak of 
 "God" and the human "Soul," any of their supposed 
 modern equivalents when the " Metaphysics " are dis- 
 charged, and then estimate the gain or loss. Will then 
 the " Benedicite " swell with the same tones of joy, when it 
 has to sing, " Bless the Eternal Law, all ye its works ; 
 bless the Lternal Law, O my synthesis of organs " ? Will 
 the contrition which now cries, " Blot out my transgres- 
 sions," " Cast me not away," " A broken heart Thou dost
 
 286 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 not despise," pour out its sorrows to a deaf " ideal," and 
 shed its passionate tears on an abstraction that cannot 
 wipe them away ? Will any moonlit form be seen kneeling 
 in our Gethsemanes, and rising from prostrate anguish 
 to sublime repose through the prayer, " O thou Eternal 
 Not-ourselves that makest for righteousness, if it be pos- 
 sible, let this cup pass from me ; nevertheless, not as I 
 will, but as Thou wilt " ? Will any Crucified one lose the 
 bitterness of Death in crying, " O Stream of Tendency, 
 into thy hands I commit my spirit " ? And to the Martyr, 
 stoned to death, will any Heaven open and any Vision 
 come, when he exclaims, ' Great Ensemble of Human- 
 ity, receive me " ? For my part, I cherish the hope that 
 our unsatisfied " Modern Thinker," after vain trial of 
 such devotions, may return to his rest, and say with a 
 natural reversion of heart, " O Thou once Unknown, I 
 thank Thee that though Thou hast hid these things from 
 the wise and prudent, Thou hast revealed them unto 
 Babes." 
 
 Our comparison, then, of the effects on life of the sub- 
 jective and objective ideal sums itself up in this: that with- 
 out personal relations between the Human and the Divine, 
 Religion is divested of all its higher attributes and in- 
 tenser forces : it loses its link with morals : it ceases to 
 transfigure the affections : it relinquishes its grasp upon 
 the will. It was by emphasizing these relations that 
 Judaism became indomitable ; and by universalizing them 
 that Christianity laid hold of the foremost nations and 
 rose into the foremost faith of mankind ; creating and 
 diffusing a heart-worship, a self-reverence and self-surrender, 
 a depth of spiritual experience, a literature of character 
 and devotion, and a breadth of social compassion, which 
 are the redeeming features of modern civilization. To 
 paralyse these relations is to relapse into Paganism. 
 a Paganism, too, with emptying temples and retreating 
 gods, and to set up again the mutual play of Man and 
 Nature, with the sanctity lost from both. The needs of
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 287 
 
 the future cannot be provided for by any such helpless 
 reaction, which forfeits what we have gained by reversion 
 to what has been discarded ; but only by ascending to a 
 more commanding point, whence contrasts melt in har- 
 mony, and the outlooks to the right and to the left are 
 embraced in one horizon and form but undulations of one 
 world. 
 
 An undertone of pathetic regret may sometimes be heard 
 in even the most confident critics of Christian Theism ; as 
 if, in substituting their abstractions, they were conscious 
 in their hearts of administering a dangerous anaesthetic to 
 Religion, which might leave it speechless and paralytic, if 
 it even survived at all. They plead, however, that the risk 
 must be run ; and that, to save any remnant of moral life, 
 the organism of faith must suffer excision of some members 
 which have hitherto been the seat of an intense vitality. 
 Men have always taken for granted that the Supreme 
 Power " thinks and loves " ; but the critics have now laid 
 it down that these predicates " cannot be verified" a 
 dictum which, giving no account of itself, relies for its 
 effect on mere supercilious iteration. If, in Mr. Arnold's 
 vocabulary, to " verify " means to " test by experiment" 
 the complaint is true, but irrelevant : the inner attributes 
 of the Supreme Cause cannot be submitted to Baconian 
 experiments, with registered results tabulated under " Sic " 
 and "Non." Yet their exemption from this criterion does 
 not discredit their existence : for if a Divine Mind were 
 really there, and in its essence were purely and only 
 Thought and Love, it would equally transcend the interro- 
 gations of our experience. It is not by such methods that 
 spiritual truths can be extorted. But if " to justify by 
 sufficient reason" is here equivalent to "verification,"' the 
 complaint, though relevant, is unfounded : for we arc 
 guided by no other reason in attributing thought and love 
 to our fellow-men than that which warrants our ascription 
 of them to God. In neither case have we any immediate 
 apprehension of these invisible affections of mind : in that
 
 288 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 degree of closeness they are known only as exercised by 
 ourselves : in others we read them only by having thus 
 learned their signs ; and precisely the signs which assure 
 us that we are not in a mad-house, but among companions 
 directed by intelligence and moved by sympathy, repeat 
 themselves in the legible order, beauty, and tendencies of 
 the world. So similar are the marks in the two instances, 
 that if intellect and feeling are allowed their causality in 
 the one, legitimate induction (as Mr. Mill himself insists) 
 requires their admission in the other : they must operate 
 in both, or else in neither. How cogent this resemblance is, 
 curiously appears from the fact that, with our modern men 
 of science, it has become usual to accept this dilemma ; 
 and, as they will not admit Mind to be operative 
 in Nature, they actually deny its efficiency in us. Both 
 are automata alike ; and all would go on the same, me- 
 chanically unrolling the scenery of life and history, though 
 the superfluous appendage of consciousness were cut off. 
 It is beyond the scope of my subject to criticize this pre- 
 tended completion, but real subversion, of the philosophy 
 of Descartes. Far be it from me to deny that in this, its 
 last exploit, Reason has fairly done for itself and proved 
 its own inefficacy. The interest of the speculation for the 
 present consists in this, that the parallelism between the 
 Universe and Man is plainly indestructible ; that the ex- 
 clusion of intellectual power from Nature cancels it also in 
 us ; and that its self-assertion in us rationally secures its 
 presence and its sway in Nature. If Nature is automatic 
 only, so are we : if we are actuated by thought and love, 
 so is Nature. The parallelism used to be denied : it is 
 now admitted ; and the ultimate " verification " is thrown 
 back upon our fundamental self-knowledge of action from 
 purpose and affection. There we may be content to 
 leave it. 
 
 I conclude, therefore, as I began, with deprecating the 
 separation between what are called the " Metaphysics : ' 
 and the ethics of our supreme beliefs. These beliefs,
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 289 
 
 whose fertilizing influence is first felt far lower down, are 
 found, when followed upwards to their springs, to have 
 two co-ordinate sources, one in the intellectual, the other 
 in the moral region of our nature ; the former bringing us 
 to a transcendent Cause ; the latter, to a transcendent 
 Righteousness ; together finding their unity in an Eternal 
 Will. The exigencies of thought in dealing with its ulti- 
 mate problems may require us, and the artifices of analysis 
 may enable us, to contemplate them as distinct, and assign 
 to them their respective lines of descent upon and through 
 the mind and character. But this detachment is our work, 
 not theirs ; not a fact of life, but an illusion of the 
 schools. In the common sense and feeling of men, and in 
 the faith of Christ, they perfectly blend, and in blending 
 support and complete each other; and no such strange 
 paradox meets us, as the conception of a Universal Cause 
 that has no character, or a Perfect Righteousness that has 
 no Causality. The final object of the Reason and the final 
 home of the Conscience are the same : these faculties are 
 but the two wings that bear us thither ; and if you disable 
 either, we vainly struggle and never rise. Religion that is 
 mere metaphysics offers us but a pale and icy reality : 
 " Religion ivithout metaphysics " offers us but a painted 
 dream. 
 
 The truth of which the new doctrine is a caricature is 
 perhaps this : that the progressive element of Religion is 
 to be found in an ever-expanding moral ideal as human 
 experience enlarges and the human conscience increases 
 its refinement and its range. New social perplexities of 
 duty, new sufferings for compassion, new virtues for vener- 
 ation, new temptations for conquest, enter the field as the 
 ages open, and leave the old formulas of righteous life in- 
 adequate : and in nothing will a true piety show itself 
 more than in freely embracing its more comprehensive 
 trust, and suffering no filaments of habit to detain it from 
 a higher perfectness. On the ontological side of Religion, 
 in the conception of Primal Being and Power, there is 
 
 VOL. IV. U
 
 290 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 
 
 no such process of advance : it is a fixed thought, and, 
 as a necessary idea of Reason, does not add to its con- 
 tents, but remains " the same yesterday, to-day, and for 
 ever." Precisely, however, on this account is it the indis- 
 pensable substratum for the moving images and varying 
 colours of goodness and beauty as they unfold. Without 
 a permanent there can be no change ; and the Ideal which 
 for ever grows must in its essence be secured upon the 
 Real. It is idle to talk of evolution and laws of phenome- 
 nal advance, as if they superseded all beyond themselves. 
 " Phenomena " of nothing, " Evolution ;) of emptiness, 
 what are such phrases but a Greek and Latin gibberish ? 
 To make a show of itself, there must be something be- 
 hind : to develop itself, there must be a plenitude within ; 
 the very words bespeak the whole reality they are intended 
 to deny. 
 
 And unless we are to throw away all idea of homoge- 
 neity and proportion between cause and effect, and between 
 instinctive tendency and its fulfilment, the Rational and 
 the Moral in us can neither have their beginning nor reach 
 their end, in the absence of Divine Reason and Divine 
 Right. If our human experience teaches us anything cer- 
 tain, it is this : that it is Thought which kindles thought, 
 and Love which elicits love, and Character which moulds 
 and refines character : and that, not tipwards, the inferior 
 prevailing to better the superior ; but downwards, the greater 
 lifting the less. To reverse this order, to educe Mind from 
 what is not yet mind, and Conscience from blind and 
 neutral force, is to put more into the effect than the cause 
 provides, and ipso facto to convict the explanation of in- 
 competency. And similarly when we face round to see 
 whither our nature looks instead of whence it comes, we 
 find not an appetency, affection, or energy of our being, 
 that fails to meet its fitting object : through the range of the 
 animal, the domestic, the social life, the several relations, 
 of which one term is within us, complete themselves by 
 hitting upon the other in the external scene. The scientific
 
 IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR GOD. 291 
 
 intellect slakes its thirst on the order and beauty of the 
 world ; and even when it ventures, in sympathy with the 
 style of nature, on guesses and forecasts too daring for im- 
 mediate belief, its vaticinations have often struck the truth. 
 Is then this analogy to be first broken when we reach the 
 highest levels of our humanity ? Are we there flung out of 
 all relations, though still furnished with their inward drift 
 and prayer ? still sent to seek, with prejudgment that we 
 shall not find ? If we are to assume any concinnity in our 
 nature, or any harmony of it with its theatre of being, such 
 disappointment of its ends carries in it an improbability 
 revolting to the Reason. And can then the " Moral Ideal- 
 ism " step in and deliver us ? Yes ; if it speaks to us, not 
 in its own name, but in that of its Inspirer ; if it stands 
 before the Living God, taking thence the inner power and 
 sending thither its secret prayer, and can utter its prophe- 
 cies as foregleams of His righteous Will. At such a voice, 
 Conscience becomes transfigured from human to Divine, 
 and life on earth is turned into a ''kingdom of heaven. 1 ' 
 But if, because its God is dead, it can only display its own 
 imaginings, and propose them in terms of personal sugges- 
 tion, without an organic faith to integrate them with the 
 possible and the intended, it will wield no persuasive in- 
 fluence, but speak as a prophet ere yet the live coal has 
 touched his lips. Its visions will pale and fade ; its pro- 
 mises dissolve in unreality : and the sickened conscience 
 that has trusted to it, sink into helpless debility. Human 
 life is too strong for the grasp of spiritual aesthetics : let it 
 remain within the hold of the All-ruling hand.
 
 XII. 
 
 THE RELATION BETWEEN ETHICS AND 
 RELIGION.* 
 
 CHRISTENDOM, through all its vicissitudes, has preserved 
 a distinctive moral physiognomy, giving to its history and 
 literature an interest very different from that which attaches 
 to Pagan times. Its eye has been fixed on an image of 
 perfection variously unlike the heroes and sages of Greece 
 and Rome. But, notwithstanding this practical unity of 
 moral reverence through eighteen centuries, the attitude of 
 the Christian Church towards the theoretic study of Ethics 
 is marked by striking contradictions. It was impossible 
 for the priesthood to work the system of Confession, and 
 save it from a chaos of discrepancies, without classifying 
 and assimilating decisions distant in time and place, and 
 gradually eliciting, from this mass of case-law, a body of 
 principles and rules applicable to the whole contents of 
 human temptation and perplexity. Through her library 
 of Casuistry, the Catholic Church has become the parent of 
 our modern Moral Philosophy, and has conveyed into it 
 her own assumption that the right guidance of life is in- 
 separable from the functions of religion. On the other 
 hand, Luther, denying all religious value to Morals, flung 
 them, as a mere matter of police, into the hands of the 
 civil magistrate. And the first volume of the " Congrega- 
 tional Lectures " instituted about half a century ago was 
 
 * Opening of Session, Manchester New College, London. October, 
 iSSi.
 
 294 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 written to prove that Christianity repudiates Ethics as 
 ab initio impossible to the vitiated reason and conscience 
 of a fallen nature. The study thus ignominiously cast out 
 to the " infidel," he in his turn is very ready to pick up, all 
 the more from its being unencumbered with theology. He 
 has quite a right to take these divines at their word and 
 refute them by effecting, if he can, on independent ground, 
 the construction which is declared impossible. We cannot 
 be surprised that the supercilious airs of the religious 
 towards Morals should in due season be assumed by the 
 moralist towards Religion ; and that, at least in the high 
 moods of both, a divorce should be agreed upon as the 
 only end of strife. And so we see offended Philosophy 
 building its palace and setting up its separate establishment 
 as far as possible from the Church, without even a window 
 looking upon the Abbey towers. A quiet observer who loves 
 them both may hold his peace and be content with his own 
 sorrow at their averted looks ; but may well doubt whether 
 a wedlock beginning with the devout enthusiasm of youth, 
 consecrated by long fellowship in trial and in victory, and 
 attested by noble offspring that bear the features of both 
 parents, can be permanently repented of; and will rather 
 believe that, when the crisis of hurt pride and harassed 
 spirits has passed, returning memories will draw from each, 
 unconfessed to the other, frequent tears of reconciliation. 
 Some natural feeling of this kind with regard to the present 
 alienation between Ethical doctrine and Religious, suggests 
 to me a few remarks on the real relation between the two. 
 
 Ethics treat of the right-ordering of Personal Relations, 
 so far as these may be made better or worse by our will. 
 
 The terms of this definition, though not obscure, it may 
 be well to unfold by a few words of comment. 
 
 Personal Relations constitute the prior condition and 
 very matter itself of Morality, and in their absence it has 
 no room to be. An absolutely solitary individual, if in- 
 vested with power of various action and disposition, might 
 affect himself for better or worse by what he did, but
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 295 
 
 would be subject to no obligation and incur no guilt. The 
 harm he occasioned would be a blunder and not a sin ; the 
 good which he earned would prove his wisdom, not his 
 virtue. If, instead of being lonely on the field of life, he 
 has companions sentient but only animal, he enters on semi- 
 personal relations and wakes to the first rudiments of 
 Duty ; the sensibilities of the creatures around him stirring 
 in him two or three of the springs of action, whose 
 relative worth, when more largely realized, fills up the 
 contents of Conscience. Though his companions are 
 not his peers, related to him as he is to them, yet it is 
 in virtue of what they have in common with human 
 nature that they are qualified to teach him the first lesson 
 of Character. 
 
 "Where the two natures are thus unequal, the morality 
 which is rendered possible by their presence together is 
 obviously limited to that one which is personal : the other 
 is the occasion of duty in him without becoming liable to 
 any reciprocal obligation. A parrot, kindly and rightly 
 treated by his owner, will repay the pains bestowed on his 
 education by amusing accomplishments and friendly ways. 
 But these habits, moulded by the discipline of pleasure and 
 pain, have not the ethical quality with which the master's 
 action is tinctured : being no objects of ideal choice, but 
 outwardly shaped by application of the physiological forces 
 which dispose of the organism. The mere capacity of an 
 animal for being " broken in," i.e., for being modified in its 
 action through fear and hope, does not constitute person- 
 ality or confer responsibility ; and no integral moral rela- 
 tion arises until both natures are homogeneous and both 
 personal. 
 
 Hence it follows that the relation, as ethically regarded, 
 includes, besides the adjustment of external action, an 
 indispensable concomitant of internal thought or feeling : 
 for it is just here, i.e., in the absence of preferential con- 
 sent or intention, that the animal obedience is defective. 
 To say that personal relations are essentially mental rela-
 
 296 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 tions, is to say that the essential business of Ethics is with 
 the inner springs of action. 
 
 Once more : our definition presupposes that the personal 
 relations " may be made better or worse by our will." If 
 I am master of no such alternative, if at each moment only 
 one thing is possible to me, or if, out of two, neither is 
 better than the other, I am the subject simply of natural 
 law, not of moral. Differences of tendency may still be 
 the object of scientific investigation, like differences of 
 stature or digestion ; but there is nothing to distinguish 
 the study of what ought to be from the study of what is ; 
 and Ethics pluck up their fence and surrender their field 
 to psychology, unless indeed the biologist, who has long 
 been squatting there, has already got too firm a hold. 
 
 Now, for Ethics thus defined I do not ask for any other 
 place of birth and exercise than the common life of persons 
 together ; i.e., a human Society. That scene contains 
 within itself adequate provision for their growth in indi- 
 viduals and their consolidation into Law : there is no need 
 for them to be superimposed ab extra, added on as an 
 appendix to the constitution of the world, as if they had been 
 forgotten or too little emphasized in its substantive design. 
 Whoever thinks, by insisting on such a supplement to an 
 original humanity, to win a celestial sanctity for the law of 
 righteousness, defeats his own object : he parts the two ele- 
 ments which he wishes to blend, and by way of making 
 Religion necessary makes Morals impossible. For, to a 
 nature from which Conscience has been omitted, no Law 
 can ever be sacred, no right and wrong ever be revealed. 
 It may be externally reduced to rule : but whatever con- 
 formity with order is thus produced is worthless as the 
 genuflections of an automaton or the mimicry of an ape : 
 whatever is willed on other grounds than its inherent excel- 
 lence is foreign to the sphere of character. Without inward 
 appreciation of that excellence in its several degrees and 
 consenting adoption of it for its own sake, goodness cannot 
 be : and if a Creator, in projecting a moral world, should
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 297 
 
 omit to render this appreciation immanent in the nature of 
 its people, no repairing message could overtake the defect. 
 Thunders of command, tables of law, oracles of instruction, 
 may terrify their imagination, engage their memory, increase 
 their knowledge ; but will not penetrate beyond the vesti- 
 bule of their mind, for want of interpreter to unlock the 
 sanctuary within. 
 
 But if for our purpose we do not require more than 
 human nature, neither can we put up with less. We cannot 
 dispense with any of its essential contents. In order to 
 build up a system of relations ethically organized, we must 
 start with men and not beasts ; i.e., with beings not blindly 
 thrust hither and thither by chance instincts, but conscious 
 of difference in their impulses, and directed by concurrent 
 intelligence Take away this common base of harmony ; 
 suppose, with Hobbes, each individual set up for himself 
 as a separate centre of repulsion, with an assertive appetite 
 for all that he can touch, resolute to get all he can and 
 surrender only what he must ; and whatever equilibrium 
 you may elicit from these data is not a moral equilibrium : 
 it is but the Statics of desolating passion, not the Dyna- 
 mics of ordered and unresting affections, and can only con- 
 stitute, as Hobbes himself insisted, the enthronement of 
 Force and the negation of all baffled Right. I will not say 
 that no community could thus be formed and hold together, 
 though even the gregarious habit of animals is not the 
 product of mere self-love : but I do say that the bond on 
 which it depends is not ethical or distinctively human ; that 
 its theatre is that of interest only and not of duties ; and 
 that its material, the mutilated essence of humanity, 
 does not supply an adequate school for the unfolding of a 
 private or public conscience. 
 
 Or shall I be corrected here, and asked to see in this 
 material, not the " mutilated" but rather the uncompleted 
 and inchoate essence of humanity ? Will it be said that 
 Hobbes, in omitting some elements which he need not 
 have denied to our self-knowledge, only anticipated the
 
 298 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 theory of Evolution, and astutely surmised the process 
 through which the brute nature had become the human ? 
 and have we to confess it as at least an established proba- 
 bility that the adequate cause of orderly society is the 
 "primitive savage"; of human rights, the violence of 
 wrong; of thought, sensation; of sensation, organic 
 structure ; of organism, the inorganic ; and so on through 
 the stages of the "beautifully less," till we reach the zero, 
 where plus and minus keep house together and become the 
 Adam and Eve of all things ? Be it so. For aught I know, 
 the remote progenitor of a biped may be a quadruped, 
 or a centipede : do you expect me then to place these crea- 
 tures among moral beings ? or to rank man with the un- 
 moral ? or to say that between moral and unmoral there is 
 no real difference ? Am I to think that when the condi- 
 tions are provided which will set up an Ascidian, nothing 
 more is wanted to make sure of an Aristotle and a Shakes- 
 peare, an Antonine and an Alfred the Great ? I must de- 
 cline to accept any such equation between the minimum of 
 causation and the maximum of effect, and must supply in 
 thought whatever is needed to cover the total difference, 
 in quantity and quality, between the insignificant beginning 
 and the majestic end. Whether the bodily forms which 
 enshrine this enormous increment of creative power are 
 of a million types or the continuity of one, is a question 
 interesting to the naturalist, but in no way critical to the 
 moral philosopher ; the consciousness of guilt is just as far 
 from toothache or hunger when lodged in the same type of 
 organism with them, as when put into another invented for 
 its sake. Let it appear when and where it may, it is a 
 thing siiis generis, which disowns an utterly heterogeneous 
 source, and, though co-existing with dissimilar functions, 
 can no more be deduced thence than vision from hearing. 
 If you have nothing to work with but animal pleasures 
 and pains, and unlimited time for their experience and 
 transmission, you can never hope, through all eternity, to 
 build up a conscience ; or, if you do, you build up what
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 299 
 
 your data will not support, and you will have to let fall as 
 an illusion. Inherited accumulation of expediences may 
 account for an ever quicker and finer and larger sense of 
 expediency, but for nothing else ; as an infinitude of sand- 
 grains may make a shore, and an infinitude of drops a sea, 
 but neither effect can take the place of the other. Add 
 as long as you will, if the items of the sum are all pru- 
 dences, the total will not come out as a duty. To this 
 truth Mr. Herbert Spencer himself bears conclusive witness : 
 for, while he undertakes to show how, from sentient experi- 
 ences, the idea of obligation obtains its de facto origin, 
 he insists that de jure it has no business to be there ; and 
 that we should never have it, did we not misread our 
 inward history, for want of his clear psychologic light. 
 He gives its genesis in order to exhibit it, not as a legiti- 
 mate derivative, but as a detected error ; and accordingly 
 infers that " the sense of duty or moral obligation is transi- 
 tory " and "fades,"* like any other illusion. What more 
 emphatic proclamation can be made that, operating with a 
 merely animal and not a personal humanity, you can never 
 justify the Ethical life or admit the possibility of an Ethical 
 Science ? For both have their very focus in this superseded 
 sentiment of Duty ; whence radiate all the affections 
 characteristic of the one, and all the lines of meaning 
 which define the language of the other. Instead of dis- 
 crediting the highest stage at present reached by our 
 nature and putting faith only in its lowest groundwork of 
 sense and impulse, we may reasonably invert the order, and 
 estimate the beginning by the end, and refuse to treat the 
 nature as present till the whole of it is there. 
 
 But now let us suppose all these naturalistic theories and 
 weakening conditions removed out of the way, and full 
 play to be given, in a human society, to the ethical conditions 
 and affections, in their present degree of maturity ; and 
 represent to ourselves the form of character which, in their 
 isolation, they tend to produce. United with others in a 
 * " Data of Ethics," p. 127.
 
 300 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 common moral nature, we take for granted a fundamental 
 agreement about right and wrong, and never hesitate, in 
 case of apparent divergence, to rely on its removal by 
 seeking coincidence at an earlier point. We regard our- 
 selves, therefore, as all under a common rule by which 
 each must be tried, and which is as little variable as any 
 self-evident maxim of common sense, and by their several 
 degrees of conformity to which or deviation from it we range 
 men on the scale of righteousness or guilt. This rule, how- 
 ever, we are aware, is not an imperative definition of action, 
 but a relative valuation of motive ; and as the same prefer- 
 ence of motive may give rise to any one of several acts, and 
 the same act proceed from any one of several attitudes of 
 motive, the conditions of the problem are always interior and 
 out of sight ; so that our judgments, if formed on conduct alone, 
 are liable to go far astray : of its wisdom or folly we have a 
 ready calculus in its consequences ; its goodness or guilt we 
 can only presume by surmising its invisible principle. 
 
 Judgment in other matters assumes no more than a 
 determinate criterion of value : Ethical judgment assumes 
 besides a personal power of conforming to it. To criticize 
 an elm as awry and a man's stature as short, it is enough 
 that you have the idea of a symmetrical tree and a well- 
 proportioned figure : in criticizing another's character, you 
 presuppose that he has the true idea as well as you, 
 and that it rests with him to realize it ; that he knows his 
 duty and can do it. It cannot be denied that the whole 
 system of moral conceptions, feelings and language, 
 rests upon the belief in Free Will, and deals with man 
 as (within its particular range) the real cause of what he 
 is and does. But for this, who could suffer compunc- 
 tion for a lie any more than for a squint, or shame for de- 
 lirium tremens more than for a typhoid fever, or feel more 
 indignant disgust at the crimes of a Caesar Borgia than at 
 the rapacity of a wolf ? Remorse for sin would be impos- 
 sible but for the consciousness that it lies at our door : 
 and the blame with which we visit the guilt of another is
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 301 
 
 measured by the merited self-reproaches of his own heart. 
 It is vain to pretend that we praise and condemn, approve 
 and disapprove, the acts of another in order to procure 
 their repetition or arrest, making an investment in good 
 words with an eye to a suitable return ; and that, except 
 to modify the future, we should have no such feeling to 
 express. These moral sentiments are distinctly retrospec- 
 tive, judicial sentences upon the past, and estimates of 
 present character, and not a device for managing some- 
 thing yet to come : and their undoubted influence on the 
 human will as incentives and restraints depends on their 
 just estimate of what is irrevocably committed, and would 
 be spoiled if they were understood to be a mere policy of 
 expectation. The modern determinist frankly admits that 
 the postulate of freedom does underlie the ordinary expe- 
 riences and judgments of the Conscience ; and only draws 
 the conclusion " So much the worse for them." Re- 
 morse, in his eyes, is an absurdity ; repentance, a weak- 
 ness ; merit and demerit, with all the feelings they excite, 
 fancies due to our ignorance of causes ; responsibility, a 
 mistake, if it means more than that no act is without its 
 consequences ; and duty, an imaginary bond, unless un- 
 derstood simply of men's reasonable expectations from 
 you. As these ideas and affections are such integral parts 
 of the Ethical disposition that it is difficult to see what is 
 left of it when they are gone, I cannot be wrong in set- 
 ting down the faith in Free Will among its characteristics. 
 Whether the faith is true or not, it is no part of my present 
 purpose to inquire. But of its effect upon the side of our 
 nature to which it attaches itself, an idea may be given by 
 a pregnant remark of Spinoza's that towards a being sup- 
 posed to be free, affections far more intense will be felt than 
 towards one under necessity.* If this be so, we must 
 assign to the type of character we are considering, not only 
 an extended range, but an exceptional energy, of affection. 
 If Ethics pure and simple have for their object the 
 * Ethica III. Pi. xlix.
 
 302 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 right-ordering of personal relations, then in the absence 
 of personal relations they will have nothing to say. In 
 proportion as action and feeling have only reflex influence 
 upon ourselves, escaping all contact with the lives of 
 others, we shall regard them, from this point of view, as 
 not falling within the scope of duty, and shall assert our 
 freedom from every claim. Not that the hypothesis of 
 isolation can ever be completely realized till the world is 
 composed of desert islands, with a man apiece : but there 
 are various near approaches to lonely exercises of will, 
 secret corners of the mind and life where others seem to 
 have no right of entrance ; and if there we take a dispen- 
 sation from all that intermeddles with our self-regards, 
 and assume an unqualified independence, we shall not sen- 
 sibly depart from our fundamental conception of morals. 
 Every one must be conscious of at least occasional tempta- 
 tions to " do what he likes with his own " ; and it is but an 
 extension of this temper that is so often seen in the combi- 
 nation of strict honour and noble conscientiousness in public 
 and social affairs with deplorable anarchy of personal habit. 
 For the group of ideas and affections hitherto described 
 we need look no further than the experiences of human 
 society. The peculiar cast of character which emerges 
 from their dominance is singularly wholesome, the very 
 staff of sustenance for the normal good of the world ; not 
 rich and rare, as the wine of genius or the fruits of art, 
 but welcome as the " daily bread " which better fits out- 
 daily prayer and meets our constant need. The sense of 
 Duty is to our humanity what gravitation is to the physi- 
 cal universe : and the solid natures in which it masses 
 itself restrain whatever is erratic, and discipline depen- 
 dent minds to orderly movement. What counterpoise have 
 we against the delirium of passion, the grasp of cupidity, 
 the phthisis of romance, but the indomitable faithfulness 
 of men who take no counsel but of their conscience, whom 
 no pretences can beguile, no threats dismay, who look 
 truth and right straight in the face, and, if they see a
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 303 
 
 neglected duty, seize it for their own, " proniores ad officia, 
 quod spernebantur " ? These are the men who feel sure 
 that, if a thing is right, it must be possible : and this faith 
 in human causality, extinguishing the sense of difficulty, 
 sweeps from their path the ideal obstacles which, far more 
 than any substantial checks, arrest the energies of weaker 
 natures. For the simply conscientious, no interval is 
 visible, or even conceivable, between perceiving the best and 
 executing it. No line for them is so straight as that from 
 thought to action. Doubtless a mere sprinkling of such 
 righteous souls may suffice at times to avert destruction 
 from a perishing community. 
 
 At the same time, where the tension of conscience is 
 pitched thus high, more is expected from the reason and 
 moral sense of others than they will be found to give. He 
 who simply wields his freedom does not understand the 
 slavery of more ordinary minds : from the dependent he 
 demands independence ; from the frivolous, devotedness ; 
 from the self-indulgent, sacrifice. And when these exac- 
 tions remain without response, he never suspects that he 
 has laid too heavy a trust upon the hampered and sickened 
 human causality, but pours out reproaches on the apathy 
 and shortcomings of others. Seeing only what might 
 have been had they but done their part, he criticizes and 
 scolds, and contracts a temper censorious and unsympa- 
 thetic, with scarcely hope enough to sustain his unaided 
 fidelity. His disappointment in their perversity does but 
 increase the rigidity of his own convictions : losing all ten- 
 derness and gaining no humility, he falls out of tune with 
 the affections and wills that are his sole allies. He cannot 
 reach the hearts of men. He wonders how it is that his 
 moral reforms make so little way. He has shown their 
 reasonableness : the proof is complete : assent is not re- 
 fused : but somehow the springs of power are not there ! 
 To what degree of repulsiveness this type of character may 
 descend, can be unknown only to the happy few who have 
 never met with the rational and ethical prig who has
 
 304 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 alighted upon some short cut to the perfection of the 
 world, and goes about offering with solemn assurance the 
 universal pill that is to cure our sins and reinstate us to- 
 morrow in Paradise. Many a projector of this order has 
 it been my lot to know. With adequate self-complacency, 
 he is perhaps the most comfortable, but the dreariest of 
 mortals ; persuaded that he has the secret of omnipotence, 
 and smitten with utter ineffectiveness ; for ever turning 
 the barrel of a dead organ which has no tune to any but 
 himself. It would be a relief if he would but be angry at 
 his failure, curse the evils he cannot heal, and take offence 
 at the nature of things which baffles him. Give me rather 
 the passionate invective of the pessimist, who at least is 
 moved by pity to his defiance, and, if he cannot have the 
 universe on his side, is content to spend himself in strug- 
 gling against it on behalf of suffering humanity. Better to 
 remonstrate, like Job, with the order of nature, than like 
 his friends, to ignore it : thus far its Infinite Author is " a 
 Jealous God " ; He will sooner bear to be denounced than 
 to be forgot. 
 
 Why is it that pure moral ideas may result in so imper- 
 fect a type of character, and moral reforms in effects so 
 feeble ? What is amiss with them ? Are they not true ? 
 Are they not good ? Whence then their impotence ? Yes, 
 they are both ; but, so long as the horizon of humanity 
 shuts in their view, there is a larger truth, there is an in- 
 finite good, beyond their little field of vision, the light and 
 warmth of which no sooner flow in than they kindle both 
 the seer and the seen with a new glow, turning assent 
 into enthusiasm, and suffusing a rugged world with divine 
 beauty. The affections hitherto noticed arise from the con- 
 templation of human causality, and receive their shock 
 because they have not reckoned with the boundless store 
 beyond, and are confused by its inrush upon their schemes. 
 The Conscience, as thus far regarded, has played the part 
 of righteous judge between man and man, never doubting 
 that its right-ordering of personal relations was herein
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 305 
 
 complete ; and if its judgments have been uttered with too 
 little majesty of voice, and have gained but faint obedience 
 from listening hearts, may it not be because there is one 
 personal relation left unrealized, the crown and interpreter 
 of all, their inward sanctity, their embracing glory ? 
 If Ethics are to cover the entire ground of character, 
 and if in our character there be a part which has reference 
 to the Infinitude which surrounds our life, a system 
 of thought, a type of feeling, which omits this part and 
 treats it as though it were not, can be but a truncated 
 moral structure, resembling the whole much as a Gothic 
 Hotel de Ville resembles a cathedral without its transepts 
 and its towers. 
 
 So long as duty is regarded as a human self-enactment, 
 it involves no personal relations except of men inter se. 
 Treated as a factor in our egoistic psychology, the idea is 
 taken as merely subjective and coming from ourselves. 
 Treated as a social product fastened upon each individual 
 by his fellows, it comes from our equals. In the former 
 case, it ranks with any other phenomenon of our history: 
 in the other, it stands on the level of a coercion or a con- 
 vention among associates. In neither case does it speak 
 to us from a superior, or carry in it any imperative right. 
 If it is the voice of our fellows, it may be louder, but is not 
 auguster than our own ; if it is an altercation between two 
 desires of the self, each may contradict the other without 
 making good its title to command the whole. Within a 
 unit, or where life is all upon one plane, Obligation cannot 
 be, but only conflict and equilibrium of Force ; and hence 
 the fatal weakness of the Moralist who, after planting our 
 nature in this position, continues to talk of what it ougJit 
 to be. He eviscerates Duty, and turns it into a mummy, 
 and then expects it to get up and walk. It is the total 
 failure of a Supreme Authority, not of compelling strength 
 but of pleading Perfection, that paralyses him, and con- 
 strains him to fly before the first fanatic mob that sweeps 
 the field in the name of the Holy Ghost. The law which 
 
 VOL. IV. X
 
 306 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 he asserts, another can deny ; and that which is made by 
 men to-day may be unmade by men to-morrow ; and no 
 preacher of such shifting relativity of truth and righteous- 
 ness will ever speak home to the undying needs of the 
 human conscience. 
 
 Is he then forbidden by veracity to speak in any higher 
 name than his own ? In his private controversies of temp- 
 tation, when the argument is at its height between some 
 splendid treachery and a guiltless ignominy, is the differ- 
 ence between them preached to him in his own name ? 
 Did he institute it ? Was it his will that planted it out 
 visibly in the frame of things and the hearts of men ? Is 
 his consciousness of it simply a play to and fro of his 
 particular ideas, and their eager polemic only a soliloquy ? 
 Is it not rather a reality, an eternal reality, that looks 
 in upon him and speaks to him ? And has he not to own 
 in it an Authority which is so far from being of his setting 
 up, that his whole personality bows in homage to it, an 
 authority so different from mere Power, that Omnipotence 
 itself could neither create nor cancel it ? Now authority 
 expresses a relation, not between mind and things, but 
 between mind and mind : no physical object, no uncon- 
 scious phenomenon, can exercise it : it is a purely personal 
 attribute, a tie of dependence between the higher and the 
 lower ; and, wherever it is felt, there are two minds present 
 with each other in uplooking and uplifting attitude. Thus 
 in the ultimate penetralia of the conscience the Living 
 Spirit of God himself is met, it may be unconsciously, it 
 may be consciously. If you enter with the spiritual eye 
 blindfolded, you will not indeed be wholly disappointed of 
 your oracle ; but, in receiving it and taking it away, you 
 will suppose yourself alone : you will keep it as a precept 
 of wisdom, and approve it as you might a proverb of 
 Solomon's, and, in commending it to others, will look out 
 for logic to support it. But the very soul of it will escape 
 you, because it is one term of a personal relation, of which 
 the other remains hidden from you. If, on the other hand,
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 307 
 
 you have discovered on what holy ground you stand, you 
 will issue forth in quite another mood : you will have, not 
 a proposition to prove, but a message to deliver ; and, fresh 
 from communion with the Infinite Inspirer, you will 
 speak " as one having authority, and not as the Scribes." 
 
 The moment the experiences of Conscience are recog- 
 nized as a personal relation, the whole body of Morals 
 starts up as in life from the dead, and becomes transfigured 
 with light flashing from the contact of two worlds. In 
 height, in depth, in volume, in sanctity, in tenderness, they 
 are hardly less changed than the mortal putting on his 
 immortality. Take only the following particulars. 
 
 1. The Authority of Duty becomes transcendent and 
 Divine ; and we understand how it is that it always gazed 
 at us with so awful and quickening an eye, as if to fix 
 our look, and still to pursue us though we turned away. 
 This is intelligible, if it be the meeting of Spirit with spirit, 
 the living touch of infinite holiness on finite temptation. 
 But no absent power, no code of the past, no heaven or 
 hell of the future, could draw from us such secret homage : 
 where and when the worship is, there and then is the God. 
 If previously it was the tendency of moral conviction to 
 harden our independence of will and impart a Stoical 
 rigour, this temper, which belongs only to our standing 
 before men or Fate, must now give way, and be replaced 
 by pure reverence and self-surrender, not to resistless Force, 
 but to Highest Righteousness. 
 
 2. The Scope of Duty becomes for the first time co-ex- 
 tensive with the area of the Will. There is a considerable 
 range of voluntary life for every one, where all his fellows 
 are out of reach, or at least so faintly and remotely affected 
 by what he feels and does, as to obtain no voice in it. 
 This field of private thought, of individual habit, of lonely 
 taste and occupation, it has always been difficult to reclaim 
 from the anarchy of chance desires, or the forbidding 
 enclosure of selfishness, and annex it to the domain of 
 Duty. To effect this, recourse has been had to such empty 
 
 x 2
 
 3o8 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 fictions as that of " Duty to ourselves " ; which can be 
 saved from contradiction only by an impossibility, viz., the 
 splitting of " ourselves " into two agents susceptible of 
 reciprocal obligations. The moment you fix any real sense 
 upon the phrase, its meaning becomes simply Prudence^ 
 the neglect of which may constitute a solitary man a fool, 
 but not a criminal. All this is changed in a moment on 
 finding that we are never alone and deserted by personal 
 relations ; that when finite agents leave us, the Infinite 
 remains ; that in every consciousness of a better and a 
 worse, his living Perfection is in converse with us, and, 
 stripping us of arbitrary option, imparts to our selection a 
 character of faithfulness or guilt. There is nothing, in 
 short, to which this one transcendent personal relation 
 does not penetrate. The whole order of the life and mind, 
 even in the deepest solitude, feels its supervision. And 
 matters of which even good men are apt to be heedless, 
 e.g., the limits of time and degree within which permissible 
 desires and pursuits, of wealth, of society, of ease and 
 ornament, of knowledge and accomplishment, may rightly 
 have their way, are no longer left unregulated. A sacred 
 light is interfused with our being from centre to circum- 
 ference, and, where human affections cease to direct our 
 path, gleams through the air and leads us on. 
 
 3. The Volume, or internal capacity, of the Moral Life 
 is immeasurably expanded by gaining its religious inter- 
 pretation. If it be the theme of converse between the 
 Divine and the human mind and the expression of their 
 affinity, our faith in Righteousness bursts the bounds of 
 anthropology and assumes a cosmical extension. No 
 escape from terrestrial conditions supersedes it: no with- 
 drawal of limits from the mind would render it obsolete : 
 for here it is, present at once in its two extremes, at its 
 beginning and in its consummation, born in the finite 
 nature from the communion of the Infinite ; inexhaustible, 
 therefore, through the gradations of approach from the 
 one to the other. And however surprising this may seem
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 309 
 
 so long as moral excellence is looked at only in the con- 
 crete form of its external offices, it becomes intelligible 
 when we follow up character to its interior essence, and 
 find its perfection to consist in a certain order and harmony 
 among the spiritual springs of action. However long a 
 mind may live, however large its powers may grow, this 
 harmony, this ascendency of the best may become more 
 nearly perfect, or in its perfection, if that be possible, cover 
 a wider field. The conscience carries in its very nature a 
 secret suspicion of this measureless possibility of goodness, 
 and feels the presence of the vision even through its 
 grievous blindness : hence, in uncorrupted natures, its 
 undying humility, its inextinguishable aspiration. The 
 moral sense, neglected and abused, may no doubt sink 
 away, and on its lower line of movement die out in the 
 dark ; but, exercising its normal function on the upper 
 line, it touches no terminus and dreams of none. Its 
 intensest speed it deems intolerably slow : if it have feet, 
 it longs for wings : if it have wings, it envies the lightning : 
 it has always spaces to traverse which it cannot overtake. 
 This ideal infinitude of excellence for our mind is but the 
 reflex of its real infinitude for the Supreme Mind. 
 
 4. The Enthusiasm of the Moral Life is intensified by 
 the consciousness of its Divine Source. That it is the 
 meeting-ground of kindred sympathy between our nature 
 and God's, where he lets us into the confidences of his 
 thought and the partnership of his causality, is in itself 
 enough to glorify the human characteristics and to endear 
 the Divine, and kindle the zeal for bringing them into 
 harmony. But, over and above this general tendency, 
 there is a provision, in the inward constitution of our con- 
 science, which gives a special impulse in the same direction. 
 It sees the springs of action in a certain order of rank in 
 excellence, an order that speaks the preferences of God. 
 And among the terms at the summit of that scale are 
 Compassion, Sympathy, Wonder (devotion to truth), and 
 Reverence (devotion to goodness) ; in short, the group
 
 310 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 (name the members as you will) of disinterested and 
 spiritual affections whence all fruitful inspiration has ever 
 burst upon the world. These, then, are the fountains of 
 life most dear to the Soul of souls : and those are most 
 like him whose energies, detained by no inner frosts, flow 
 freely forth in streams of Love that nourish the roots of 
 every human good. The Ethical spirit is often supposed 
 to be cold and scrupulous and negatively correct, shrinking 
 from innumerable things and worshipping nothing. In its 
 period of critical legalism, prior to its new birth, it may 
 be so ; but once sweetened with the waters of regeneration 
 and initiated into its Divine relations, it breathes the air 
 of quite another world ; discovers that the best vigilance 
 against evil is to fling yourself away into some humane and 
 purifying good ; and, since the life of God is the life of 
 love, gains assurance that, with an infinite ally, the battle 
 of righteousness can never lose hope and heart. The 
 grievous features of the human lot which, in the natural 
 stage, produce only dejection, become, in the spiritual, an 
 impelling power. The sadness of the actual to so many 
 sufferers, when touched by faith in their latent possibilities, 
 lets in a kindling air, and turns the mournful smoke into 
 a living flame. And the inequalities of men, which once 
 seemed to be stereotyped by nature in caste, in serfdom, 
 in slavery, and to close the door upon the future, no 
 sooner catch the transforming light of the common human 
 responsibility, than they wake the justice of converted souls, 
 and shame the former pride and scorn, and raise vast armies 
 of compassion intent on rescue, and penetrate life with 
 mutual respect. 
 
 Such, then, I take to be the connection between Ethics 
 and Religion ; the latter, as containing the Supreme Per- 
 sonal Relation, completing the former, and, in doing so, 
 transfiguring it throughout. The attempt of our own age 
 to separate the two, and prove that it makes no difference 
 to Morals what theory we adopt, or whether any at all,
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 311 
 
 respecting the universe beyond our own nature, is full of 
 pathetic interest, as expressing an anxious resolve, amid 
 the disintegration of other faiths, to save at least the mini- 
 mum of conditions for our orderly life with one another. 
 But, intellectually, this excellent motive does not excuse 
 so great a paradox. It is simply impossible to be indif- 
 ferent to the kind of Power which presides over the system 
 of things ; and the choice practically lies between two 
 conceptions, Necessity and Will, the one blind, the 
 other with moral ends. Whichever you adopt carries with 
 it a train of consequences direct into the sphere of our 
 experience. 
 
 Blind Necessity on the throne of the Universe means 
 submission without law for (" Necessity has no law ") ; 
 internecine war through the whole field of life ; equilib- 
 rium, attained on the line of least resistance ; society, 
 suspended upon a truce ; every nation, a camp ; every 
 individual, a sentinel against rivals ; the strong, hunting 
 the weak and laughing their saviours to scorn ; history, 
 reduced to a perpetual " massacre of the innocents " ; and 
 morals, to a persistent getting what you can and doing 
 what you must. 
 
 Righteousness on the throne of the Universe means the 
 subordination of might to right ; concord, composed out of 
 the varieties of life ; equilibrium, effected by concurrent 
 attractions ; society, resting on the common recognition of 
 a binding law ; every nation, a province of the " kingdom 
 of God " ; every individual, a member of a " Sacred band " ; 
 the strong, bearing the burdens of the weak, and the weak 
 holding on to the rear of the strong ; history, an " Educa- 
 tion of the human race " ; and morals, the Divine ideal 
 which that education is to work out. 
 
 I do not deny that each of these theories may cite phe- 
 nomena that seem to countenance it ; but I affirm that 
 the characteristic phenomena of the Moral world are com- 
 patible only with the second, and must be dismissed as
 
 312 THE RELATION BETWEEN 
 
 illusions before it can be dislodged. Is any one to be 
 listened to who says that this would make no difference ? 
 
 Religion can as little afford to forget its emergence 
 from the Conscience, as the Conscience to shrink from its 
 religious transfiguration. The essence of Religion lies in 
 communion between the finite and the Infinite Mind, be- 
 tween the individual Soul and the Universal. Where this 
 communion is based specifically on the Ethical conscious- 
 ness, it is a felt relation between Will and Will, a harmony 
 or discord between Spirit and Spirit, in which two free 
 Causalities are in presence of each other, in the light or 
 under the cloud. Here, the human Personality asserts 
 itself in the very moment and by the very act of surrender 
 and abnegation, and never rises into higher liberty than 
 when sinking into identification with the supreme intent. 
 But if you quit this unique ground of Moral experience, 
 and for any other side of your nature throw open the 
 windows to the Infinite, the overwhelming inrush of the 
 Primary Causality will utterly drown the secondary, abolish 
 the conditions of personality, and dissolve all detached 
 existence in the deified cloud with which the Mystic fills 
 all space. The imagination, brooding on the fixed idea 
 that " the All is only One," sees the lines of difference 
 melt away, and accepts all states, outward and inward, as 
 equally Divine ; treats all moral distinctions as wiped out 
 from the nature of things ; and all objects alike, conscious 
 or unconscious, as passive vehicles of the same necessitat- 
 ing Power. I will not urge that Religion, being the 
 communion between two, commits suicide when, by 
 merging one, it passes into a speculative Monism. But I 
 dwell simply on the fact of the utter denudation, by these 
 floods of Divine Necessity, of the whole ground on which 
 Ethics stood : so that, if Religion can be said to remain, it 
 cannot be a religion of Duty. It is true that the Mystic, 
 in losing himself, is freed from a copious source of human 
 sins. But it is a negative deliverance, even if it lasts
 
 ETHICS AND RELIGION. 313 
 
 beyond his meditative moments ; and it secures nothing 
 better to take the place. According as his nature tends to 
 thought, to affection, to art, he will dissolve himself away 
 in speculation, in love, or in beauty, without a regulative 
 order for his personal relations, or capacity for concrete 
 action. These precarious drifts of emotion involve great 
 danger to character. No greater gift do we owe to 
 Christianity than the conception and consecration of 
 Personality : and every influence that confuses and disturbs 
 it softens the very nerve of modern civilization.
 
 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE subjoined correspondence will explain the occasion 
 of the following address, and also its mixed character, in 
 part resembling a College Lecture, and in part a Sermon. 
 
 In case these pages should find any outer circle of 
 readers, it may be proper to state that it is usual, at the 
 close of the five or six years' study in Manchester New 
 College, to mark the Student's transition from the Aca- 
 demic to the Pastoral life by a special religious service, of 
 Farewell on the part of the Teachers he leaves ; of Wel- 
 come on the part of the Ministers he joins ; and of self- 
 dedication on his own part. The Valedictory portion of 
 this service devolves on the Principal of the College. 
 And it is in place of the Adieu to the untried preacher 
 that the following reflections were addressed to men 
 approved by long and various experience. 
 
 LETTER. 
 " To the Rev. James Martineau. 
 
 " DEAR DR. MARTINEAU, 
 
 " At the close of the present Session of Manchester 
 New College there will be no Students who have completed 
 their course, and consequently no Valedictory Address. 
 
 " It has occurred to some of us that this will be an opportu- 
 nity not to be passed by for your old Pupils to gather together 
 on the Thursday evening of Examination week for a special 
 religious service, and to hear an Address from you. We there- 
 fore all earnestly join in this request, that you will consent to 
 speak to us at such a service. 
 
 " Scattered as we are in our different posts of ministry, many 
 of us have had but few opportunities of personally renewing our 
 ties with the College which we have never ceased to love.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 With that College the thought of you is inseparably associated 
 as friend and teacher ; and we feel that it would be a source of 
 great delight and refreshment to us all to meet together once 
 more to listen to the voice from which we have learned so 
 much. 
 
 " And even should some of us, in the event of your consent- 
 ing to this request, be debarred from being present, we shall 
 still be glad to have shared in the expression of affectionate re- 
 gard which prompts it. 
 
 " In the arrangements and place of the service we should 
 desire to be guided by your own choice, whether it should be 
 held privately in the College Library, or whether with an open 
 invitation to all friends in the greater publicity of Little Port- 
 land Street Chapel. 
 
 " We are, dear Dr. Martineau, 
 
 " Faithfully yours, 
 (Signed) 
 
 DENDY AGATE, 
 W. M. AINSWORTH, 
 R. A. ARMSTRONG, 
 CHARLES BEARD, 
 AMBROSE N. BLATCHFORD, 
 WILLIAM BLAZEBY, 
 W. COPELAXD BOWIE. 
 J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, 
 ANDREW CHALMERS, 
 HUBERT CLARKE, 
 CHARLES C. COE, 
 HENRY W. CROSSKEY, 
 DAVID DAVIS, 
 V. D. DAVIS. 
 H. ENFIELD DOWSON, 
 ROBERT B. DRUMMOND, 
 JAMES DRUMMOND, 
 THOMAS DUNKERLEY, 
 ALX. GORDON, 
 JAMES HARWOOD, 
 P. M. HIGGINSON, 
 EDWARD L. HOWSE, 
 T. LLOYD JONES, 
 
 March 2nd, iSSl." 
 
 R. CROMPTON JONES, 
 FRANCIS HENRY JONES, 
 J. B. LLOYD, 
 REES L. LLOYD, 
 J. E. MANNING, 
 T. L. MARSHALL, 
 WILLIAM NAPIER, 
 C. J. PERRY, 
 CHAS. T. POYNTING, 
 JOHN RUSSELL, 
 LAWRENCE SCOTT, 
 J. D. HIRST SMITH, 
 H. SHAEN SOLLY, 
 FRANK WILLIAM STANLEY, 
 S. ALFRED STEINTHAL, 
 CHRISTOPHER J. STREET, 
 CHARLES B. UPTON, 
 PHILIP VANCESMITH, 
 DOUGLAS WALMSLEY, 
 JAS. T. WHITEHEAD, 
 PHILIP H. WICKSTEED, 
 JEFFREY WORTHINGTON.
 
 PREFACE. 319 
 
 REPLY. 
 
 " 35, Gordon Square, London, W.C. 
 March 4, 1881. 
 
 " DEAR FRIENDS AND FELLOW- WORKERS, 
 
 " Your letter and its request deeply move me ; and 
 I cannot wait for a second thought before I say how joyfully I 
 shall meet you and speak to you what may be in my heart on 
 the usual evening of the Valedictory Service in June. 
 
 " It is one thing to teach the young at College ; it is quite 
 another to interpret the lessons of life for those who are in the 
 midst of its conflicts and rich in its experiences. And there are 
 many of you from whom I could now learn more than I have 
 to tell of the duties and wisdom that, in these days, may make 
 the Christian ministry still a beneficent power. 
 
 " But if you are not tired of the old voice, speaking in the 
 old spirit, I will not shrink from offering you what may be my 
 last word, though it be only to say how the world looks to one 
 who must shortly leave it. 
 
 " I should incline, if agreeable to you, to preserve, as nearly 
 as may be, the customary form of the Valedictory Service. At 
 least it would seem natural to retain its component elements 
 of Hymn and Prayer and Scripture, as well as Address ; and 
 also freely to admit the sympathy of friends, from whom we 
 can have no secrets. 
 
 " Meeting thus, we shall have no occasion to make any 
 change in the established place or time ; and it will only re- 
 main for you to distribute the parts of the service which are 
 not mine. 
 
 " Believe me always, dear Friends, 
 
 " Yours faithfully and affectionately, 
 "JAMES MARTINEAU. 
 
 " To my former Pupils whose names are appended to 
 the letter of March the 2nd, forwarded by the 
 Rev. Valentine D. Davis." 
 
 I cannot refrain from adding, ere I part from this unique 
 occasion, my heartfelt thanks to my old fellow-student and 
 friend, the Rev. William Gaskell, for his supporting parti-
 
 320 PREFACE. 
 
 cipation in it. How greatly its interest was deepened by 
 his sympathy can hardly be understood except by the few 
 survivors whose College ties have never been weakened for 
 fifty-five years. To both of us, as veterans soon to quit 
 the field, it was a true joy to meet the growing company of 
 well-trained and faithful successors, already armed with 
 better weapons than we shall lay down. 
 
 LONDON, Jttne 24, 1881.
 
 XIII. 
 LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 
 
 DEAR FRIENDS AND YOUNGER BROTHERS, 
 
 IN a rash moment crowded with affectionate memories 
 of your College days, I promised to speak to you to-night : 
 as if it were possible for us to cancel the intervening years 
 and meet again as the Students' class around the Professor's 
 chair. Once, no doubt, it was my right and duty to teach 
 you, and offer some guidance to your thought and con- 
 science : and the successive relations thus established during 
 more than four decades of this century form for me golden 
 links of an experience unspeakably precious. But when 
 you come back to me with heads now grey, nay, father 
 and son together, pastors of great churches, familiar with 
 public life, and bearing well-earned honours in science or 
 literature, what can I say that you have not thought ? 
 whither move, without finding you there before me ? from 
 what danger guard you that you have not already shunned ? 
 It is but a little truth that one hand can grasp, perhaps a 
 few seeds that may try their chance to grow. I opened all 
 I had to you : and whether they withered or lived, whether 
 they yielded tares or wheat, you alone can tell, who are 
 in the warm rich summer of life. We freely gave you 
 our ideas of things human and Divine : and now, could 
 I choose, I would fain hear from you the lesson of lessons, 
 viz., how they stand the test of working experience ; 
 whether they can look reality in the face and even make 
 it glow "as the face of an angel '' ; whether they can nerve 
 
 VOL. IV. V
 
 322 LOSS AND GAIN 
 
 the tempted will, and sweeten the tried temper, and blend 
 a music with the sorrows of humanity. Instead of this, 
 however, you ask me to tell you how your life-problem 
 looks from the present point of view, a point of view 
 which is doubly altered ; for all of us, through new lights of 
 thought that have fallen upon the scene ; and personally 
 for me, as an old man standing on the verge, and having 
 beneath his eye all that he can here expect to see. Is it true, 
 as we are often told, that our prophetic function is gone, and 
 that the Naturalist is henceforth to take our place as well 
 as his own ? that the divine meanings in human things are 
 all a dream, and we really " live by bread alone," and not by 
 mystic words overheard from God ? that the story of our 
 earthly days is a detected failure, a disenchanted romance, 
 instead of a rudimentary eternity ? Has anything recently 
 happened to our nature that we must despair of it ? or to 
 the Universe, that its only infinitude is that of Space, with- 
 out the deeps of any spiritual heaven ? Guarding ourselves 
 alike against the obstinacy of old illusions and the levity 
 of new, let us measure, if we can, some of the admitted 
 changes of religious conception since the time when we 
 first studied together ; and see whether they snatch our 
 commission from us, or leave us still a gospel to preach, a 
 kingdom of God to bring in, an immortal life to expect. 
 
 We have no doubt had much to unlearn in our method 
 of building up and supporting religious faith in others and 
 in ourselves. Instruments of persuasion once ready to our 
 hand have become unavailable. We have overstrained 
 perhaps the search for final causes and made providences 
 out of trifles. Or, we have tried to reach the Creator by 
 dating the beginning of the world ; or, to establish a mono- 
 poly of Revelation by maligning the great Heathen religions 
 and philosophies ; or, to extort a proof of eternal life from 
 the records of Christ's resurrection. In the first humiliation 
 of such mistakes, it is natural to feel helpless and disarmed. 
 But are we then reduced to silence, because we have once 
 spoken foolishly for God ? The everlasting realities take
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 323 
 
 no notice of our false logic, but hold their course, to meet 
 us when we no longer mistake their track. How the mo- 
 mentary loss may turn to a permanent gain, may be best 
 seen if we concentrate our attention on one or two leading 
 and recent instances of superseded theological beliefs. 
 
 I. Consider, first, the total disappearance, from our branch 
 of the Reformed Churches, of all External Authority in 
 matters of Religion. The Catholic prediction, so often 
 made when Luther threw off the restraints of ecclesiastical 
 Tradition, has at last come true ; and the yoke of the Bible 
 follows the yoke of the Church. The phrases which we 
 have heard repeated with enthusiasm, that " the Bible, 
 and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants," that 
 " Scripture is the Rule of faith and practice," are indeed 
 full of historical interest, but for minds at once sincere and 
 exact, have lost their magic power. I need not remind 
 you how innocently, and how inevitably, this has come 
 about ; how completely the conception of a Canonical 
 literature that shall for ever serve as a Divine statute-book, 
 belongs to a stage of culture which has passed away; how 
 widely discrepant are the types of doctrine and the con- 
 ceptions of morals and the recitals of fact, in different parts 
 of this supposed uniform manual ; and how, if you disown 
 these human inequalities and insist on artificially filling 
 up its valleys and levelling its hills, you destroy a region 
 glorious in beauty, and doom its running waters to stagnate 
 in unwholesome fens. It is simply a fact that dictated 
 faith and duty are no longer possible, and that, by way of 
 textual oracle, you can carry to the soul no vision of God, 
 no contrition for sin, no sigh for righteousness. The time 
 is past when a doctrine could save itself from criticism by 
 taking refuge under an apostle's word, or a futurity authen- 
 ticate itself by a prophet's forecast, or a habit become 
 obligatory by evangelical example. 
 
 To our function, as witnesses for divine things, this seems 
 at first a disastrous change, little short of a loss of both 
 the credentials and the instructions which legitimate our 
 
 V 2
 
 324 LOSS AND GAIN 
 
 message. We naturally think how easy was the preacher's 
 task when he had only to exhibit the sacred seal and make 
 clear the sentences it covered, and the Reason of men would 
 accept them as truth and the Will would bow before them ; 
 when doubts of Providence fled from the sufferer at the 
 mere sound of the words, " The hairs of your head are all 
 numbered " ; and the shadows of death vanished before the 
 voice, "This mortal must put on immortality" ; and the 
 guilty conscience shuddered to hear, "There shall in no 
 wise enter therein anything that is unclean or that maketh 
 abomination and a lie." In our moments of weakness, 
 when we cry, " Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for 
 I am a child ! " we may long for some infallible support 
 which may bear our burden and relieve the strain of 
 thought and love. But it is just in order to bear this burden, 
 to sift out the eternally true and good from transient and 
 tempting semblances, and make the divine light glow amid 
 human things, that we have girded up our wills and set 
 apart our lives for spiritual service. And if there were a 
 book-theology ever so perfect, the verbal quintessence of 
 all transcendent truth, the more we spared our own souls 
 and depended upon it, the less should we pierce to the 
 seats of conviction and re-kindle sight for the blind. Reli- 
 gion is not the truth of any stereotyped propositions, but 
 the highest life of the moving spirit : nor can it be conveyed 
 from mind to mind, except by the vibration of harmonic 
 chords. Even the rigid Scripturalists of Puritan times, at 
 the very moment when they seemed to rest everything on 
 the " Word of God/' felt how poor a thing was a faith taken 
 upon trust, and dived down with their truth into the deep 
 waters of human experience, and showed its subtle mingling 
 with the whole element of thought and feeling : so that, 
 with all their Biblical securities, their real power lay in the 
 rich stores of their own inward history, their keen insight 
 into the temptations and passions of mankind, and the 
 secret response of conscience to their lofty claims for Holy
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 325 
 
 Arc \ve then to despair of our office, because what was 
 once used as a Divine Text-book has become a human 
 literature? On the contrary, I claim it as a noble though 
 .severe advantage that we are driven from words to realities, 
 and must sink right home to the inward springs of religion 
 in our nature and experience. The use of knowledge is to 
 take and conform us to the things known ; not to look at 
 them, but to live in right relations with them : and we may 
 well bless any change which, withdrawing us from mere 
 reflections of God, centralizes us in God himself; and, 
 silencing formulas of righteousness, makes us organs of its 
 power ; and, instead of ideas of immortal life, sets up its 
 very essence and initial stage within us. Will any one tell 
 me that these stupendous spiritual realities can be, and 
 leave no marks on the universe they fill ? that it can make 
 no difference to the countenance of nature, whether a Living 
 Mind look through it, or it be as the eyeless mask moulded 
 from a face of the dead ? or, to the aspect of the Moral 
 Law, whether it be the expression of an Infinite Holiness, 
 or only a municipal artifice of human management ? or, to 
 the constitution of our faculties, whether they are on the 
 -scale of illimitable growth, or exhaust their possibilities 
 within the term of earthly years? And, if difference it 
 does make, thither let us go, and we are in the very audi- 
 ence-chamber, nay, under the quickening touch, of the 
 Infinite thought and righteousness and love ; and, rendered 
 incandescent with them ourselves, shall pass on their fires 
 into other souls. It is the unwritten oracles of God that 
 have most deeply stirred the hearts of the devout, the 
 beauty of the heavens and the earth, the secret heroism of 
 duty, the mystery of sorrow, the solemnity of death ; and 
 Scripture itself is only so far the " Word of God," as it 
 truly plants us face to face with these his silences. It moves 
 us, because it reads their significance as we read them our- 
 selves, and would speak to us in vain, were not the same 
 faiths and affections already implictily there. Just as no 
 critic, be he even infallible, can show you the majesty
 
 326 LOSS AND GAIN 
 
 of a statute, the pathos of a poem, the expressiveness of a 
 human face, if you do not intuitively feel it ; so can external 
 authority make nothing sacred which does not in itself/?*/ 
 you and wake up some sleeping piety. Our attitude towards 
 Scripture thus becomes the same which has long been 
 familiar to the Society of Friends ; simply assuming that 
 the Spirit of God, which in the old time wrought their 
 elements of sanctity into the pages of the Bible, lives and 
 operates for ever in the human soul, renewing the light of 
 Divine truth, and kindling eternal aspirations : so that the 
 day of Pentecost is never past, and there is still a tongue 
 of fire for every evangelist. 
 
 II. And now take the measure of another great change 
 which though gradual and timid in its advance, has for us 
 reached its completion within our own memory, the dis- 
 appearance from our faith of the entire Messianic mythology. 
 I speak not merely of the lost " argument from prophecy," 
 now melted away by better understanding of the Hebrew 
 writings, or of the interior relation, under any aspect, of 
 the Old Testament and the New ; but of the total discharge, 
 from our religious conceptions, of that central Jewish dream 
 which was always asking, " Art thou He that should come, 
 or look we for another ? " and of all its stage, its drama, and 
 its scenery. It no longer satisfies us to say, that Jesus 
 realized the Divine promise in a sense far transcending 
 the national preconception, and revealed at last the real 
 meaning of the Spirit which spake in Isaiah. Such forced 
 conforming of the Jewish ideal to the Christian facts, by 
 glorifying the one and theorizing on the other, was inevit- 
 able to the first disciples, and could not but colour all that 
 they remembered and thought and wrote : and the imagin- 
 ation of Christendom, working with undiscriminating faith 
 on these mixed materials, has drawn upon its walls a series 
 of sacred pictures, from which Art has loved to reproduce 
 whatever is tender and sublime, and which have broken 
 silence in the Divina Comedia, in the Paradise Lost and 
 Regained, in plaintive Passion-music, and the kindling
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 327 
 
 popular hymn. All this is of intense interest to us as 
 literature, as art, as the past product of devout genius ; nor 
 will I too rigorously question those elements of it which 
 fairly admit of symbolic use in setting forth the truths we 
 really mean aud the affections we deeply feel. But, as 
 objective reality, as a faithful representation of our invi- 
 sible and ideal universe, it is gone from us ; gone therefore 
 from our interior religion, and become an outside mytho- 
 logy. From the person of Jesus, for instance, everything 
 official, attached to him by evangelists or divines, has fallen 
 away : when they put such false robe upon him, they were 
 but leading him to death. The pomp of royal lineage and 
 fulfilled prediction, the prerogatives of King, of Priest, of 
 Judge, the Advent with retinue of angels on the clouds of 
 heaven, are to us mere deforming investitures, misplaced 
 like court-dresses on " the spirits of the just " ; and he is 
 simply the Divine flower of humanity, blossoming after 
 ages of spiritual growth, the realized possibility of life in 
 God. And if he is this, he has no consciously exceptional 
 part to play, but only to be what he is, to follow the momen- 
 tary love, to do and say what the hour may bring, to be 
 quiet under the sorrows which pity and purity incur, and 
 die away in the prayer of inextinguishable trust. And, to 
 see him thus, we go to his native fields and the village 
 homes of Galilee, and the roads of Samaria, and the streets 
 and courts of Jerusalem, where the griefs and wrongs of his 
 time bruised him and brought out the sublime fragrance of 
 his spirit. All that has been added to that real historic 
 scene,- the angels that hang around his birth, and the fiend 
 that tempts his youth ; the dignities that await his future, 
 the throne, the trumpet, the great assize, the bar of judg- 
 ment ; with all the apocalyptic splendours and terrors that 
 ensue, Hades and the Crystal sea, Paradise and the Infernal 
 gulf; nay, the very boundary-walls of the cosmic panorama 
 that contains these things, have for us utterly melted away, 
 and left us amid the infinite space and silent stars. What 
 painter among us dares now to put upon his canvas the
 
 328 LOSS AND CAIN 
 
 scene in which " before him are gathered all nations " ? or, 
 like the old masters, represent " the dead in Christ who 
 rise first " ? Such pictorial subjects occupy indeed a 
 curious position ; too far from our serious belief to be 
 treated earnestly ; too near to it to be delivered over to the 
 play of artistic fancy, like the incidents of the classical 
 Olympus. 
 
 Where then do we stand, on the dissolution of these 
 scenic dreams ? Is their fading away a mere loss, aban- 
 doning us to a desolate negation ? When you think most 
 reverently of Christ, when you most lose yourself in God, 
 when you are clearest in immortal hope, do you wish them 
 back again ? Would they overfill, or would they disap- 
 point, the measures of your spirit in such hours ? May we 
 not say that the more the Divine life awakes within us, the 
 less do we ask, and the less can we bear, that its infinite 
 objects and elements should be rendered finite by being 
 brought into the plane of Perception ? It is only in the 
 rudimentary stages of piety that men crave tangible objects 
 or feigned pictures on which to fasten their wonder and 
 veneration. The perennial fountains of Religion lie in the 
 deepest wells of our nature, in the primary essence of the 
 Reason and the Moral consciousness : but, to suit the ease 
 of "the natural man," there is a constant tendency in more 
 superficial faculties to take possession of it as it rises and 
 treat it as their own. Imagination is delighted with it, 
 mistakes its character, and plays with it perilous experi- 
 ments of colour and of form ; which at last tempt the 
 Senses themselves to claim it and set it fast in some 
 " graven image which shall not be moved." Invert this 
 
 o o 
 
 order of degeneracy, and you recover the purity and reality 
 of faith. Iconoclasm has already dispossessed the Senses : 
 the perishing of Mythology is fast bringing Imagination to 
 repentance and inducing it to lower its sceptre ; and we 
 reach the ultimate simplicity of Christ, '"' the Spirit which 
 beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of 
 God/'
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 329 
 
 Is, then, the power of things invisible destroyed, when 
 they can no longer be treated as if visible ? Uo we not 
 " walk by Faith and not by Sight" ? And is not Imagina- 
 tion essentially " Sight," mere vision with shut eyes ? It 
 can never supply anything to Faith except a perishable 
 drapery : and if we are to have a religion which " neither 
 moth nor rust doth corrupt," we must " lay up our treasure 
 in the heaven " of the spirit, not in earthly folds, however 
 graceful, of the sensuous fancy. There is something sui- 
 cidal in the scene-painting of apocalyptic belief. It is the 
 effort of men's lower mind to draw down objects infinite 
 and eternal within the grasp of their representative faculty, 
 the rebellion of Wonder against its own baffling limits, its 
 resolve to force an answer to its own questions, a relief to 
 its own amazement and suspense. The resolve fulfils its 
 own aim : the answer is self-created : the relief is gained : 
 the blank is filled : the required scenery appears and 
 settles into determinate forms : and then the Wonder sinks 
 away, and with it the Religion dies. When we are called 
 of God to plunge and float in His illimitable sea, what can 
 be more miserable than forthwith to escape and land on 
 some broken spar of mythology or dogma ? 
 
 The devout trusts and habits of the soul in which the 
 pure religious life consists are conscious of their own con- 
 ditions, and ask no help from sense or fancy. " Blessed 
 are they who have not seen and yet have believed " ; who, 
 knowing that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned," 
 pine for no brilliant phantasms, but can "pour forth their 
 song in the night," and to whose thought and love, just as 
 to God himself, "the darkness shineth as the light." 
 What is Divine in the world and in ourselves is precisely 
 what lives behind and within all appearances ; and the 
 assurance of it becomes intense in proportion as outward 
 conditions dissolve like shadows before us, and leave us 
 alone at the inner focus of reality. It is with closed eyes 
 that we best commune with the Father of spirits, and 
 " enter the secret place of the Most High." None the less
 
 330 LOSS AND GAIN 
 
 solemnly does Conscience make us "sure that our sin will 
 find us out," because we have no vision of the hour and 
 the scene of our inevitable shame. And when Death 
 snatches from our side the attendant angels of our life, 
 guides and companions of our way, with their wisdom not 
 half exhausted and the wonders of their love only just 
 begun, are we not as certain that they are made for more 
 than these fragmentary years, as if the landscape were 
 before us of the everlasting hills ? For my part, I put no 
 faith in scenic religion, and look upon the modern ritual- 
 istic return to it as an unfailing mark of inward decay. It 
 is a puerility, or a mockery, to offer it as help in tempta- 
 tion or peace in sorrow. If the immediate pleading of 
 God in our conscience is of no avail, the visionary fires of 
 future torment will glare upon us in vain. And as for our 
 dear departed ones, if we cannot surrender them to the 
 environing infinitude as to the protecting arms of God, it 
 will hardly be more congenial to let them go into any 
 pearl-gated City of the Redeemed. The closer we keep to 
 the simplicity of human life, the meanings of human 
 experience, the depth of human duty and affections, the 
 nearer shall we stand to God as well as man, and the less, 
 from our station on earth, feel ourselves cut off from hea- 
 ven. In youth, if ever we receive a " Serious Call" it is 
 the most elementary religious truths by which the mind 
 becomes entranced. Who can ever forget the intense and 
 lofty years when first the real communion of the Living 
 God, the same God that received the cries of Geth- 
 semane and Calvary, and the Sanctity of the inward Law, 
 and the sublime contents of life on both sides of death, 
 broke in a flood of glory upon his mind, and spread the 
 world before him, stripped of his surface-illusions and with 
 its diviner essence cleared ? The restless intellect of mid- 
 life may toss these things about in speculation, may add to 
 them or take from them, or weave them into the artificial 
 texture of a system. But in old age, as the end draws 
 near, we repose again on these simple truths and trusts,
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 331 
 
 only with a fuller inward witness and more spiritual calm. 
 And so, the evening light is as the morning's, and sheds 
 once more the tenderest beauty on the world. 
 
 Are we then to warn off Imagination from the sacred 
 precincts and, on account of its illusions, allow it no 
 entrance into the religious life ? This would indeed be 
 absurd : as well might we propose to dispense with eye- 
 sight, because the blind can have no falsely-coloured 
 dreams. It is precisely in the sphere of religion that 
 imagination, everywhere essential alike to intellect and to 
 affection, exercises its most glorious rights. But, in order 
 to guard these rights, we must define their limits, perhaps 
 thus : the function of the imagination is to decipher the 
 real though invisible, and not to set up the unreal by exhi- 
 biting it as visible. It finds for us all the hidden truth of 
 which the physical world supplies only the symbols to the 
 eye, the power behind all phenomena, the meaning of 
 every expressive face, the feeling within every tone, the 
 secret spring of every character. It reproduces for us the 
 figures of the past, the theatre of their history, and the 
 passions that move them across the stage. It is the foun- 
 tain of sympathy, by carrying us to the heart of joys and 
 sorrows other than our own ; and of hope, by showing 
 lights of possibility beyond the darkness of the actual. 
 And according as the Gospels are interpreted without or 
 with its aid, the person of " the Son of Man " emerges as 
 that of a Jewish compound of enthusiast and charlatan, or 
 as the Head of a divine humanity. In the support which 
 it affords to spiritual apprehension, it reads the finite into 
 the infinite : its action is expansive ; and its result, an 
 ascent into immeasurable truth. But in the invention of 
 a mythology it reads the infinite into the finite ; its 
 action is contractile ; and its result a descent into puerile 
 fable. 
 
 But I must hasten to my last word. I have spoken of 
 changes of thought since first we studied together : what is 
 the sum of them ? That they discharge the ingenuities of
 
 332 LOSS AND GAIN 
 
 schoolmen and dreamers, and re-deliver us to the intui- 
 tions and pieties of our nature ; by his identification with 
 which it is that Christ wins us as his disciples and makes 
 us one with himself and God. Herein lies the security 
 and, under faithful administration, the intrinsic nobleness 
 of your function, which is nothing else than to represent 
 and work out this inward, spiritual, divine, and perfectible 
 side of human life, and uphold its authority over all that 
 is merely outward, temporal, and animal. Religion is 
 reproached with not being progressive: it makes amends 
 by being imperishable. The enduring element in our 
 humanity is not in the doctrines which we consciously 
 elaborate, but in the faiths which unconsciously dispose of 
 us, and never slumber but to wake again. What treatise 
 on sin, what philosophy of retribution, is as fresh as the 
 fifty-first Psalm ? What scientific theory has lasted like 
 the Lord's Prayer ? If it is an evidence of movement that, 
 in a library, no books become sooner obsolete than books 
 of science, it is no less a mark of stability that poetry and 
 religious literature survive, and even ultimate philosophies 
 seldom die but to rise again. These, and with them the 
 kindred services of devotion, are the expression of aspira- 
 tions and faiths which for ever cry out for interpreters and 
 guides. And in proportion as you carry your appeal to 
 these deepest seats of our nature, you not only reach the 
 firmest ground, but also touch accordant notes in every 
 heart ; so that the response turns out a harmony. Say what 
 we may about the dissensions of Christendom, I yet affirm 
 that Religion in its very essence, and the religion of Christ 
 in the most absolute degree, is a bond of human union 
 tenacious in itself, and increasing the tenacity of every 
 other. It is always the self-assertion of intellect and will 
 that divides us : it is the self-forgetfulness of love and 
 reverence that unites us : and never can we so pass out of 
 our own hands as when we lose ourselves in God : to be 
 one with Him is to be one with each other. There are 
 two sides to human life ; one, towards the kingdom of
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 333 
 
 nature ; the other, towards the kingdom of God. To the 
 former belong all the secular competitions, the strife of 
 opinion, the self-regarding efforts, the passions of party, the 
 conflicts of war, which keep the world in a ferment of 
 ambitions, and make it the prize of victorious capacity. 
 To the latter belong all the blending affections, the 
 common admirations, the subduing pieties, the enthusiasms 
 for the true, the just, the holy, by which life is sweetened 
 and purified, and healing brought to its sorrows and peace 
 to its storms. In the rivalry between the two, rude voices 
 proclaim the triumph of the energies ; but Christ steps 
 forth and pronounces the beatitudes. That winning voice 
 has brought you to his side. You have accepted from him 
 a function which is not pre-occupied by the eager partizans 
 of separate interest or opinion, not superseded by the 
 journal or the platform ; viz., to become the organ of far 
 deeper faith than opinion, of hope that is never clouded, 
 of chanty that conquers ill ; to intensify the hunger and 
 thirst after righteousness ; to open the dull eye of the spirit 
 to the beauty and graces hid beneath the plain face of life ; 
 and reverently watch over that purity of heart which alone 
 can see God. In this service of Divine ends, be not 
 dismayed by the seeming scorn of heedless men : could 
 you look behind that screen, you would find that in their 
 remoter soul you have an eternal Advocate, " the spirit of 
 truth that cometh from the Father." Whoever will deal 
 with realities must often disbelieve appearances : else how 
 should he ever suspect that, beneath the driving waves 
 and angry surge of human passions, the same waters, 
 through miles of depth, lie tranquil in their bed ? The 
 harmonizing element in the soul is infinitely vaster and 
 more enduring than the discordant : only it remains latent 
 till you absolutely believe in it and live in it. But you 
 will soon meet it and learn to trust it, when once you dare 
 to speak to what is least visible in human character, yet 
 most surely witnessed in your heart of hearts. 
 
 Dear Friends and Brothers, if it is well, in this work of
 
 334 LOSS AND GAIN 
 
 ours, to begin with the Heathen idea of perfection and 
 know ourselves, it is indispensable to go on to the Christian 
 and forget ourselves. Here lies the secret of spiritual 
 power. Our own brief experience, as well as all Christian 
 history, attests this. When I look back over the two 
 generations that are clear to me in memory or in record, 
 and, among the inevitable varieties of worth, notice the 
 figures and features that survive in thought, the differences 
 are full of pathetic lights and shades. The vain and 
 empty are simply gone without a trace, their egoism melted 
 into nothingness. The hard and opinionative are remem- 
 bered indeed, and with homage to their integrity ; but 
 remembered with a smile, as belonging to the past ; or, if 
 more, only on account of some redeeming enthusiasm or 
 tenderness which hinted a suppressed fire within. But the 
 forms that are still radiant, the eyes that have not lost their 
 glow and are still as if near to us in the distant air, are 
 those of loving and trustful disciples, surrendered to faithful 
 service, and spending in it, with childlike simplicity, the 
 gifts of genius or the affluence of culture. Your own hearts 
 will testify that it is no mere personal accident if Channing, 
 inspirer of my youth, and John James Tayler, the friend 
 of my full age, live before me among the dearest and most 
 sacred figures of my past, and of my future. It is their 
 purity of soul, their constancy in duty, their tenderness 
 of affection, their life in God, that joins them to the train 
 of Christ, and mingles them with the lengthening pro- 
 cession of the saints. Their work is in your hands : may 
 the grace and power of their spirit be continued in your 
 hearts !
 
 IN RECENT THEOLOGY. 335 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 God of our life ! who abidest for ever, but appointest 
 the ages to carry us away as with a flood ! we would 
 pass into thy hand and rest in thee. Our wishes are blind : 
 thy wisdom is infinite : we trust thy mercy alike, whether 
 thou make our time short, or allot to us length of days. 
 Our only prayer shall be that, morning or evening, in the 
 light or in the shadows, we may be moulded to thy perfect 
 will. 
 
 O Spirit of grace, whose witness appeareth in the lives 
 of the righteous, and is hid in the secret places of all 
 hearts ! clear our vision to read it truly, and waken our 
 courage to declare it faithfully. Rising above all proud 
 thoughts and selfish aims and unloving temper, may we 
 dedicate ourselves to thee in the meekness and simplicity 
 of Christ. Sanctify every soul that seeks thee here ; and 
 send us to our remaining work with chastened desires, with 
 truer diligence, and more devoted fidelity. Living or 
 dying, here or there, still join us in love to each other and 
 to thee. Amen.
 
 OCCASIONAL SERMONS, &c. 
 
 VOL. IV.
 
 VIEWS OF THE WORLD FROM HALLEY'S 
 COMET. 
 
 Z 2
 
 TO THE 
 
 CONGREGATION OF PROTESTANT DISSENTERS 
 
 ASSEMBLING IX 
 
 PARADISE STREET CHAPEL, LIVERPOOL, 
 
 TO ACCOMPANY AND AID WHOSE CHRISTIAN PROGRESS IN THE 
 
 EXERCISE OF A FREE MIND, 
 
 THE PRACTICE OF A PURE MORALITY, 
 
 AND THE SENTIMENTS OF A LOFTY DEVOTION, 
 
 is THE AUTHOR'S DUTY AND DESIRE, 
 
 THIS DISCOURSE, PREPARED IN THEIR SERVICE, 
 
 IS INSCRIBED 
 
 BY THEIR AFFECTIONATE FRIEND AND FELLOW-WORSHIPPER, 
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU.
 
 VIEWS OF THE WORLD FROM H ALLEY'S 
 COMET.* 
 
 " Lift up your eyes on high, and behold, who hath created those 
 things, that bringeth out their host by number ; he calleth them 
 all by their names, by the greatness of his might, for that He is 
 strong in power ; not one faileth." ISAIAH xl. 26. 
 
 AMONG those conjunctions of ideas which have appeared 
 in all nations and at all times, none has imprinted itself 
 more distinctly on the imagination and language of mankind, 
 than the association of the visible heavens with the con- 
 ception of Deity. Most of the departments of human 
 knowledge have had their origin in the physical neces- 
 sities of man ; but astronomy has sprung, in part at least, 
 from his want of a religion. With the elder nations of the 
 world, the priest of the Divinity was the priest of Nature 
 too, and interpreted in the same breath the will of Provi- 
 dence and the courses of the stars : the temple by day was 
 an observatory by night ; the catacombs of the dead had 
 passages pointing to the northern pole ; : and between the 
 vicissitudes of earth and the revolutions of the skies was 
 imagined a mystic sympathy, enabling the wise to read the 
 fates of nations, in the silent language of those moving 
 lights. Under the serene heavens of Asia and of Egypt, 
 Science and Adoration entered the world together, twin 
 births of midnight ! 
 
 There is nothing surprising in this association of Reli- 
 gion with Astronomy. The affinity between the material 
 
 * Paradise Street Chapel, Liverpool, September 27, 1835.
 
 342 VIEWS OF THE WORLD 
 
 and the moral sublime is close and natural; and the 
 scenery of night, witnessed in silence and answering the 
 observer's gaze witrf the glance of a thousand eyes travelling 
 through the immeasurable distance, the silence so like 
 death, the movement so like life, might well oppress the 
 soul with the sense of mystery, and dissolve thought into 
 veneration. The two ideas which are the chief elements 
 in the conception of Deity are irresistibly forced upon the 
 mind by a nocturnal sky ; the notions of unlimited space, 
 and of indefinite time. What fitter dwelling for the great 
 Ruler of human things, than that expanse in which the 
 earth is hung ? What more durable palace for the Eternal, 
 than the firmament, whose fires have lighted unnumbered 
 generations to the tomb, and seem destined to burn on 
 undimmed when man and his works may be no more ? 
 Nor was it wholly unnatural to dream of a possible con- 
 nection between the stars and the future, the mysterious 
 in space and the mysterious in time. The only visible 
 objects which travel into the cycles of the future, and whose 
 movements are so regular as to symbolize the inexorability 
 of fate, they might well be supposed cognizant of the secrets 
 of destiny, and thought to exhibit to the initiated the sacred 
 cipher of prophecy. 
 
 Experience has dissipated the errors of this venerable 
 faith. A more manly homage is now rendered to the 
 wonders of the skies, the homage, not of ignorance to its 
 own dreams, but of knowledge to intelligible and magnifi- 
 cent order. The better study of cause and effect has 
 broken the fancied ties of fate between the celestial and 
 sublunary spheres ; and human affairs are understood to 
 pursue their course in the order of moral causation, without 
 witness or revealer in the heavens, except that eye and word 
 of Providence which looks, and bids that all be well. While 
 the heavenly bodies roll on, in conformity with the laws 
 which regulate material systems, the events which make up 
 the history of man are evolved from the energy of human 
 reason and passion, andean be predicted only from a know-
 
 FROM H ALLEY'S COMET. 343 
 
 ledge of the human will. Though, however, the heavens 
 have no control over the progress of human affairs, their 
 mighty periods enable us to measure it; though they suggest 
 not the same ideas of our own nature and of God, which 
 presented themselves to the sages of old, they may suggest 
 other and better, and be teachers still of faith and hope. 
 At least, I either find, or fancy, a fit occasion in the recent 
 appearance of a Comet, in precise accordance with astro- 
 nomical anticipation, to present to you a few thoughts, on 
 the prospects which Providence opens to society and the 
 individual mind. It is impossible for even an uncultivated 
 intellect to regard with indifference the most distinguished 
 celestial phenomenon of our times : and there are circum- 
 stances connected with it, which suggest reflections of no 
 common interest. The star in question belongs to a set of 
 bodies, which were long held to be exceptions to the sym- 
 metry and even to the benevolence of nature, to be 
 wandering curses, subject to no law, and let slip to blight 
 the beauty of creation. It is the first of its class whose 
 periodical revolution was discovered, and which verified a 
 prediction of its punctual return. It appears only after 
 intervals of seventy-five years, so that Halley, the philoso- 
 pher, who first defined its orbit, and foretold its approach, 
 was gone from the world, when it fulfilled his announce- 
 ment. The present is but the second of its anticipated 
 appearances ; and it comes into the vicinity of the sun from 
 beyond the cold confines of the solar system. 
 
 The arrival of this body may mark to our minds the 
 progress of society. Civilization is too slow-paced to be 
 calculable by our common years ; it moves by generations ; 
 it is measured by cycles ; it steps from century to century. 
 Its advance, imperceptible day by day, becomes appreciable 
 to the mind that sweeps over a vast reach of duration, and 
 compares together remote points of history. The cometary 
 year is no unfit auxiliary to this process of comparison. It 
 presents to society a species of anniversary, which should 
 not be allowed to pass without self-examination ; its
 
 344 VIEWS OF THE WORLD 
 
 successive returns may be used as a series of signal-posts, 
 raised on the great plain of time, from each of which the 
 eye can take the survey to the preceding, till all vision is 
 lost in the obscurity of antiquity. One who should visit 
 the world with the comet would witness phenomena 
 cheering to his faith in Providence. 
 
 Six of its years ago, 2 Europe was immersed in an intel- 
 lectual darkness almost total. Amid the gloom, priestcraft 
 celebrated its carnival, and played its most "fantastic tricks 
 before High Heaven." Religion was the only good 
 influence operating on the soul of society ; and that was no 
 longer the inspiration of God upon the heart, but the 
 pressure of priests upon the will : no longer a principle of 
 love, but the power of fear. Art had given no impulse to 
 human ingenuity : and commerce, except in two or three 
 cities of Italy, brought no contributions even to external 
 and physical civilization. Force and superstition were the 
 only preservers of social order. Almost the only method 
 by which genius could pour its ideas and sentiments into 
 the popular mind, was by the recent, or recently revived, :i 
 invention of oil-painting, the divine art, which at its birth 
 was consecrated to religion, and brought before the eye of 
 unlettered multitudes the grace and pathos of Scripture 
 story, and enshrined in rude hearts the love of purity and 
 the aspirations of holiness, under the images of Mary and 
 of Christ. Amid the sleep of the general mind, 4 a promise, 
 indeed, of better days had arisen. The writers of Greece 
 and Rome had just been rescued from a long oblivion ; ' 
 but it was only by an indirect and circuitous influence, by 
 furnishing the impulse to the production of national and 
 popular literature, that their recovery could act on the great 
 mass of men. After a long polar winter of the mind, the 
 brilliant orb of ancient learning had arisen on the summits 
 of society, and began to melt the snows which had frozen 
 its genius ; but the valleys still lay beneath the night, and 
 were unvisited yet by the descending streams of thought, 
 that were to clothe the wilderness with fertility.
 
 FROM H ALLEY'S COMET. 345 
 
 Suppose another cycle gone, and our eye turned again 
 upon the world. 6 All darkness still ; fear, and strife, and 
 bloodshed walk the earth in melancholy triumph. The 
 labourers of Providence in the peaceful arts of civilization 
 seem fewer and more dispirited than before. But in the 
 obscurity of a German city, an instrument is seen, of little 
 note indeed, and power undeveloped, but great significance; 
 in which the spirit of foresight perceives that Providence 
 was never more beneficent, and humanity never on the eve 
 of a mightier career. The implements of Printing are at 
 work. 7 
 
 When the periodic visitant returns again 8 to look upon 
 the earth, the face of all things is changed. For itself, // is 
 not likely to lurk any longer unnoticed in the heavens, and 
 glide through its course unrecognized ; for Copernicus 9 is 
 there to gaze ; and Algebra, a new instrument of unrivalled 
 power in the scientific interpretation of nature, is already 
 in men's hands. 10 There is a perceptible accession of 
 refinement to the hearts, and dignity to the minds of 
 men ; for they have held converse with the creations 
 of poetry and art ; u the genius of Italy has converted 
 a material into an ideal existence, and visited them 
 with the perceptions of beauty, and aspirations after 
 better life. The thraldom of fear upon the passions is 
 relieved by the sentiment of intellectual admiration, and 
 the impulses of moral sympathy. Above all, the consoli- 
 dated tyranny of Rome is cleft in twain ; and though it 
 has been truly said of the Reformation, that it gave to the 
 human mind many lords instead of one, still it is some- 
 thing to have a choice of masters ; and by that species of 
 infinite division to which Protestant intolerance tends, 
 despotism becomes attenuated into liberty, and fanaticism 
 must be starved for want of sympathy. The fatal spell of 
 Pontifical Tradition was broken. The book of life was 
 open before the eyes of men ; and however their ignorance 
 may misunderstand, and their passions pervert its meaning, 
 it teaches too variously, by parable and precept, by model
 
 346 VIEWS OF THE WORLD 
 
 and by miracle, the infinite paternity of God, the univer- 
 sality of his Providence, and the equal and immortal rela- 
 tion of all men to him, not to drive away the fierce fancies 
 of bigotry at last, and sublime the devotion, while it refines 
 the morality of the world. True it is, that within the very 
 generation of which I speak, one of the most malignant 
 acts of intolerance w r as committed : Calvin, after himself 
 rejecting the doctrine of Transubstantiation, one of the 
 twin mysteries of Rome, burnt Servetus as a heretic, for 
 rejecting the Trinity, which was the other. 1 ' But in the 
 meanwhile, so long as persecution should disgrace the 
 annals of the old world, a refuge was not inaccessible ; for 
 America had been opened to human enterprise, and was 
 destined to become the asylum of oppressed religion, the 
 forest nurse of infant liberty. 13 
 
 It was not to be expected, that succeeding epochs should 
 be marked by such extraordinary strides of improvement, 
 such an eager crowd of civilizing causes, as this memorable 
 period displayed. Time was needed for the development 
 of their natural effects ; and in these effects, whether 
 we look to the creation of great individual minds, or to 
 the silent amelioration of institutions, and the diffusion of 
 a more intelligent social spirit, there is nothing to dis- 
 appoint, or to let down our rising faith in the progress 
 of Christian communities. At the expiration of the next 
 seventy-five years, Bacon had made his gigantic survey of 
 creation, and traced a high road of discovery through 
 its most difficult defiles ; Galileo had invented the Tele- 
 scope, that magic eye wherewith to read the luminous 
 lessons of the firmanent, and had brought to the shrine 
 of science the four moons of the Planet Jupiter, a coronet 
 of gems, offered in gratitude for her gift of this new sense ; 
 and Shakspeare had enriched the world with the marvel- 
 lous creations of his genius, in which life will receive 
 illustration, and man will see his image to the end of 
 time. 14 
 
 Another interval ; and the wandering luminarv returned
 
 FROM HALLE Y'S COMET. 347 
 
 just time enough to be the torch which followed Milton to 
 his grave, and led on the philosophy of Newton to its 
 modest throne. Locke too was at that moment busy with 
 the human mind, engaged in such researches into its 
 capabilities and weaknesses, into the source of its fallacies, 
 and its means of attaining truth, as must inevitably cut up 
 the strength of intolerance by the roots, banish from society 
 the mischievous confusion between guilt which resides in 
 the will, and error which belongs to the understanding, and 
 prepare the way for that spirit of serene and dignified 
 charity, which Christianity itself can never produce, except 
 in combination with a knowledge of human nature. 15 
 
 It was inevitable that the improvement of society should 
 now 10 assume a less imposing form. Providence appears 
 to forbid the ascendency of solitary genius for many genera- 
 tions in succession. The vastness of its onward bound 
 distances immediate pursuit ; a pause must be allowed for 
 humbler minds to overtake the position it has seized. In 
 science, the truth to which it darts with almost the ease of 
 intuition, others must reach by the steady march of labour- 
 ing reason, over the successive steps of evidence. To climb 
 the eminence which it gains would render ordinary faculties 
 dizzy, did they not palpably feel how firm the footing at 
 every stage, and accustom their vision to the prospect as it 
 grows. Accordingly, the age of discovery is naturally 
 followed by one of circumspection. After so fleet a 
 transportation through scenes of various wonder and 
 magnificence, knowledge sits down to make up its journal, 
 and reduce to order its tumult of impressions. And in 
 poetry and art, the first effect of productions of the highest 
 order, is to overawe all neighbouring minds ; the last to 
 inspire them with kindred creative power. They exhaust 
 for a while all the perceptions of beauty; and time must be 
 allowed for new ideas and perceptions to arise, for new 
 types of thought and character to be struck out, before any- 
 rival excellence can rise up. The higher kinds of merit 
 being preoccupied, mechanical and material, rather than
 
 348 VIEWS OF THE WORLD 
 
 ideal excellence, is for a time the only superiority which is 
 attainable. The desire, moreover, arises to dwell on the 
 emotions of admiration, to recur to them in cooler 
 moments, and trace them to their source. Hence it is 
 not surprising that, in the next period, Milton should be 
 replaced by Pope ; for the successor of genius is precision ; 
 and criticism follows production. The social amelioration, 
 however, was no less real for being less conspicuous. The 
 great conquests of Newton were not ingloriously followed 
 up. 17 Handel found for Scripture a voice most heavenly. 
 The pure-minded and accomplished Berkeley broke into 
 speculations which opened a new era of opinion, and 
 stamped on the succeeding age some of the most striking 
 of its intellectual features. 18 
 
 We stand ourselves at one extremity of that age ; 19 and 
 unless we are deceived by the nearness of our view, and see 
 what at the distance of a cometary year would vanish into 
 nothing, never, in any of its former returns, had the causes 
 of social progression acquired such strength and organiza- 
 tion. The shadows of gigantic changes have swept the 
 earth ; the forms themselves approach ; their footsteps are 
 already on the ear. It is not indeed to be denied, that in 
 the recent history of civilization, there are some passages 
 dark and terrible : and in the present state of knowledge, 
 some things disappointing to minds that have conversed 
 lovingly with the master spirits of an earlier age. Physical 
 science has been accused of positive decline; and in 
 morals and religion there has been a fearful convulsion of 
 opinions, at which alarmists tremble. The two phenomena 
 are intimately connected ; and conjointly are but a passing 
 symptom of the greatest of all revolutions, the diffusion of 
 knowledge, thought and emotion before concentrated, the 
 elevation of the great mass of men to a position of greater 
 dignity, and a feeling of more healthy self-respect. It may 
 be true that the material creation is not studied now 
 in the temper of Boyle and Newton ; that the vulgar 
 demand of immediate utility may have let down the lofty
 
 FROM H ALLEY'S COMET. 349 
 
 and reverent enthusiasm, with which those elder spirits 
 aspired to learn ; that we have found a place of traffic in 
 that science of nature, which to them was a house of 
 prayer, a fresh-opened temple, whose gates they passed 
 with awe, and in whose courts they bowed their heads to 
 listen to the faintest oracle. Yet even of natural knowledge, 
 the names of Davy and of Werner remind us of two lagging 
 departments, chemistry and geology, which have been 
 triumphantly brought up. And the generous zeal which 
 has declined in one direction has burst forth in another. 
 Inquiry has ascended from the natural to the moral world; 
 man has retired within himself, to study his own faculties, 
 to sift his opinions, to analyse his sentiments of moral 
 obligation, to contemplate his relations to his fellows and 
 to God. True it is, that under the guidance of Voltaire 
 and Hume, this process issued for a time in a spread of 
 scepticism, startling enough to those who see in religion an 
 indispensable element of social improvement. In removing 
 the spell of superstition, they withdrew the charter of hope. 
 These great disenchanters of reason, in exorcizing human 
 fanaticism, cast out human faith. But the purer of the 
 two spirits, weary of " wandering through dry places," will 
 return, disengaged from the unclean : and "bringing with 
 it other spirits " as heavenly as itself, will enter its abode 
 again, and "find it swept and garnished." "The last state 
 of that " mind is better " than the first." The breaking 
 up of creeds and forms is the mark of a period of social 
 transition, the preparation, on which wise and trustful 
 men will look with calmness, for some new faith, not less 
 fervent and more enlightened. It is the needful fusing of 
 old material, ere thought is poured into new moulds, and 
 comes out in diviner forms. Led in another direction by 
 one of the profoundest of philosophers, Adam Smith, society 
 has turned to the study of itself. And that science, of 
 which he was the creator, has already done too much in 
 softening the jealousies of nations, in rebuking the selfish- 
 ness of class, in exciting sympathy for the well-being of the
 
 350 VIEWS OF THE WORLD 
 
 industrious many, not to give good hope, from its co-opera- 
 tion with higher causes, for the peace of communities, and 
 the civilization of the world. It is the character of all the 
 changes in our recent history, that they have favourably 
 affected the condition of the great body of the population ; 
 have extended improvement from the few to the many, 
 and brought the meditations of the thinker and the philan- 
 thropist to bear on the intelligence and character of 
 millions. Few now are without the consciousness of a 
 mental and moral existence. And though that benevolence 
 must be paltry, which can look with satisfied complacency 
 at the present state of the public mind and character, at 
 the present amount of education and aspect of religion, yet 
 there is ground for gratulation, that the instruments of 
 improvement are in our hands, and the aspirations of 
 society still turned towards better things. Even the feelings 
 awakened by the present astronomical phenomenon afford 
 indications of favourable change. At its last appearance, 
 and still more in remoter times, it was contemplated 
 with terrified superstition, deprecated with prayer and 
 penance, and greeted as the flying scourge of anger, and 
 forerunner of doom. Now it is met with tranquil expecta- 
 tion. Better notions of the Creator, and a firmer trust in 
 his paternity prevail. Portions of his universe like this, 
 whose office we cannot understand, are thought more likely 
 to exercise functions of benevolence, than of judgment : 
 and His is felt to be the Providence of a Protecting, rather 
 than an Avenging God. From the recurrence of this 
 period, then, may we not take occasion to augur well of the 
 destinies of the world ? As in our pilgrimage of observation 
 it plants our foot on age after age, we feel that we ascend : 
 and as we stand aloft on our present stage of history, and 
 look forth into the shadows of coming years, to suffer the 
 imagination to people them with brilliant creations, and 
 discern amid the darkness a land of better promise, is no 
 dream of disordered enthusiasm, but the just vaticination 
 of a eood heart.
 
 FROM H ALLEY'S COMET. 351 
 
 This event is not only a testimony to the advancement of 
 mankind collectively, but an assurance, or at least a sugges- 
 tion not wholly worthless, in corroboration of the voice of 
 Christian promise, of the individual immortality of man. Look 
 only at the comparative duration of this comet, and of our 
 mortal existence. One of its years exceeds the whole length 
 of human life : the men who witness one of its visits, have 
 taken their departure when it comes again : and on it rolls, 
 cycle after cycle, their span of life mocked by its durability. 
 And yet one of these short-lived minds could place itself in 
 the temple of science ; and catching only a little glimpse, a 
 few faint hints, of its orbit, rise up and prophesy its course 
 eternally. Nay more, he could make it tell the secrets of 
 those invisible spaces into which it plunges, and bring back 
 tidings, whether there be other planets beyond the known 
 limits of our system. 20 He could tell the place, the year, 
 the month of its return. And yet, when it comes to do 
 honour to his intellect by its exactitude, it looks down upon 
 his quiet grave, and his children only share the triumph ! 
 Is this credible in the government of God? Shall the 
 material thing, inorganic, inert, impercipient, move on in 
 this wondrous perpetuity ; and shall the soul, which dis- 
 cerns its order, and tracks its career, and detects its laws, 
 and admires its lustre, and speculates on its constitution, 
 be swept away as nothing before it ? Shall unconscious 
 matter last, while the mind, to which alone its functions 
 are subservient, which interprets its mysteries, and reads in 
 them the signature of God, vanish like the passing wind ? 
 Shall the works and discoveries of intelligence survive itself, 
 and while the toil is its own, shall the reward be for its 
 successors ? Shall the knowledge and the thoughts of men 
 be handed down in endless genealogy, teaching and in- 
 spiring the soul of other times, and shall the conscious 
 being which created them be blotted ignominiously from 
 creation ! Impossible ! it cannot be but that Halley and 
 Newton, through the medium of whose thought we now 
 gaze at the skies, witness elsewhere the excellence of their
 
 352 VIEWS OF THE WORLD 
 
 past toils, the triumphs of their studious meditations. 
 Surely the heavens which they deciphered they behold, 
 with eyes undimmed by age, and minds yet yearning, but 
 in a spirit of profounder adoration, to press forward towards 
 vaster disclosures of the infinitude of God. 
 
 And if we may be permitted to imagine what sentiment 
 they would address to us, could we but hear their friendly 
 voice, perchance they would bid us learn a lesson of Provi- 
 dence from their experience. They might say : " Behold 
 the infinite fidelity of God ! Amid the seeming lawlessness 
 of this star, once deemed the offspring of Divine caprice, 
 an inflexible order, a fair symmetry, an entire absence of 
 fortuity prevail. Be assured, thus faithful and immutable is 
 the Eternal in his administration of the moral world ; thus 
 inexorable the connection of effect and cause within the 
 soul of man ; thus certainly, despite all apparent confusion, 
 will the Providence of humanity fulfil its cycle of mystic 
 but blessed fates. Fear nothing, hope nothing, from chance 
 and change within the circuit of his sway. In your aspira- 
 tions after well-being study the laws of Duty. Changeless 
 as the tie which binds the planets to their orbits, or the 
 ocean to the shore, is the decree of the world of spirits, 
 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap."
 
 NOTES. 
 
 1 In the great pyramid, called the pyramid of Cheops, the exit 
 from the chamber containing the sarcophagus is by a passage to the 
 North, ascending at an angle of 26 to the horizon. Twenty-six degrees 
 being the latitude of the building, the passage evidently points to the 
 pole. The same construction is found in the smaller pyramids. See 
 "Bclzoni's Researches in Egypt and Nubia," Vol. I. p. 416. 
 
 y A. ix 1380 A. D. 1456. 
 
 3 Vasari, in his " History of the Lives of the most excellent Painters, 
 Sculptors, and Architects," ascribes the invention of oil-painting to 
 John Van Eyck, of Bruges, who was born in 1369. This painter, how- 
 ever, appears to deserve only the humbler honour of reviving the art ; 
 as, in the opinion of the most competent judges, Mr. Raspe has shown 
 that it was practised ages before Van Eyck was born. See Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds' "Journey to Flanders and Holland." Bruges. 
 
 4 Those who remember that before the era of which I speak, Dante 
 had lived and died (1321), that his immortal poem was honoured 
 throughout Italy, and that in Milan, Bologna, and Florence, professors 
 had been established for the sole purpose of expounding it, may think 
 the foregoing estimate of the intellectual condition of Europe in the 
 fourteenth century too low. But the kind of intoxicated admiration 
 which the Divina Commcdia excited, really proves how far Dante was 
 raised above his contemporaries and successors, and how little he can 
 be taken as a measure of the mental advancement of his age. To 
 venerate is not necessarily to appreciate. " Les Commentaires," says 
 M. Sismondi, " qu'on nous a donnes sur le Dante fournissent une 
 nouvelle preuve de la superiorite de ce grand homme ; on y voit avec 
 t-tonnement ses admirateurs a gages, incapables d'apprecier sa vraie 
 grandeur." " Le grand savoir du Dante a aussi excite 1'admiration de 
 ses commentateurs ; et, en effet, le poete parait avoir reuni toutes les 
 connaissances qui ornaient son siecle ; son livre en est le depot ; il 
 indique assez exactement jusqu' ou etait parvenue la science ; il montre 
 aussi combien elle avait encore de chemin a faire pour satisfaire 1'esprit." 
 ' Sismondi's Litte'rature du midi de 1'Europe," VoL I. p. 395. 
 
 5 Petrarch, to whose z-jal Europe was greatly indebted for the re- 
 VOI.. IV. A A
 
 354 NOTES. 
 
 vived attention to classical literature, and the discovery of many of its 
 remains, died in 1374. 
 
 6 A.D. 1456-1531. 
 
 7 Printing, that is, by movable metal types ; the first use of which 
 constitutes the true date of the invention of the press. They were 
 introduced by Fust, Schofer and Guttenberg at Mentz ; and their first 
 application \vas to the printing of the Mazarine Bible, between 1450 
 and 1455. If, as there seems some reason to believe, the types used in 
 this work were cut by hand, the first complete separation of the arts of 
 engraving and printing, took place in 1462, when the Mentz Bible, 
 unquestionably executed by cast types, issued from the press. Engraved 
 blocks of wood had been long in use ; as far back as the early part of 
 the fourteenth century in the manufacture of playing cards, and more 
 recently in multiplying copies of certain rude drawings of saints, with a 
 quantity of explanatory text. Sec " Hallam's Middle Ages," Chap. 
 IX. part 2. 
 
 8 A.D. 1531. 
 
 9 He was born at Thorn in Prussia, in 1473 ; and died in 1543- 
 The work in which he explained the apparent motions of the heavenly 
 bodies by a rotation of the earth on its axis, conjoined with an annual 
 revolution round the sun, was put into his hands a few hours before his 
 death. He is described by Kepler as "a man of great genius, and 
 what is of great moment in these matters, of a free mind." Prefatio 
 ad Paulum III. Pontif. max. 
 
 10 Notwithstanding some faint traces of an earlier existence, both in 
 Germany and Italy, Algebra must be regarded as having been intro- 
 duced for the first time to the knowledge of Europeans in general, by 
 Lucas de Burgo in a work published at Venice in 1494. 
 
 " It was the brilliant period when Michael Angelo, Titian, Cor- 
 reggio and Ariosto were still living, and the works of Giorgione and 
 Raffaele still fresh. 
 
 n This memorable crime was perpetrated in 1553. It was an act of 
 disinterested theological aversion ; in holy zeal for the truth, the re- 
 Dormer was willing to serve the Trinity by the sacrifice of all the 
 scruples of honour, and relentings of humanity. Servetus was neither 
 countryman, nor ecclesiastical rival, nor heretical neighbour of Calvin ; 
 but an Arragonese by descent, a physician by profession, and a French 
 subject by settlement. Through the influence of his former fellow- 
 student and correspondent Calvin, he was thrown into prison in 
 France. Passing through Geneva, on an intended journey to Naples, 
 he was arrested on Sunday, August 19, 1553, by the vigilant exercise 
 of the same influence ; Calvin's servant, with singular meanness, was 
 put forward as the accuser ; Calvin himself furnished in evidence, on 
 the trial, papers which had been confidentially submitted to him for
 
 NOTES. 355 
 
 his opinion by the accused. Servetus complained of having been left 
 without the most necessary comforts of clothing in a dungeon, the damp 
 and intolerable loathsomeness of which were destroying him ; and his 
 remonstrances were treated with contempt. lie petitioned, as a 
 foreigner, to be allowed the advantage of an advocate ; and he was 
 told that he wanted none, for he himself was a perfect adept in the art 
 of lying. A proposal was made by one of his more compassionate 
 judges, to remove the trial to another court, the supreme council of the 
 Two Hundred ; Calvin, enraged at this attempt " to free the wretch 
 from punishment," by transferring the case from an ecclesiastical to a 
 civil tribunal, stifled it at once. " What a glorious reformation," says 
 Mr. Robinson, "had been wrought at Geneva, when the proof of a 
 man's Christianity lay in his humbly requesting the magistrate to burn 
 a foreign gentleman, over whom they had no jurisdiction, for the 
 honour of God and his eminent servant, Mr. Calvin ! " Throughout 
 this transaction the claim, so seldom disallowed by civilized commu- 
 nities, of the stranger and the passer-by, to the offices of common 
 humanity, seems not for one moment to have been felt. But in- 
 tolerance has no such local prejudices ; it has no country ; its hate is 
 universal. During the proceedings, Calvin wrote to Farel, " I hope 
 Servetus will be condemned to death ; but I wish that the severity of 
 his punishment may be mitigated.' It would have been fortunate for 
 the memory of the reformer, had this language less closely resembled 
 the smooth speeches, in which inquisitors have always been in the 
 habit of expressing their sympathy with their victims, when beyond 
 the reach of the last hope of mercy ; or had any attempt on his part 
 been recorded, to procure the alleviation which he desired, and could 
 not be without the power of effecting ; or had there been no earlier 
 letter of his extant to his friend Farel, in which he declares, " if ever 
 this heretic should fall into my hands, I will take care, if my authority 
 is worth a straw, that he shall not slip through them with his life." 
 History fulfilled the threat, and disappointed the benevolent wishes, 
 of Calvin ; for on October 27, 1553, Servetus, whose constancy never 
 failed him, was burnt alive. The act appears to have given great 
 satisfaction to the leaders of the reformation. Calvin himself never 
 repented of it ; but eight years after, recommended it to the high 
 chamberlain of the king of Navarre, as a model for the treatment of 
 heretics ; " above all, do not fail to rid the country of those infamous 
 zealots who stir up the people to revolt against us ; such monsters 
 should be exterminated, as I have exterminated Michael Servetus the 
 Spaniard." Beza took occasion from the act to write in defence of the 
 destruction of heretics ; even the moderate Melancthon testified hi> 
 approbation; and I'uccr ("a man," says Calvin, "of holy memory, 
 and true servant of Christ,") had long before declared from the pulpit,
 
 356 NOTES. 
 
 that " Servetus deserved evisceration, and to be torn limb from limb." 
 Well may Mr. Robinson say, "this sentence was executed to the 
 encouragement of Catholic cruelty, to the scandal of the pretended 
 reformation, to the offence of all just men, and to the everlasting dis- 
 grace of those ecclesiastical tyrants, who were the chief instruments of 
 such a wild and barbarous deed. Many have pretended to apologize 
 for Calvin ; but who is John Calvin, and what are his nostrums, which 
 end in tyranny and murder, that the great voice of nature should be 
 drowned in the din of a vain babbling about him." "Robinson's 
 Ecclesiastical Researches," p. 341. 
 
 13 The American continent was discovered in 1498 : the -conquest of 
 Mexico, the first Spanish settlement, effected in 1527 : and the colony 
 of Virginia, the first British settlement, named in 1585. 
 
 M Bacon published the Novum Organum in 1620. Galileo dis- 
 covered Jupiter's satellites, January 8, 1610. Shakspeare died in 
 1616. 
 
 14 Milton died in 1674. Newton published his Principia in 1686. 
 Locke formed the design of his Essay on the Human Understanding in 
 1670; and it was published in 1690. 
 
 16 A.D. 1682-1759. 
 
 17 By Halley, Bradley, Clairaut, Lalande, &c. 
 
 18 Handel died in 1759. Bishop Berkeley in 1753. 
 
 19 A.D. I759-I835- 
 
 20 Clairaut, assisted by Lalande, undertook in 1757 the arduous task 
 of computing the probable return of Halley's Comet, allowing for the 
 effect of planetary perturbations on its course. He found that by the 
 action of Saturn its arrival would be delayed 100 days, and by the 
 action of Jupiter as much as 518. He suggested, that possibly the 
 comet's period might undergo a further modification from the attraction 
 of some yet undiscovered planet, beyond the orbit of Saturn. The 
 arrival of the comet at the perihelion on March I3th, instead of April 
 1 3th, as he had predicted, afforded a remarkable confirmation of this 
 conjecture. Its complete verification was reserved, as is well known, 
 for Sir William Herschel, who discovered the planet which is called by 
 his name on the ijth March, 1781.
 
 NEED OF CULTURE FOR THE CHRISTIAN 
 MINISTRY.* 
 
 " Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth 
 not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." 
 2 TIMOTHY, ii. 15. 
 
 THERE is perhaps no Church in Christendom which 
 exhibits the character and influences of the Gospel in their 
 true and complete proportion. The spirit of Christianity 
 has undergone decomposition ; some of its elements have 
 been embraced in the religion of sacerdotal or national 
 establishments, others in the religion of sects. In establish- 
 ments are preserved its traditional usages and archaic 
 forms of speech ; in dissent, its practical moral power. In 
 -the one it appeals to the imagination and more refined 
 emotions ; in the other, with graver tones to the conscience 
 and the life. In the one it acts as a sentiment, in the other 
 as a principle ; calling up in the former case the sense of 
 the dignified, the picturesque, the magnificent ; in the 
 latter, the cogency of strong and uncompromising convic- 
 tion. The devotion of the one is quieter, more personal, 
 the offering of reverence ; that of the other, more aspiring 
 ff.nd passionate, the offering of a less distant adoration. 
 The morality of the former, merciful to human frailties, 
 borders upon laxity ; that of the latter, of more jealous 
 temper, tends to austerity. The benevolence of the one is 
 an expression of humility and compassion ; that of the other, 
 
 * Cross Street Chapel, Manchester, 5Oth Anniversary of Manchester 
 New College, January 24, 1835.
 
 358 NEED OF CULTURE FOR 
 
 of zealotism. An establishment is rich in the poetry and 
 the humanities of faith ; it is enfolded in the graceful 
 mantle of the past. Its majestic architecture, monument 
 of the mystic piety of other days, labouring to construct a 
 fitting shelter for the solemnities of worship ; its ancient 
 bell, swinging over the dust of generations that once 
 listened to its call ; its spire upon the hills, whose "silent 
 finger points to heaven," a testimony of civilization 
 diffused, and human hopes and duties not forgotten, amid 
 the solitude of nature ; these things, and with them a 
 crowd of historical recollections, present no ignoble attrac- 
 tions to Conformity, attractions, within which churches 
 are apt to enshrine themselves and sleep. 
 
 Of a sterner order, as well as of more recent origin, are 
 the recollections of Dissent. Its history is that, not of 
 splendour, but of persecution ; its birth, not in ambition, 
 but in self-denial ; its pride is in resistance to oppression ; 
 its ancestry adorned with nobility, not of rank, but of 
 conscience. The tale which it tells to its children of their 
 forefathers, is of learned and holy men betrayed, and driven 
 from church and home to wander in beggary ; or of 
 covenanted hosts that slept in arms upon the heath, and 
 worshipped at midnight on the hill side, rather than shelter 
 themselves in the cloister of episcopacy; or of exiled 
 Puritans, who, resolved to put the Atlantic between them 
 and tyranny, cast themselves on the wild elements and the 
 wastes of the Western Continent, rather than " subscribe 
 slave " in their own land ; who felled the ancient forests 
 in sacrifice to civilization and pure worship ; and planted 
 on the rocks of New England that banner of free religion, 
 which is now the proud emblem of a hundred cities, and 
 ere long perhaps will float in the breezes of both worlds. 
 
 The class of Nonconformists, of whom this venerable 
 edifice reminds us that we are the successors, were dis- 
 tinguished by the honour they paid to learning as well as 
 to conscience. The moral glory of the Gospel they held 
 to be dignified by the intellectual eminence of the evangelist.
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 359 
 
 They deemed it fitting, that the Divine institution should 
 suffer no wrong by being committed to rude and feeble 
 hands ; that the truth should be poured upon the world, 
 unsoiled by ignorance ; that Revelation should be guarded 
 by those who knew more of its strength than its acutest 
 enemies could affirm of its weakness ; that it should be 
 interpreted by those who had drunk profoundly of the 
 spirit of its age ; and command, as the vehicle of its 
 diffusion, the best-ordered of the world's minds, and the 
 most awakened of its sympathies. They appreciated more 
 than others the extent of erudition needful to extract 
 Christianity from the records in which it is embodied, and 
 trace its history through the vicissitudes of seventeen 
 centuries ; and the power of thought required to apply its 
 principles to the duties and the hearts of men. You will 
 not deny that they judged right. You will not question the 
 wisdom which, when their ministers were excluded from 
 the national seats of learning, and found their integrity of 
 opinion a disqualification for instruction there, raised for 
 them a less ambitious but a freer shelter. Whatever faults 
 you may perceive in the character of our ministry, it is not 
 that it has too much learning, but too little enthusiasm ; 
 not that its intellect is too much cultivated, but its affec- 
 tions too little ; not that it is too profoundly versed in the 
 past, but too superficially touched by the sympathies of the 
 present. You do not want less cultivation, but more soul ; 
 a more living spirit breathed into the outward forms of 
 religion, and kindling them into the fires of a holier 
 worship : you demand not a more empty mind, but one 
 more teeming with aspiring thoughts ; a burning utterance, 
 the overflowing of vivid convictions and quenchless desires ; 
 appeals such as burst from men of high purposes and 
 great hearts, heaving secretly with faith in God and hope 
 for man. Let not these additional demands upon the 
 ministry be abated. They are honourable to you and 
 awakening to us : they indicate true and noble conceptions 
 of the mission which religion has to accomplish in the
 
 360 NEED OF CULTURE FOR 
 
 world ; a deep sense of its sublimity ; an absence of all 
 cold scepticism of its power; a persuasion of its eternal 
 fitness to the wants and capabilities of men ; a solemn 
 resolve to make it the ruler of cultivated, as it has been of 
 barbarous life. But it is important that these demands 
 should be regarded as additional claims on the pulpit ; as 
 not at variance with any attainments which it has hitherto 
 possessed ; not casting the slightest disrespect on the 
 studies by which the candidates for its duties have hitherto 
 been prepared. All the reasons which attached our fore- 
 fathers to a learned clergy still exist. And whatever 
 changes have taken place, since their time, in the senti- 
 ments of our churches and the condition of society, render 
 more imperious the necessity of an enlightened ministry. 
 I proceed to show that, if they held the attainment of this 
 end a worthy object of their zeal, you have reason to regard 
 it as a yet worthier aim of yours. 
 
 i. The feelings towards the Christian ministry have 
 changed ; and the change is such as to demand a more 
 enlightened class of men, in order to make it yield the 
 same results. 
 
 The causes of this change are to be sought, partly in the 
 altered state of the whole framework of British society, 
 partly in the theological history of our own communion. 
 
 The different stages of civilization are marked by the 
 prevalence of different orders of sentiment and the 
 ascendency of different classes of men. Physical force, 
 thrown into combination by the cement of greedy and 
 ferocious passions, is the first organizer of communities, 
 the first rude creator of social order ; and the men dis- 
 tinguished for corporeal energy and animal courage, for 
 that terrible kind of decision which flows from vehement 
 impulses and a reckless will, constitute the first natural 
 rulers of human multitudes. At a subsequent period, this 
 class is succeeded by the ecclesiastical order ; the material 
 by the moral sway ; the sanguinary by the pacific ; the 
 solid arm of terrestrial tyranny by the representatives of
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 361 
 
 invisible terrors. When brutality has wearied the earth 
 with woes, the exhausted hearts of men shelter themselves 
 beneath the wing of religion ; the hunted victim flies to 
 the sanctuary ; the weak, the oppressed, who have no 
 worldly redress of suffering, invoke an avenging God, and 
 dream of the retribution of heaven ; and indignant 
 humanity, clothed with the power of its wrongs, its right 
 hand quivering with the lightnings of justice, stands up 
 and utters the cry of faith, before which the guilty soul of 
 violence quails. Religion, the antagonist of force, thus 
 became its substitute : it stayed the arm of murder ; it 
 mitigated the outrages of the sword \ its generous senti- 
 ments softened the hardships of feudalism ; its fears deter- 
 mined the distribution of property. It broke the sceptre 
 of mere animal power, and set over mankind the first form 
 of spiritual dominion. 
 
 It was a dominion, however, that in this form could not 
 last. It was too dependent on the irregularities of the 
 world, on the ignorance, the crimes, and the miseries of 
 men, not to yield before an improved order of society. It 
 rested on the sympathies of the oppressed, the fears of the 
 superstitious, the remorse of the guilty, and as oppression 
 and superstition and guilt diminished with advancing 
 civilization, was sure to pass away. To the ecclesiastical 
 order have succeeded the moneyed classes : it is into 
 their hands that social power is more and more trans- 
 ferred ; it is their will, their morality, their sentiments, that 
 now constitute the largest ingredient in public opinion, and 
 impress upon events the course which they should take. 
 And they have restored, though in an improved form, the 
 dominion of materiality. Prosperity is their idol ; the 
 spread of luxury, the multiplication of external refinements, 
 their measure of civilization ; the cheapness of food and 
 clothing, their criterion of a nation's happiness ; the 
 tendency to produce wealth, their prevailing standard of 
 utility. By this test they estimate the worth of mental and 
 moral qualities ; the education that will tell upon the purse
 
 362 NEED OF CULTURE FOR 
 
 is indeed essential ; of that which only unfolds the faculties, 
 refines the tastes, elevates the feelings, they cannot discern 
 the practical use. The virtues which have reference to 
 wordly success, prudence, industry, integrity, are in high 
 esteem ; the loftier sentiments which rise above the gainful 
 to the beautiful, from the discreet to the disinterested, 
 which venerate right without computing its profits, and 
 scorn the wrong without cowardice at its pains, are feebly 
 felt and shyly avowed. The outward world oppresses the 
 energies of the soul ; interest plants a heavy foot upon 
 immortal desires ; the invisible swims and faints away 
 before the eye of self-indulgence ; the ideal succumbs before 
 the actual ; comfort seduces piety to sleep ; conscience 
 grows enamoured of epicurean ease, and starts not at the 
 thought of God : the future broods with no dread power 
 upon the will, thrust away by the impertinences of the pre- 
 sent. The ready fear, the living hope, the silent vow, the 
 scrupulous search of heart, the ancient attitudes of 
 reverence, have become rare. This extraordinary develop- 
 ment of the material in life has lowered the estimate of the 
 ministry, whose power is in the spiritual. It no longer 
 represents to the eyes of men the only interests that are 
 worthy of serious regard ; it no longer speaks to hushed 
 and listening spirits, agitated to the centre by the truths 
 which it proclaims. 
 
 It cannot be, however, that society is not to advance 
 beyond its present stage ; and already symptoms are not 
 wanting, to show that we are emerging from a physical to a 
 moral civilization. But the clergy can never again enjoy 
 the advantages which they have possessed, as an order : 
 their mere professional influence has for ever passed away. 
 The warrior, the priest, the merchant, having had their 
 day, must hand over their influence to the man of great 
 intellectual and moral power. When the first onset of 
 prosperity has gone by, men begin to estimate their human 
 nature more correctly, and regard it as something better 
 than a mere machine for the creation of riches. Science,
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 363 
 
 art, virtue, devotion, are no longer felt to be only the mere 
 instruments of order, and means of wealth, but the great 
 ends, to the attainment and increase whereof every external 
 advantage in life must be consecrated, the ultimate 
 purposes of individual and social existence, at once the 
 duty of earth, and the recompense of heaven. All who 
 further these ends, those who elaborate new thoughts, 
 and shower them on the understandings of mankind, 
 those who dart a ray of discovery into some unexplored 
 recess of God's creation, those who by profound converse 
 with their own affections win power over others, and learn 
 to sculpture forth in visible language the viewless emotions 
 of the mind, those who can well persuade the reason, and 
 powerfully stir the generous sympathies, and quicken the 
 virtuous efforts, and freshen the immortal hopes of men, 
 will be thought to perform the highest office, and wield the 
 most beneficent power, for our race. Into this class must 
 Christian ministers throw themselves ; on these qualifica- 
 tions for influence must they rely. The artificial associa- 
 tions with their office, which gave them, till even recent 
 times, a preternatural position above other men, have 
 disappeared. The tide of conventional power has ebbed 
 from them, and left them on the common strand of 
 humanity, and they must trust to the recognized means of 
 human persuasion, to the natural energy of their own 
 faculties, the resources of their own knowledge, the glow of 
 their own affections. 
 
 Besides this general change in the ruling powers of society, 
 there are particular changes in the theological sentiments 
 of our own communion, which have the same tendency to 
 strip the ministry of all adventitious help from association, 
 and reduce it to exclusive dependence on its own in- 
 tellectual and moral forces. The theory which represents 
 the Christian pastor as the heir of the apostolic office, and 
 as sustaining a relation to the modern churches, analogous 
 to that which Peter bore to the primitive assemblies of the 
 faithful, has declined, if not disappeared. It is understood
 
 364 NEED OF CULTURE FOR 
 
 that the functions of the first missionaries of the Gospel 
 were, in their own nature, incapable of transmission ; that 
 of being the vehicle of " the Spirit of Truth " throughout 
 the body of primitive believers ; and more especially, that 
 of testifying to the things which they had seen and heard 
 as witnesses of Christ, an office no more capable of dele- 
 gation than intellect or eyesight. The dim and mystic 
 conceptions of a divine mission, a call, a preternatural 
 residence of God's spirit, in the teachers of Christianity, 
 linger with us no more. The high Sabbatarian notions, 
 which once singled out the offices of public worship as the 
 divinest means of grace, and concentrated upon them the 
 intensest anxieties of conscience, and maintained the feel- 
 ings so much on the stretch towards edification that the 
 faintest breath upon the chords yielded a distinct response, 
 no longer lend the preacher their powerful aid. A number 
 of exciting topics, which work upon the passions, with but 
 a cheap expenditure of thought, and the most ordinary 
 exercise of imagination, have passed from our hands. We 
 cannot tell men that there is one act of the mind, one per- 
 ception of faith, on which alone depend their hope, their 
 immortality, their affinity with God ; one solitary thread of 
 belief, twined on the everlasting throne, by which they hang 
 over the unfathomable gulf, and which let insidious reason 
 secretly unravel, and they fall ! The warnings which we 
 may utter against unworthy states of mind ; the strong 
 remonstrances against the wrong which sin inflicts upon our 
 nature, against habits which damp the pure fires of the 
 soul ; the appeals that we make to the private love, which 
 no conscience loses, for the noble and the good ; the hopes 
 which we offer of unchecked and eternal progress, without 
 the delays of shame and of remorse, to those who never 
 betray their high responsibilities, are doubtless more health- 
 ful and healing to man, because more true to God ; but 
 their influence it is more difficult to dispense with power : 
 that influence requires for its development something far 
 deeper than the rude zeal of fanaticism, a searching know-
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 365 
 
 ledge of the human heart, an analysis of human motives, a 
 flood of human sympathies, a wise estimate of human good, 
 a quickness of moral susceptibility, a clearness of moral 
 judgment," which can be combined in one character, only 
 by the assiduous and impartial cultivation of a nature not 
 ungifted originally by God. When, then, was the demand 
 for an enlightened ministry ever more urgent than it is 
 now ? 
 
 2. The feelings towards the Scriptures which we 
 preach are changed ; and the change has augmented the 
 difficulty of applying them to the wants of the human 
 mind. 
 
 The plenary inspiration of the Scriptures was once an 
 admitted tenet among our Churches. It was supposed 
 that the evangelical authors performed only the mechanical 
 process of writing, and were, in fact, but amanuenses to the 
 dictation of the Holy Spirit ; or if they furnished, within 
 certain limits, ideas as well as words, were directed, by 
 Divine agency upon their faculties, to the selection of such 
 as were infallibly correct. It may, indeed, be difficult to 
 point out any recent period, in which precisely this form 
 of belief was prevalent among our forefathers ; but it is 
 certainly the view in which their conceptions of Scripture 
 had their origin, and which, long after some modifications 
 had crept in, influenced their sentiments and feelings 
 respecting the use of the Bible. Almost every part of 
 Scripture was supposed to be both universal in its applica- 
 tion and infallible in its meaning. The admission was 
 hardly made, that the sacred writings contained matter of 
 local and temporary interest, or were, in any of their parts, 
 objects of historical curiosity rather than sources of moral 
 obligation. The kind of textual veneration, the worship of 
 the very letter of Scripture, which these notions naturally 
 produced, rendered the task of the preacher exceedingly 
 easy. Under shelter of the great authority, he could pre- 
 cipitate what impressions he pleased upon the hearts of 
 men. Let him but cover a sentiment with a sacred phrase :
 
 366 NEED OF CULTURE FOR 
 
 let him but gild the coin of his own thoughts with the 
 pure gold of a Scripture metaphor, and the counterfeit, 
 however poor, would pass for revelation. 
 
 All this is now changed. The tendency among us (a 
 tendency not, I think, likely to be arrested) is towards the 
 belief that the Sacred Writings are perfectly human in 
 their origin, though recording superhuman events ; that 
 the Epistles abound in the discussion of questions now 
 obsolete ; that the Gospels, with one exception, were con- 
 structed from earlier documents, whose origin it is impos- 
 sible to trace, and whose fidelity rests upon their internal 
 character ; that even their preceptive parts will not yield 
 the Christian morality pure to our hands, till a mass of 
 local and temporary elements has been withdrawn. The 
 historical rather than dogmatic character of Christianity, 
 its transmission at least to us in an historical form, is 
 becoming more and more evident. If this be so, how are 
 we to make it yield its voice to the human conscience and 
 to human hopes ? We cannot use it as an oracle ; we 
 cannot appeal to its sentences as direct and conclusive 
 authorities ; for it is not its letter, but its spirit, not its 
 details, but its principles, that belong to all men and ages. 
 We must take possession of it as a history, before we can 
 construct it into a system ; we must deeply familiarize our 
 minds with what is temporary, before we are competent to 
 pronounce what is everlasting, in the Gospel. And who 
 will say, that thus to interpret the history of Christ, to 
 abandon ourselves freely to the impression of its incidents, 
 is easy ? Two conditions are essential to success, that the 
 mind be empty of all modern theories, and full of all 
 ancient knowledge. We must learn to listen to Christ in 
 the spirit of a Hebrew of old : to stiffen with the ancestral 
 pride of the Pharisee, and the official dignity of the priest, 
 and the petulant scepticism of the Sadducce ; to feel the 
 shyness of the hated Samaritan, and the abjectness of the 
 despised Publican ; to crouch in the humiliation of tribu- 
 taries, yet burn with the ambition of conquerors : and,
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 367 
 
 in reading the ancient Scriptures, to feel the mockery of 
 magnificent prophecy amid a mean history. We must 
 learn to walk the streets of Jerusalem, and bow with the 
 throng in the temple courts, and cross the bridge of 
 Kedron, and wander on the Mount of Olives. We must 
 be on the shore of the lake when the fisherman is made 
 the disciple, and experience the power on an uncultivated 
 mind and a rugged heart, of the refined and heavenly soul 
 of Christ. With John in the hall of judgment ; with Mary 
 beneath the Cross ; with the weeping Magdalen by the 
 sepulchre, startled by her own name ; with Stephen, serenely 
 falling amid foes that gnashed their teeth with rage; with 
 Peter in his midnight prison ; with Paul in travels and in 
 shipwreck, in perils and in bonds, speaking to philosophers 
 on the Areopagus of Athens, and walking silent through 
 the forum of Rome ; we must make the circuit of the 
 ancient world, penetrate the recesses of Jewish and Pagan 
 society, sympathize with their opinions, adopt their emo- 
 tions, and trace their modifications of those human affec- 
 tions which, in their essence, are immortal. 
 
 Thus to pass behind the veil of antiquity, is the only 
 method of rising to a genuine appreciation of the mind of 
 Christ, or of attaining a clear vision of the perfect religion 
 which it enshrines. And surely, if this is no slight demand 
 upon learning, no little insight into the philosophy of 
 human nature will be required, when we proceed to analyse 
 the character of our great model, that we may derive thence 
 the universal laws of duty ; when we bring his spirit and 
 principles to the altered conditions of modern life, and 
 preach from them to childhood and age, to penury and 
 affluence, to ignorance and wisdom, to aspiring virtue and 
 deluded sin, to private suffering and public wrong, to 
 the ever-varying heart and conscience of individuals and 
 nations. And in performing this office, it is not to be for- 
 gotten, that the ministry has not now to deal with such 
 audiences as worshipped in our temples of old ; not with 
 those whose chief means of knowledge and exercise of
 
 368 NEED OF CULTURE FOR 
 
 intellect are comprised within the weekly ministrations of 
 religion. The pulpit is no longer the sole, or the most 
 important disseminator of ideas ; its monopoly is gone, and 
 the quality of its supply must be improved. It has a noble 
 competitor, say rather coadjutor, in the press, which is 
 daily training masculine minds, and accustoming men to 
 athletic thought ; which is spoiling their taste for pueril- 
 ities, and mysticism, and affectation ; which makes them 
 sensitive to sophistry and impatient of formality, and has 
 taught them to relish the speculations of vigorous under- 
 standings, and the outpourings of earnest hearts. Among 
 those classes which form our worshipping assemblies, the 
 whole sphere of life and action has become enlarged. 
 They move upon a vaster theatre, and their existence is on 
 a greater scale. They think, they feel, they do, more than 
 their fathers ; they pass through a more complicated 
 individual lot, and wield a more extended social power. 
 Their problems of duty have become less simple, and their 
 responsibilities have greatly deepened. No ministry, then, 
 can adequately meet their wants which is not enlightened 
 and sincere. 
 
 Fifty years ago, the desire of such a ministry led to the 
 formation of the institution which invites our good will 
 this day. I have endeavoured to follow out the reasons 
 for such an establishment down to the present date, and 
 to show, that they strengthen as we descend ; that the 
 more recent changes in society and sentiment impart greater 
 force to their pleadings ; and that if a cultivated ministry 
 were desirable, when our Presbyterian predecessors decided 
 in its favour, much more is it important in these days, 
 when the preacher finds his office stript of superstitious 
 reverence, and the Scriptures requiring a more circuitous 
 and refined method of application. 
 
 With respect to the College of which I have now the 
 privilege to be the advocate, and had once the higher 
 privilege to be a pupil, I can hardly venture to speak, lest 
 in the warmth wherewith I might enumerate my obligations,
 
 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY. 369 
 
 I should seem to ascribe to it more than I possess. A 
 retrospect of the peaceful period of youthful studies, over 
 eight intervening years of toil not without its tears, is apt 
 indeed to exhibit the past in colours too tender ; its 
 faint voices come to us as a melody athwart the troubled 
 waters of life. However that may be, I must render, in 
 a word, my tribute of gratitude. The hours spent in that 
 much-loved retirement, I muse on with delight : the ideas 
 \vith which they furnished me are among my choicest 
 treasures; and those who imparted these ideas, or enabled 
 me to find them, live and grow in my most affectionate 
 veneration. Would that all could enter life through 
 such a vestibule of well-directed years ! and life would 
 be to them a temple of duty, consecrated by cheerful 
 memories, and kindling with inextinguishable hopes. 
 
 VOL. IV
 
 THE OUTER AND THE INNER TEMPLE.* 
 
 HITHERTO, no voice has been heard within this place, 
 but the sound of Scripture, of poetry, and prayer. The 
 first descent is harsh to this profaner speech ; and could 
 scarcely be endured, had not our hearts become filled with 
 thoughts, that ask perhaps for an interpreter. We have 
 come hither to dedicate this house of worship ; which 
 needs only the added grace of Christian memories, to make 
 it sacred as well as beautiful : but we feel that consecra- 
 tion cannot be imparted in an hour, even by vows the most 
 sincere ; and our meditations press inquiringly into the 
 future, wondering what sanctities may be gathered together 
 here, by length of time and love. We have sought on 
 bended knees the benediction of the Holiest ; but we know 
 that his blessing dwells not in the enclosure of the temple, 
 and must be brought by the faithful and filial souls that 
 frequent its courts. We have breathed a supplication, 
 which spreads over years and lives unknown ; and the 
 Hearer of the prayer already beholds in answer, that 
 which we too cannot help imagining, the history (long 
 and peaceful may it be !) of this new church. Who does 
 not see at this moment a vaster and more various assem- 
 blage thronging this pavement, than that which hears me 
 now? The transient forms of many generations, entering 
 with young wonder, and retiringVith aged trust ; children, 
 as of old, marking how their parents, with unspeakable 
 devotion, bow before a yet higher presence; the weekly 
 
 * Opening of Upper Brook Street Chapel, Manchester, Sunday, 
 September i, 1839. 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 THE OUTER AND 
 
 greeting of families recurring without end ; the garb and 
 the gratulations of the joyous, coming up amid friends for 
 thanksgiving ; the symbols and the sympathies of grief, 
 stealing back to the old resort, and able now to bear the 
 first silent pressure of a neighbour's hand ; the weary and 
 the anxious, bringing the drag of care, and taking away the 
 flush of faith ; and all, stepping aside hither from the dusty 
 walks of custom, to be disenchanted of its spells, and catch 
 the spirit that makes all things new, and feel the solemn 
 weight of life's deep mysteries ; are not these the visionary 
 groups, that seem to share with us the consecration of this 
 day ? And winding through them all, to form them into 
 one dear brotherhood, is the blessed chain of Sabbaths, 
 whose first link is this moment in our hand. The inward 
 life of these our successors, no human eye can read ; but 
 you have raised this roof to shelter it, knowing only that 
 they will not cease to strive under the common wants of 
 our humanity. These walls stand ready to be inscribed 
 with the invisible colours of every human emotion, to be 
 the divine confessional for penitence that dares not speak, 
 and doubts that fade away in silence, and hopes that glow 
 beneath the light of cheerful praise ; to be, I had almost 
 said, a tablet to the memory of God, but that it is all open 
 to him, like the hidden temple stones. It is something 
 nobler than mere curiosity, which impels us to wish that we 
 could decipher that history too : our interest in the future 
 Providence of humanity urges us to ask, whether this house 
 of prayer will be faithful in its day to its high office ; what 
 special function it will perform in the communion of 
 churches, what influence will flow forth from its gates on 
 the societies of men ; what true and Christian hearts will 
 be nurtured within it ; what good faith and conscience, of 
 which shipwreck might else be made, will find a life-boat 
 here in times of storm; in short, what everlasting thoughts 
 the Divine Spirit, that makcth his abode with hospitable 
 souls, will meditate within this place. In answer to these 
 questions, we may at least define our own desires and hopes;
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 373 
 
 declare, what spirit we would here be permitted to enshrine; 
 to what faith and service we consecrate this Christian 
 sanctuary. In one phrase, duly pondered, the whole exposi- 
 tion is comprised ; This is a Church of God's Messiah* 
 To develop the meaning of these words, which will be 
 found of neither vague nor antiquated spirit, let us avail 
 ourselves of the aid we may derive from the following saying 
 of Christ : 
 
 "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall 
 they say, lo here ! or lo there ! for behold, the kingdom of God 
 is within you." LUKE xvii. 20, 21. 
 
 The Messiah is no historical personage ; yet was the 
 system of ideas associated with his name something more 
 than a mere set of Jewish traditions. When the belief in 
 him which prevailed in Palestine is divested of its local 
 form and natural dress, we reach a faith most venerable 
 and altogether natural to the human mind. It is indeed 
 but a concentration of the trust in Providence ; an applica- 
 tion of this great idea to the prospects of our race ; an 
 expectation that the glories of the divine government in 
 their royal progress through the universe, will not pass this 
 province of creation by, or , refuse (seeing that to the 
 Eternal a thousand years are but as an evening watch) at 
 least some millennial lodgment here. The thoughtful and 
 
 O O 
 
 good have never been able to divest themselves of the 
 suspicion, that this earth is designed to be the scene, and 
 our human nature the subject, of some more glorious 
 experience, some diviner life, than either has yet exhibited. 
 
 * Since the delivery of this discourse, I have learned that a new- 
 place of Christian worship in New York has been designated " The 
 Church of the Messiah " ; and that the designation has been announced 
 and defended in a dedication sermon by the accomplished pastor, Rev. 
 Orville Dewey. I have not seen Mr. Dewey's discourse ; but con- 
 clude that the co-incidence is simply verbal. Indeed, the difference is 
 obvious between applying such a phrase as the distinctive name of a 
 single edifice, and using it as a general description, from which to 
 deduce the proper functions of all true churches.
 
 374 THE OUTER AND 
 
 Indeed the impression is one of the most elementary results 
 of reflection on the course of human affairs, and starts up 
 on the collision of our observation of the actual, with our 
 idea of the possible. Who that 1ms a heart for the sufferings, 
 or a prayer for the virtues of his kind, can pretend to be 
 content with the history of departed ages, or the condition 
 of existing millions, whom we pronounce, but dare hardly 
 imagine, to be immortal ? Who can issue from his 
 wanderings over the field of the world, and see what are 
 called the vicissitudes of history varying only the surface of 
 society, and beneath, one dull, permanent, immeasurable 
 mass of human beings, trampled on by an iron necessity, 
 and performing no noble function of life, but in their mus- 
 cular heaving beneath this weight, without inexpressible 
 melancholy ? The pure breath and silence of the native 
 earth, are not more denied by the noisomeness and din of 
 cities, than is the tranquillity of the past broken by the 
 frequent groans of bleeding and guilty humanity. Who 
 that believes in the righteousness of God, can suppose that 
 he will for ever be satisfied with this ? Who that looks at 
 the godlike eminence to which a just development of genius 
 and conscience has often raised our nature, can imagine 
 that it is collectively to have no age of glory ? No ; the 
 long night of ignorance and sin must pass away at length ; 
 the earth, in which the fathers rest from too much toil, will 
 not always be moistened again with the children's tears ; 
 those smiling heavens will not for ever mock us with their 
 glad promise, and the melodies of nature keep singing their 
 songs to heavy hearts : there must be deliverance in store ; 
 a reserve of regenerating agencies, that in the latter days 
 shall renew the earth with blessings, and people it with the 
 true children of the Highest. The power commissioned 
 to this end, whatever be its form, is God's Messiah ; the 
 powers to which we are apt erroneously to trust for this end, 
 constitute man's Messiah. These two are perpetually 
 coming into collision ; and the errors of human expectation 
 on this matter, having a deep seat in our nature, are much
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 375 
 
 the same in all ages ; and the very mistakes of the Jews, 
 which of old committed the tragedy on Calvary, are rife 
 among us still. We all believe that, at the birth of Chris- 
 tianity, Heaven's great Messiah actually came, that the 
 true divine instrumentality for perfecting the characters of 
 men and their communities, began its operation, and has 
 ever since been sending benediction on the world ; and will 
 yet, by methods which we must administer, complete the 
 promised transformation. When he came, he was thrown 
 into the midst of a set of human anticipations, displaying 
 God's and man's Messiah in most instructive contrast. 
 The errors of that time not being Hebrew, but human, 
 and the mission of Christ not being insulated, but specially 
 representative of the spirit of the divine government, the 
 one is a sample for ever of the thoughts of men, the other 
 of the thoughts of God ; and from that focal point of 
 history the clearest light is thrown upon the real methods 
 of Providence, and therefore the true faith and duties of 
 his children, respecting the sanctification of men and the 
 progress of society. A comparison of the false proposals of 
 human folly, with the genuine execution of divine wisdom, 
 will make it manifest in what spirit, and with what faith, we 
 should consecrate a church of his Messiah. 
 
 See, first, how the great Father rebukes every plan of 
 partial and exclusive deliverance ; and declares that any 
 rescue of his must fold the earth in its embrace. The 
 Hebrews would have had the divine Emancipator to be 
 theirs alone ; the child of a nation ; the property of a class; 
 the personal concentration of their collective peculiarities ; 
 the punisher of other men's hatred and contempt, by 
 adopting and indulging their own. The golden age 
 for which they prayed, under the desecrated name of " the 
 consolation of Israel," was little better than a dream of 
 vengeance. When the lash of some new oppression fell, 
 they could think with a bitter smile, how soon the turns 
 would change, and secretly clench the hand at the 
 pressure of that hope. When the light laugh of the Greek
 
 376 THE OUTER AND 
 
 derided their physiognomy and their superstitions, they 
 imaged to themselves the hour when heaven would send the 
 destined vice-gerent, with the outward characteristics of 
 the race stamped upon his features, their ritual upon his 
 life, their faith and passions upon his mind. It was by 
 clearing away the sceptic and the profane, and disposing of 
 them in some suitable and terrible way, that God was to 
 free the saints from all annoyance, and fulfil the prophecy 
 which says, " there shall be nothing to hurt or destroy in 
 all the earth." And then all that is fair and glorious was 
 to be evolved from their own Jerusalem ; even Galilee 
 being too far beyond the shadow of the temple to make it 
 possible that "any good could come out of Nazareth." 
 The Jubilee of Heaven was to commence, without a merci- 
 ful thought of the outcast millions, driven to the place of 
 weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth : the Israelite 
 might uplift a yet bloody hand in hot and passionate 
 prayer ; and the air of Moriah be rent with the national 
 hymn of thanksgiving to Jehovah, for trampling on his 
 children, and pampering his favourites, and turning insensi- 
 bly away from their brother's blood, that crieth to him from 
 the ground. 
 
 The Jews had plenty of Scripture to quote for all this. 
 Nevertheless, it was Satan, and not God, that took them up 
 into this high mountain of their pride, and stretched 
 beneath them thus all the kingdoms of the world, and the 
 glories of them. The thing was a temptation, and they 
 took it for a prophecy ; deceived perhaps by the mere 
 sound of holy writ, and the interpreting power of their 
 own passions. For see in what majestic way the Lord 
 of all the earth chides the selfish dream, and proclaims 
 his diviner counsels. He takes a village Christ, whose 
 soul is human, and not Hebrew ; whose spirit has become 
 acquainted with men in the retreats of families, not in the 
 schools of Priests and Pharisees ; and felt the presence of 
 God in the stainless breath of his native hills, and the 
 lilies of his native fields, more than in the smoke of altars.
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 377 
 
 and the withered fragrance of incense ; one who would 
 neither strive nor cry, who had no scorn except for narrow 
 affections and mean pretences ; from whose voice hearers, 
 listening for denunciation, receive the tones, more piercing 
 far, of a divine forgiveness ; and whose eye, when spec- 
 tators look for the flash of resentment, fills only with 
 silent tears. Nor was this all ; for when his countrymen, 
 enraged that his mind is not exclusively theirs, led him 
 away to Calvary, God does but take the occasion to wrest 
 from them his person too ; permits his executioners to 
 destroy the only part of his nature in which he resembled 
 them, and then redeems the everlasting elements of his 
 humanity for a blessing to all people and all times ; and 
 says to Death, " Take now the son of David, but leave the 
 son of Man ; the Israelite is thine, but I suffer not my holy 
 one to see corruption." And so, the cross, which was to 
 disown him as the Messiah of Jerusalem, made him the 
 Messiah of mankind. He could not carry to the other 
 side of mortality the distinctions which contract the 
 sympathies of life, and conceal the truth of things on this. 
 Ascending from this world, he could bear no relations so 
 trivial as those of clime and race, but saw its whole circle 
 beneath him, as the object of his impartial benediction. 
 And thus did he pass into universality as he rose ; and 
 from a higher point, and with wider proclamation did his 
 glad tidings spread ; no nook so deep and dark, that they 
 did not reach it ; the Samaritan, the Gentile, the Slave, 
 heard of the brother, once despised as they, calling to 
 them from the skies ; listened to him as disciples from afar ; 
 found that they too had celestial elements within them ; 
 and discerned the awe of immortality in their nature, and 
 the sanctity of responsibility in their life. How could 
 God more significantly declare that the delivering agency 
 of his Providence must be comprehensive as his Father- 
 hood, and generous as his Love ? 
 
 The spirit of the great Ruler once, is his spirit always. He 
 whose judgment severely rebuked Pharisaism in Palestine
 
 378 THE OUTER AND 
 
 of old, cannot be supposed to have become polemic in his 
 preferences in these latter days. We therefore desire to 
 guard our hearts against the irreverent pride of system ; 
 we profess to have no Christ exclusively our own. We 
 consecrate this Church to an impartial Messiah, and a 
 universal gospel. It is dedicated not to belief, but to 
 worship ; and sends its invitations forth, not to the 
 scholastic intellect, but to the meek and Christian heart ; 
 to those who are too much possessed and penetrated by 
 the sublime and simple relations of humanity to God, too 
 intent on the solemn oracles of conscience, too deeply 
 touched by the divine spirit of Christ, too busy in practical 
 conflict with the evils of human society, too near the illumi- 
 nation of their immortality, to spend their zeal on the 
 differing symbols by which the incapacity of men may re- 
 present to itself the infinite and unattainable truth. Let no 
 presuming creed, let no cold formalism enter here ; but let 
 the objects which should be loved, for ever transcend the 
 notions that should be thought. We believe that the life of 
 duty will always bring the heart of faith ; that no one who 
 spends himself in the service of men, will think seriously 
 amiss of the providence of God ; that true piety lies nearer 
 the centre of our nature, than the region of doubt and 
 speculation ; that it has in it the blessed vitality which 
 belongs to our best affections, enabling it to draw the nutri- 
 ment of a divine life from the merest stubble of error, and 
 to work the miracle of gathering grapes of thorns, and figs 
 of thistles. Not indeed that we would intentionally plant 
 the thistle and thorn in the garden of the Lord ; or leave 
 them there, when we can replace them with any nobler tree 
 of life ; but the poorest growth of a devout faith is better 
 far than the barren clod of a material existence. The 
 worship here will doubtless be conformed to a definite 
 system of belief, always expressed with frankness, occasion- 
 ally recommended with earnestness ; how otherwise could 
 prayer be shed forth with unrestrained simplicity, and the 
 aspirations of conscience be genuine, and the applications
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 379 
 
 of responsibility be close? Nor will the spirit of even 
 theological reformation be wanting ; for no one believes 
 truly that does not believe earnestly ; and it is impossible 
 to be impressed with the Personal Unity, the Moral Per- 
 fection, the Universal Paternity of God ; to recognize Christ 
 as morally though not physically Divine ; to feel the per- 
 sonal nature of sin and holiness, alienable by no transfer, 
 and attainable by no miracle ; to see in prospect, however 
 distant, the guilt and suffering of men worn out, and every 
 wanderer gathered back into the divine embrace ; without 
 desiring to supplant with these great ideas the harsher and 
 more repulsive conceptions endeared by ecclesiastical 
 tradition. But this desire will be regulated by a profound 
 respect not only for the rights of the mind in matters of 
 opinion, but for the strong love of the human heart in 
 matters of faith. The anxiety will be not to unsettle and 
 devastate, but to establish and construct. Men must be 
 converted, we are aware, by their veneration, not by their 
 doubts ; and new religions are successful, not by producing, 
 but by relieving the scepticism which prepares a void for 
 their admission. God has so ordained it, that society will 
 yield nothing, not even the paltriest superstition, to the 
 persuasion of mere disproof. The most cutting and wintry 
 winds of doubt may drive through the soul ; yet with ever- 
 green life it will hold fast even its sapless and withered 
 leaves of faith, till, in more genial season, a new foliage 
 shall burst forth for its adornment. If we take up the task 
 of reformation, we pray God that it may be in the spirit, not 
 of sacrilege, but of devotion ; that when we take up the 
 sword to do battle against error, we may go forth, not as 
 the wanton Destroyer, but as the generous Avenger : for 
 in vain do we strike the idol with one hand, till we can 
 hold up a gospel in the other. For many a year at Athens 
 had piety, philosophy, oratory, showered acute and sceptic 
 sarcasms at Olympic Jove, and his worship stood unmoved 
 as his own marble form ; but when Paul, without a sneer, 
 even taking a text from a Pagan altar, revealed the Un-
 
 380 THE OUTER AND 
 
 known God, and preached Jesus and the resurrection, the 
 doom of the whole Pantheon went forth upon his voice. 
 And this reverential temper is the more obligatory and 
 the more natural to us, because we look with unaffected 
 veneration on every mode of Christian belief, and are per- 
 suaded that no soul that makes faithful use of any, shall 
 die from dearth of the daily bread of life. For myself, 
 indeed, I am convinced, that their varieties are largely 
 created by the spiritual demands of differing minds, and 
 administer a well diversified supply to their several wants ; 
 that they never will, and never need, vanish from the face 
 of Christendom. Yet we will not forego the hope of unity 
 at last ; a unity, however, more deep-seated and affectionate 
 than that of mere opinion ; a unity of allegiance to one 
 Father, and toil for one Brotherhood, and reverence for 
 one law of Duty, and aspiration for one Home in heaven ; 
 the universal church of good and faithful souls, adorning 
 God's providence with varieties of thought, and strength- 
 ening it by consentaneousness of love. To aid in 
 gathering the elements for so glorious a community, we 
 devote this Church of the Messiah. 
 
 Let us notice another particular, in which the Messiah of 
 God has proved quite different from the Messiah of men. 
 It was always thought, not only by the Jews, but even by 
 the early Christians, that the great Deliverer would person- 
 ally visit the earth, and reign thereon ; that he would 
 come, armed with celestial force, which no man or nation 
 could resist ; that he would supersede all existing arrange- 
 ments, annihilate all principalities and powers, sweep away 
 all actual interests, erect new institutions, and remodel the 
 whole structure of society. The living subjects of his 
 kingdom were to pass into it unchanged and passive ; and 
 the great revolution was to be in their mutual position and 
 organization. The individual was to find his millennium 
 in the accumulation of outward good ; and the world, in 
 the re-adjustment of its communities, and the beneficence 
 of its administration. Believing men might continue as
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 381 
 
 they were, waiting the consummation ; but nothing less 
 would suffice for the scene around them than altogether a 
 new heaven and a new earth. 
 
 Instructively enough did God set aside all this. He did 
 not let his Messiah so much as touch a single institution, 
 or put forth even the show of force upon any part of the 
 frame work of society. Spontaneously did the infallible 
 conscience of Jesus fly from any such idea, and struggle 
 with it as a temptation in the wilderness ; and from those 
 who would have made him king, he retreated to the soli- 
 tary prayer of the sea-beach and the mountain. And here- 
 in he did only that which was well-pleasing to the Father - } 
 who was so intent to proclaim his thoughts above ours, 
 high as the heavens above the earth, that he withdrew the 
 great deliverer from the very scene he was to transform ; 
 separated him from it by the interval of a creation, that he 
 might not even seem to stretch out his hand upon it. Yet 
 the great regeneration was to be achieved ; only in place of 
 Messiah's collective government of men, they were to come 
 with individual faith to him ; to seek him simply with the 
 private heart ; to be swayed in soul by his divine image. 
 He was never to descend to their earthly life ; but they to 
 rise to his most heavenly spirit. 
 
 Providence, then, emphatically discourages our illusory 
 reliance on mechanical reconstructions of society ; dis- 
 perses our dreams of perfectibility by ingenious arrange- 
 ment ; and rather operates by quite another method, 
 beginning with the affections of individuals, and after 
 securing the sanctity of these, leaving the outward 
 machinery of communities to their spontaneous creation. 
 In the moral government of the world, he works by the 
 vital principle of growth from within, not by the crystalline, 
 of deposit from without. And seeing that as the Father 
 Avorketh hitherto, so Christ works, we think it well to con- 
 secrate a church of the Messiah, to the inward life, the per- 
 sonal faith, the private affections, of the individual believer. 
 This appropriation of a Christian sanctuary, experience of
 
 382 THE OUTER AND 
 
 the past will be found to justify, and the spirit of the 
 present greatly to require. 
 
 Experience justifies it. For it renders it most evident, 
 that both in the solitary character, and the collective civil- 
 ization of men, the inward life has authority from God to 
 rule the outward ; and always does rule it, in spite of 
 various deceptive plans which we are perpetually contriv- 
 ing for reversing the action. How ancient and how vain 
 the effort to change the mind by re-adjustment of the lot ; 
 to evade the stern necessities of duty, by idle trust to some 
 new facilities of position ! Could we only fly to a less 
 harassed life, how would the confusion of conscience lapse 
 into the fairest order ! Were men more reasonable and 
 grateful, how willing we should be to bless them ! This 
 trouble once away, we should chafe and fret no more ! 
 These weary days abated, we should win some piety of 
 heart ! Alas ! thus to conjure up before us some fair palace 
 of existence has no efficacy to exorcize the fiends that 
 torture and corrupt us, but even beckons them to crowd 
 and throng upon us more : a mind thus occupied is the 
 very nest they love : the familiar demons of temptation 
 well understand their place ; and when they perceive this 
 swept and garnished house in the imagination, they know 
 that they may enter there ; and unobserved, invite many 
 other spirits of evil to steal in too. For this very 
 propensity, to appeal from obligatory convictions to cir- 
 cumstantial excuses, is in truth the master-spirit of unfaith- 
 fulness, that can call up at will a legion of seducing 
 auxiliaries from the fathomless abyss of human delusions. 
 This inverted reliance of the inward upon the outward life 
 is the primary mark of moral laxity and thriftlessness. It 
 is the restless and unstable, not the firm and ancient 
 denizens of the good kingdom of the Lord, that are ever 
 longing for some foreign colony of opportunities, where a 
 lighter tillage may bring a larger fruit ; and with result no 
 happier than we might anticipate. The seas may look 
 smooth, and the climate fair, upon the mere map of
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 383 
 
 things ; but God's elements, within which we are fast 
 prisoners, are everywhere the same ; no ocean without its 
 storms, no land without the bramble and the rock ; to 
 plough and build on any plot of service in this world, and 
 make its plenty smile beneath the eye of heaven, demands 
 the brave resolve, and patient skill, the cheerful toil, the 
 feet early in the fields, of the true labourer of God. And 
 there are few that rove to find some ampler lot abroad, 
 who do not first neglect the small husbandry of duty at 
 home. We are deceived by the mere external look, the 
 visual conception of ourselves in some new position, devis- 
 ing wisely and executing well ; and forget how different a 
 thing it is to lie still and dream, and to start up and work ; 
 forget the weary tension of the will, the scrupulous frugality 
 of conscience, the frequent solitude of purpose, the faint 
 collapse upon the dust of life. No ; it is not these remote 
 imaginings that renovate the character : but the secret 
 glow of some living point within the soul ; the fall of a 
 divine and morning light on some affection, waking alone 
 and unwatched from sleep ; the seed-like growth of some 
 noble faith within the heart, becoming at length the 
 shadiest of the trees of life, wherein the birds of blessed 
 song find shelter. Where there is really this inward faith, 
 this venerating trust in some deep-seated conviction, the 
 outward obstructions of the lot spontaneously yield to it ; 
 and scarcely is there any mountain of difficulty that may 
 not, by this power, be hurled into the sea. 
 
 Society, in like manner, must be reformed from within, 
 and vivified from the heart to the extremities. All experi- 
 ence throws discouragement on the speculations of the 
 social mechanist, who hopes to mend the evils of human 
 life by a nice disposition of its institutional forces ; and to 
 perfect human character by the application of a precise 
 gauge to its motives, and a fit adjusting screw to its pas- 
 sions. The conception is intrinsically foolish ; since the 
 organization of communities is nothing without the internal 
 mind that works it, and cannot control that mine!, of which
 
 384 THE OUTER AND 
 
 it is every moment the creature and the slave. Even in a 
 machine, there is no art known by which a force can prevent 
 itself from bursting: and our nature, especially when ex- 
 hibited in sympathetic masses, is no machine ; its powers, 
 excited from within, are incalculable and terrible ; and 
 the attempt even to measure them is as poor an affecta- 
 tion as to try with an instrument of glass the heat of the 
 volcano. I would on no account speak with unconcern of 
 the great institutions whose consolidation or improvement 
 it is the object of the statesman to secure : but political 
 changes have a very limited agency ; and from exaggerated 
 estimate of this, they usually disappoint. They are pre- 
 ventive, rather than productive ; and are needed to destroy 
 a dangerous variance between a nation's mind and its 
 social forms. When wrong, institutions are perilous irrita- 
 tions; when right, they are but the natural shapes, the 
 becoming vest, in which a people's character may manifest 
 itself, and move with least restraint. There is an essential 
 falsehood in every theory which confounds the mere cos- 
 tume of society with its moral life, and imagines that, 
 unless it is in perfect dress, it is going to die. It is with 
 communities, as well as individuals, that the most graceful 
 drapery may conceal decline, and robustness walk about in 
 rags. The true life of the human community is planted 
 deep in the private affections of its members ; in the 
 greatness of its individual minds ; in the pure severities of 
 its domestic conscience ; in the noble and transforming 
 thoughts that fertilize its secret nooks. Who can observe, 
 without astonishment, the durable action of men truly 
 great on the history of the world, and the evanescence of 
 vast military revolutions, once threatening all things with 
 destruction. How often is it the fate of the former to be 
 invisible for an age, and then live for ever ; of the latter, 
 to sweep a generation from the earth, and then vanish with 
 slight trace ! 
 
 To cherish then the inward life of faith and piety, to 
 foster the sanctities of the individual mind, is to obey the
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 385 
 
 experienced commands of God : it is nothing less than to 
 stand by the providential fountains of civilization, and 
 reverently guard them that they become not dry. This is 
 in truth the proper function of a church ; and it is one of the 
 painful peculiarities of all our modern Christianities, that 
 they more or less abandon this divine office, and mingle 
 with the outward contests and jarring interests of the 
 season and the place. There is, I believe, a profound 
 truth in the popular impression that religion should not 
 defile its sacredness by contact with the scene of political 
 and secular strife. Influence in that scene, and influence 
 often paramount, it must possess ; but only by its occupa- 
 tion of the mind, and direction of the will, of the actors 
 there; whose affections, not whose opinions, it is com- 
 missioned to keep right. The disposition of the present 
 times, which criticizes every thing, and trusts itself to 
 nothing, which believes no truth, venerates no object, 
 expects no blessing, performs no duty, breathes no prayer, 
 without a reason logically clear, is destructive of the sim- 
 plicity of Christ and the genuineness of faith. We believe, 
 now-a-days, more in religion than in God ; and study con- 
 science, instead of following duty. This critical temper 
 bears down the tendencies to individual devotion ; poisons 
 the spirit of self-forgetfulness ; and forces into artificial 
 action the propensities, always too potent, to an Epicurean 
 and calculative life. It is seasonable, therefore, no less 
 than Christian, to raise this temple, as a retreat for the 
 private and unspoken affections of those who feel that 
 earth is not without its awful relations to heaven. Let the 
 chaste and vaulted forms of this house be an emblem of 
 the accordant grace and symmetry, that should prevail in 
 the inward life of the believer, that temple not made 
 with hands, -which beneath this shelter, is to attain its 
 beauty and perfection. When untrodden by the feet of 
 worshippers, let it inclose only Silence, which is one of the 
 attributes of God ; which itself fosters whatever is divine 
 within us ; which broods over the holiest moments of our 
 VOL. iv. C c
 
 386 THE OUTER AND 
 
 life below ; and which will surround us, when our spirits 
 glide away in death on their lonely passage to the immortal 
 sphere. And never let it be said, that our inmost affec- 
 tions may be cherished in solitude better than in society. 
 It is not indeed society, it is communion, here ; and there 
 is a timidity in faith, when left alone, a recoil from tran- 
 sitory doubts, a fear breaking from the very greatness of its 
 suggestions, which vanish before the warmth of other souls : 
 and when a multitude of brother men stand around me 
 and feel the very same, respond in heart to the same utter- 
 ance of prayer, and turn their eyes, filled with the same 
 interior light, to the heaven that opens as we gaze, the truth 
 becomes mysteriously clear, and the tremulous whispers of 
 hope strengthen into the trumpet-tongued oracles of God. 
 
 Here, then, my friends, we take up our rest. We conse- 
 crate this church to a gospel that is universal, and a piety 
 that is individual ; to a religious love of men, and a 
 spiritual devotion towards God. Certainly, neither conse- 
 cration can depart hence while my friend, in whose place 
 I now stand, shall be permitted by the guardian provi- 
 dence of our lives, to shed forth his thoughts of wisdom 
 and of love on the hearts of yourselves and your children. 
 With long and unrelaxing faithfulness may he show you 
 his own accustomed way to a genuine simplicity of life, and 
 yield up in your service the well-ordered graces of a mind, 
 which we might esteem the rich palace, were it not rather 
 the pure temple of the Lord. Should troubled times 
 approach, should the principles which we hold dear be 
 doomed to a severer ordeal than they have yet known, 
 should a scorn so terrible visit us in these days of strife 
 and passion, that unstable churches waver and fall away, 
 you will be reminded that only with souls of a most clear 
 sincerity can the grace of Christ for a moment make abode, 
 and that from the least unfaithfulness the spirit of God 
 must instantly retreat. You will also be told something of 
 the traditions of our fathers ; with whom a conviction was 
 an oracle, though it consigned them to a prison or to the
 
 THE INNER TEMPLE. 387 
 
 Atlantic storms ; who passed through persecution, leaving 
 nothing behind them but their exclusiveness ; and of whom 
 we are not worthy to be the children, if, parting with their 
 devotedness, we take their freedom, but use it as a freedom 
 to do nothing or do wrong ; and make their brave fidelity 
 bequeath to us a legacy of falsehood or of fear. And 
 should a happier Providence prevail within the precincts 
 of our churches, Christianity will yet have no common trials 
 to encounter, and many a noble war to wage with the inex- 
 haustible forms of intellectual and moral evil. Here, as 
 on a watch-tower of contemplation, high-lifted above the 
 field of the world, you will descry the posts of danger that 
 courageous hearts delight to fill : and hence will go forth 
 to swell the ranks of the resolute and true. God, that 
 gave the gospel and its power, still lives : his inspiration 
 surely is not past and spent ; but only needs the open and 
 willing soul, the simple and devoted conscience, the clear 
 and loving look of faith upturned to Him, to come again 
 and dwell with all its blessedness. May His spirit, that 
 wandered of old around the walls of Nazareth, His 
 spirit, that ever bloweth where it listeth, be henceforth 
 often heard to whisper around these walls ! 
 
 c c 2
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD.* 
 
 "And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch 
 them. But when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But 
 Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come 
 unto me, and forbid them not ; for of such is the kingdom of 
 God." LUKE, xviii. 15, 16. 
 
 THERE is no sentiment more natural to thoughtful 
 minds than that of reverence for childhood. Many sources 
 both of mystery and love meet in the infant life. A being 
 so fresh from non-existence seems to promise us some 
 tidings of the origin of souls : a being so visibly pressing 
 forward into the future, makes us think of their tendency. 
 While we look on the " child as father of the man," yet 
 cannot tell of what kind of man, all the possible varieties 
 of character and fate appear for the moment to be collected 
 into that diminutive consciousness : that which may be the 
 germ of any, is felt as though it were the germ of all : the 
 thread of life, which, from our hand that holds it, runs 
 forward into instant darkness, untwines itself there into a 
 thousand filaments, and leads us over every track and 
 scene of human things ; here, through the passages where 
 poverty crawls ; there, to the fields where glory has its 
 race ; here, to the midnight lake where meditation floats 
 between two heavens ; there, to the arid sands where 
 passion pants and dies. Infancy is so naturally suggestive, 
 it is the representative of such various possibilities, that it 
 
 ' Paradise Street Chapel, Liverpool, July, 1845.
 
 390 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 would be strange did we not regard it with a feeling of 
 wonder. 
 
 Wise men, however, are fond of discovering ingenious 
 reasons for natural sentiments. And there was a theory in 
 ancient times, that the souls of all men come hither from a 
 pre-existing state, where they dwelt within the shelter and 
 near the light of God ; where truth and love were as affluently 
 poured on perception, as light and sound upon the senses 
 here ; and the sublimest thoughts of beauty, of virtue, of 
 science, of Deity, streamed amid the spirits of that purer 
 air, like sunbeams amid the clouds, bathing them in glory. 
 Birth into this world was a transference of the mind from 
 a celestial to an earthly life ; its benumbing contact with 
 material things ; its retirement from the boundless and 
 brilliant freedom of a spiritual life, to the dark and narrow 
 cave of a corporeal being. The further it advanced into 
 the interior of its mortal existence, and the more skilled it 
 became in groping along the ways of experience, the more 
 faint grew the impression of the immortal region it had 
 left, and the more dim were the rays of reminiscence that 
 yet painted a divine vision on its path. Education was 
 a process of forgetfulness ; the gradual extrusion of the 
 godlike by the human ; the drowning of abstract truth in 
 experimental knowledge ; the tapering-off of sublime per- 
 ceptions of the universal into mean individual sensations. 
 When, under the influence of this doctrine, Plato looked 
 upon a child, he saw through that shell of life an intelli- 
 gence fresh from God : it was a star dropped from its 
 sphere. Still filled with dreams and memories of the 
 invisible, half present still in its divine abode, it was a 
 thing of sanctity to behold ; for its orb of existence floated 
 yet on the margin of the unknown world, and. though 
 creeping on to be eclipsed by the shadows of mortality, had 
 its edge yet illumined by the past. 
 
 Viewed under this aspect, human life is a declension 
 from the divine to the earthly ; and infancy claims respect 
 because it is in immediate contact with the earlier and
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 391 
 
 the holier state. Christianity preserves the solemnity, and 
 dissipates the irrepressible melancholy of such a theory : 
 retaining the parts, it reverses their order, and represents 
 our life as an ascension from the earthly to the divine. 
 Childhood, in the view of Christ, presents not the wreck, 
 but the elements, of an heavenly existence ; not the ruin, 
 but the design, of a temple not made with hands. Its 
 glory is not of the past, but of the future ; its experience is 
 to be not a loss, but a gain, of truth and goodness ; its 
 education here not a vain struggle to preserve memories 
 that inevitably vanish, but an inspiration, that can never 
 disappoint the willing heart, after mental and moral ex- 
 cellence, rising always to more godlike forms. It were 
 a task of sadness to take up the infant life, as if it were the 
 fallen petals of a celestial flower, borne to our feet by the 
 stream of things, and every moment fading more ; but it is 
 a task of gladness to accept it as the seed and germ of 
 an everlasting growth, which, planted in the rock, and 
 strengthened by the storms of earth, shall bloom at length 
 in the eternal fields. 
 
 To educate a child is an office of which no one, taking 
 the Christian view, can think lightly. To administer per- 
 ceptions, and unfold the faculties in their season and 
 proportion ; to give power to the affections, without im- 
 pairing their symmetry ; to develop, in their right order, 
 and to their full intensity, the great ideas of duty and of 
 God ; to exhibit human virtues and relations in so beautiful 
 an aspect, that the soul may pass from them with ease to 
 the venerating love of the Infinite Mind ; is a task of 
 responsibility so solemn, as to invest every parent's life 
 with the sanctity of a divine mission. 
 
 If the philosopher's doctrine had been the true one, and 
 the soul had been like a bird fallen from the skies, its 
 plumage soiled in the dust, and its forces drooping in our 
 heavier air, it would seem a cruel office to stimulate it to 
 ascend again, by convulsive effort, to an element native, 
 but natural no more. L!ut, as the truth really stands, we
 
 392 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 have not to provoke a strength jaded and expiring, but to 
 aid and develop one that is half formed ; ourselves to bear 
 it awhile into the heights "as upon eagle's wings"; and 
 then launch it from the precipice alone, to sweep down the 
 gale, and soar into the light it loves. 
 
 Many, however, have but a feeble impression of the 
 delicacy and responsibility of this task, of training the 
 early mind to aspire, by the power of the noblest ideas of 
 duty and religion. There is no department of education in 
 which wrong methods are so fatal ; in which the convey- 
 ance of a thought into the mind at an unhappy moment, or 
 by an unhappy process, may leave a more indelible and 
 prejudicial effect ; in which the penetrative and considerate 
 spirit of sympathy, which is the true secret of educational 
 as of all other moral power, is more absolutely demanded; 
 in which different minds more require to have their in- 
 dividuality consulted ; yet there is none to which a more 
 hard, technical, and wholesale system is applied. While 
 secular instruction is the object of constant study and 
 improvement, and a thousand ingenuities present them- 
 selves to facilitate labour and secure perspicuity, the 
 method of religious and moral education continues the 
 same. The reason is obvious. This is a department 
 which is thought to be incapable of improvement, in 
 which it would be deemed impious in any man to pro- 
 pose any material alteration ; the sacred writings furnishing 
 a perfect system made to our hands. The whole respon- 
 sibility is at once thrown upon the Bible. It is put before 
 the eyes of a child, and little further care or anxiety 
 bestowed upon the matter. Teachers assume that all its 
 parts are alike and perfectly inspired ; all of universal 
 moment ; all invested with the form most fitted for every 
 human mind, so that to familiarize the young with their 
 whole contents, without presuming to select, is at once the 
 wisest means and the ultimate end of all religious and 
 moral education. This doctrine, which would impose upon 
 us in our families and our schools the Bible, and the whole
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 393 
 
 Bible, as not indirectly furnishing the principles, but con- 
 stituting the direct instrument, of all spiritual instruction, 
 a doctrine insisted on in high ecclesiastical tone, and brought 
 to bare against every project of comprehensive education, 
 requires to be strongly resisted and plainly exposed. 
 It is no less at variance with the present condition of theo- 
 logical knowledge, than mischievous in its social results. 
 
 In the following remarks, every candid hearer will per- 
 ceive that I argue not against the use of the Bible, but 
 against the use of the whole Bible, in religious education. 
 The spirit and the life of Christ, his humiliation and ascen- 
 sion, are to be taken as the divinest and most authoritative 
 teaching of Providence, and duty, and hope ; suitable and 
 refreshing alike to the infant and the sage ; attractive 
 alike to the love of innocent hearts, and the penitence of 
 the worn and guilty. And it is precisely on account of 
 their variance from this standard that the restricted use of 
 the older Scriptures, as media of religious instruction, will 
 be advocated. 
 
 Even if every thing that is demanded respecting the 
 divine origin of the Hebrew Scriptures were conceded ; if 
 they not only contained but actually constituted a revela- 
 tion ; it would be altogether inconsiderate to conclude that 
 they are therefore a fit instrument for early instruction now. 
 No one can deny to God the power of giving a temporary 
 revelation, adapted exclusively to some particular stage of 
 human improvement ; and that which is temporary must, 
 some time, become obsolete, must be transformed from 
 a means of instruction into a record of history, totally 
 superseded by new and nobler conceptions, gifts of a later 
 Providence, or growths of a later civilization. Thus, at 
 least, the Apostle of the Gentiles thought ; and, however 
 much Paul might indulge his countrymen with reasonings 
 from their ancient Scriptures, he was silent of the law and 
 the prophets when he pleaded before Gentiles on the 
 Areopagus at Athens, and summed up the Christian 
 doctrine in this, that we are all the offspring of God, and
 
 394 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 brothers of the risen Jesus. Even upon the highest 
 doctrine of inspiration, then, there would be reason to 
 pause, before we framed our instructions on the Old Testa- 
 ment writings. 
 
 But if, with all their general historic truthfulness, these 
 writings are, almost without exception, of unknown author- 
 ship, and therefore of unknown inspiration ; if their 
 antiquity carries them beyond the reach of all outward 
 evidence of authority ; if many of them are the venerable, 
 but human, relics of a literature produced by a half-bar- 
 barous nation in wholly barbarous times ; if they contain 
 the ideas, the passions, the moral sentiments, of a simple 
 but savage people ; if they give expression to notions of 
 right and wrong imbibed amid constant bloodshed, and to 
 a religion which was without expectation of a future life ;. 
 if among its hymns are the strains of a penitent adulterer, 
 and its aphorisms the wisdom of an exhausted voluptuary, 
 is it not appalling that such an aggregate should be placed in 
 youthful hands as the reflection of the Divine purity and the 
 oracle of the infinite Intelligence ? that every effort should 
 be made to gather round it the unquestioning reverence of 
 early years, and form the moral taste from its mixed 
 elements ? The party-cry of the present day about scrip- 
 tural education demands great plainness of speech, and I 
 scruple not to denounce it as a demoralizing and corrupting 
 superstition. 
 
 This indiscriminate use of the Bible, as an infallible 
 whole, fills the mind with a system of confused and self- 
 contradictory ideas, both of religion and of morals. What 
 other result can possibly ensue from the attempt to 
 cement into one structure of thought the conceptions of 
 writers scattered over many centuries, and living, feeling, 
 thinking, under every variety of condition, and in opposite 
 states of civilization ? As well might you propose to frame 
 a system out of every thing that was ever written in Latin, 
 as out of every thing that was ever written in Hebrew ; and 
 form a creed by borrowing here an article from the mytho-
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 395 
 
 logy of Virgil, there another from the speculations of 
 Cicero ; first a prodigy from the exaggerations of Livy, then 
 a thought from the wisdom of Tacitus ; now a reflection 
 of the philosophic Seneca then a superstition of the gross 
 and fierce Tertullian. The religion of the Romans from 
 Romulus to Julian underwent no more change than the 
 religion of the Israelites from Moses to Malachi ; and there is 
 as much unity between the Jupiter of Homer and the Deity of 
 Plato, as there is between the Jehovah of Abraham and the 
 infinite Father of Christ. If the Scriptures were not read 
 habitually with the obtuse eye of familiarity and prejudice, 
 every one would instantly perceive, that the Theism of the 
 Hebrews was of very gradual formation ; that the sublimest 
 representations of the divine unity and omniscience and uni- 
 versal government appear, for the first time, in the prophets 
 and later psalms that the Mosaic theology went no further 
 than to limit the national worship to Jehovah, without deny- 
 ing the existence, or interfering with the local rights, of other 
 deities ; that the most rude and puerile conceptions of 
 God, ascribing to him the imbecilities of human nature and 
 the passions of savage life, fill the more ancient of the 
 Israelitish writings ; that remorse, jealous}-, offended pride, 
 rage, sensible pleasure in the odour of sacrifice, personal 
 susceptibility to the influence of praise and gifts, are 
 literally attributed to the Creator. He descends to wrestle 
 bodily with a patriarch ; he commits an acknowledged 
 error in creating men, and is obliged to destroy them by 
 the flood, and try the effect of recommencing the race ; he 
 enters into competition with the divinities of Egypt, and 
 the contest is reiterated and long. There is every evidence 
 of which the case admits, that these are no figures of speech, 
 but strictly the ideas of the writers. And if it were not so, 
 if they were mere accommodations to the minds of an un- 
 cultivated people, for that very reason they are not accom- 
 modated to the minds of a cultivated people : that they 
 were qualified for use in a savage age is only stating, in 
 another form, that they are disqualified for use in purer
 
 396 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 times. Nay, that we ever resort to such modes of excusing 
 them proves that they revolt us, that they no longer com- 
 mand our sympathy. To defend them thus is to disown 
 them : why, then, insist on dragging our children's minds 
 through that which, we admit, would contaminate our own ? 
 why employ, in the teaching of our families, that for 
 which we justly claim the merit of being good for bar- 
 barians ? The historical value of the Hebrew annals I do 
 not deny : the simple beauty of their pastoral traditions 
 will delight, so long as the human heart remains 
 unchanged : the rugged sublimity of their triumphal hymns 
 will never cease to overpower the imagination with a kind 
 of physical awe : the tender and romantic incidents, which 
 are interwoven, as domestic episodes, in the great epic of 
 their history, will prove to the refreshment of all times that 
 the simpler affections of our nature are immortal : and to 
 study the slow development, under influences very peculiar, 
 of the true idea of God ; to follow it as it expanded from 
 the image of a national idol-hating being, to that of the Sole 
 and Universal Ruler of creation ; to trace its moral refine- 
 ment and growing effulgence from age to age, till it rose in 
 the majestic orb, whose spiritual light warmed and ripened 
 the soul of Christ, is one of the most interesting objects of 
 intellectual research. But to take up the series of writings 
 which mark this progress, as an immutable system of 
 religious instruction ; to give it a didactic as well as an his- 
 torical importance ; to attribute the same infallibility to the 
 gross materialism of its earlier, and the divine spirituality of 
 its later parts ; to refer our children indifferently to Jacob 
 and to Christ ; to bid them go and learn devotion, now amid 
 the yells of exterminating war in Gibeon, and then at the 
 feet of the Prince of Peace in Nazareth ; can only produce 
 the most bewildered conception of Deity, and the most 
 unsteady operation of the devotional sentiment ; a 
 fusion into the same mind of the elements of the savage and 
 of the angel. Oh ! why should the gentle heart of child- 
 hood be made to shrink and cower before the vision of a
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 397 
 
 Deity, with an arm laid bare in vengeance, and garments 
 dyed in blood ? Why be compelled to struggle into a 
 fancied veneration for a Being to whom, amid a certain 
 physical sublimity, scarce an untainted moral excellence is 
 ascribed ? Why have to wrestle, as with a sin, against the 
 doubt of reason, whether the only Good of whom Jesus was 
 the image, when he healed the sick, and uplifted the 
 penitent, and welcomed the alien, and silenced the storm, 
 and raised the dead, could indeed be the same that taught 
 his people the lessons of indomitable hate, and declared 
 that he would let loose on them his fury, because they only 
 half performed the work of carnage ? Till this superstition 
 be abated, a great portion of the power of religion will be 
 employed in bidding successful defiance to the holiest sen- 
 timents of the conscience and the heart. 
 
 Nor is the system of morals, which the mind will con- 
 struct for itself from such incongruous materials, of any 
 better or more consistent character than the ideas of God. 
 
 If I were required to select from history the three 
 systems of morality most at variance with each other in 
 their general spirit and tendency, I should make my choice 
 within the limits of the Bible, and name the teachings of 
 Moses, of Solomon,* and of Christ. They are respectively 
 perfect representations of the sacerdotal, the Epicurean, and 
 the spiritual type of human duty. The tendency of the 
 reputed Mosaic writings is to raise to enormous exaggera- 
 tion the reader's estimate of the ceremonial parts of 
 morality ; to force on him a total forgetfulness of the real 
 character of institutional duties, as mere symbols for ex- 
 pressing the power of the great primary obligations, and 
 destitute of all intrinsic value ; to train in him a conscience 
 
 * In designating the several portions of the Jewish Scriptures by the 
 names with which they are commonly associated, I do not intend to 
 express any opinion as to their real authorship. For my present pur- 
 pose it is not necessary to call in question the date assigned to the 
 Book of Ecclesiastes, or to relieve the mission of Moses from responsi- 
 bility for the Levitical institutions, by pointing out the traces of their 
 slow and late formation.
 
 398 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 at once scrupulous and lax, slavish and presumptuous, 
 rigid without purity, sensitive without delicacy, timid with- 
 out love. Even in the Decalogue, the observance of a 
 holiday is put down in the same rank with the most perma- 
 nent and solemn duties ; and the prohibition to pick up 
 sticks and light fires on one day of the week, is on a par 
 with the enactments against theft, murder, and adultery. 
 Whatever necessity may be thought to exist, in certain 
 states of society, and for the sake of peculiar theological 
 ideas, for such an ill-proportioned distribution of the divine 
 authority of duty, surely there is no pretext for maintaining 
 it now ; surely we need no longer pervert the natural rever- 
 ence of our children's minds, and turn them aside from the 
 love of whatever things are pure and good, to the awe of 
 forms, whose only use is to express such love ; surely there 
 is no divine obligation upon us to teach them sanctimonious 
 criticism on the infringements of the Sabbath, instead of 
 keeping their secret vigils near the fountains of their own 
 hearts. The mischiefs of this formal morality are exceed- 
 ingly serious : it links together in the conscience things 
 trivial and great, and forces them into partnership for better 
 and worse, for breach as well as for observance. Touch 
 one, and you touch all ; the light temptation to a Sabbath 
 gaiety gains a terrific leverage, and upsets the whole struc- 
 ture of moral obligation ; the sanctities of life are at the 
 mercy of the remorse of a fictitious conscience. 
 
 It is known to every one, that there is a school of 
 philosophy which refers all human conduct and feelings to 
 to self-love as their origin, and delights in explaining away 
 every appearance of disinterestedness which may present 
 itself in the character : this absurd and degrading scheme is 
 
 O o 
 
 called the selfish system. There is also a school of moralists 
 who base the obligation of virtue upon its utility to the 
 performer; who reduce, in fact, all excellence under the 
 head of prudence, and conceive him to be the most per- 
 fectly good man who has the most far-sighted and steady 
 view to his own interests. You will perceive that I refer to
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 399 
 
 the lowest form of the doctrine of utility, a form in which 
 whatever is really true and valuable in its fundamental 
 principle is concealed by revolting error. It has so 
 happened that these two systems, of which the one is a 
 theory respecting what men's objects actually are, the 
 other a representation of what they ought to be, have 
 frequently met in the person of the same advocates, and 
 thus become almost hopelessly confounded together. They 
 have, for the most part, been favourites with sceptical inter- 
 preters of human nature and life, though not without 
 supporters amongst philosophers of remarkable intellectual 
 power ; and they have almost uniformly excited the disgust 
 and hostility of religious moralists. Even Paley is hardly 
 an exception to this remark ; for though he was a clergy- 
 man, and rendered services never to be forgotten to the 
 preparatory evidences of religion, though in his work on 
 moral philosophy there are theological formulas, to save 
 appearances, and dress up its laxity in the drapery of 
 sanctity, his was not a mind to be deeply penetrated with 
 the religious sentiment : his muscular sagacity did good 
 service in repairing the outside of the temple ; but he was 
 not the inspired hierophant to interpret the divine spirit 
 within. By others, filled with a more generous and devout 
 enthusiasm, every species of assault has been made upon 
 the systems I have named. They have been described as 
 a libel on the best affections of our nature, as bearing kindred 
 with the doctrine of annihilation, as at variance with the 
 whole spirit of Christ's affectionate morality. This is not 
 the time to weigh the precise force of these objections ; 
 with which, however, you will perceive that I feel a certain 
 degree of sympathy. I would simply point attention to the 
 fact, that they proceed mainly from divines and religious 
 philosophers ; yet, if there be any extant works which more 
 than others contain the selfish and utilitarian sentiments in 
 a form naked and unblushing, they are the reputed writings 
 of Solomon. Bentham seems likely never to recover from 
 the disgrace of having recommended benevolence as a
 
 400 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 good speculation ; yet the Hebrew king had said before 
 him : " A kind man doeth good to his own self; " and " The 
 benevolent soul shall be enriched."* The philosopher of 
 London was thought to be a low-minded Epicurean because 
 he said that all pleasures were good, and proposed to 
 economize them well ; but the sage of Jerusalem before 
 him had published the most sensual of all possible per- 
 versions of this sentiment : " There is nothing better for a 
 man than that he should eat and drink, and that he should 
 make himself enjoy good in his labour,"! How many 
 severities of censure had the modern teacher to encounter 
 for his supposed mean opinion of human nature ! yet saith 
 the preacher of old : " Behold ! this have I found, counting 
 one by one to find out the account (which still my soul 
 seeketh, but I find not), one good man among a thousand 
 have I found ; but a good woman among all have I not 
 found."! What declaration did the utilitarian patriarch of 
 the nineteenth century hear respecting the supposed alliance 
 of his system with the creed of annihilation ! yet the royal 
 teacher had exclaimed : " That which befalleth the sons of 
 men befalleth beasts ; even one thing befalleth them ; as 
 the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one 
 breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast." 
 Nay, sentiments are found in this writer which it would be 
 impossible to parallel by any thing in the history of 
 Epicurism ; which tend to the destruction of all moral 
 distinctions ; which lay wisdom and folly on a level with 
 each other ; which deliberately scorn and restrain all enthu- 
 siasm of virtue, and sum up all good counsel in precepts of 
 voluptuousness and the doctrine of death. 
 
 Now, what is to make these sentiments safe and salutary 
 in the Bible, and shocking and poisonous everywhere else ? 
 And how can they form one consistent whole, when meeting 
 with the same reverence in the same mind with the morality 
 
 * Prov. xi. 17, 25. f Eccles. ii. 24. 
 
 + Eccles. vii. 27, 28. Wellbeloved's translation and note. 
 
 Eccles. iii. 19.
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 401 
 
 of Christ ? Oh ! what a refreshment to our fevered heart 
 to turn from the jaded sensualist of the palace, to the 
 holy Prophet in the villages of Galilee ! to quit the morals 
 of the appetites, and, at the breathing of a spirit so divine, 
 to feel that our souls have wings again ! The sense of 
 responsibility, forgotten in the casuistry of self-indul- 
 gence, steals back to its secret throne; the faith in dis- 
 interestedness, conjured out of the heart by the enchant- 
 ments of sophistry, streams on us from the eye of Jesus ; 
 and dim feelings of the just, the noble, and the holy, 
 dilating into sublime and reverential aspirations, swell 
 within us, like the very breath of God, at the tones of that 
 sacred voice. To whom, then, but to him should we and 
 our children go ? 
 
 The parents, then, who would guard the moral purity of 
 their child, who would not wish him to find access any- 
 where to impressions and premature knowledge of wrong, 
 from which they would religiously screen him in a news- 
 paper or a tale ; who would dread his contracting a 
 sympathy with ferocious and intolerant passions ; who would 
 maintain his estimate of duty wisely graduated, and not 
 suffer him to confound secondary with primary obligations, 
 the forms and means of duty with its ends and substance ; 
 who would bring him to acquire his ideas of God to one 
 pure and consistent school ; who would mix no taint of 
 selfishness with his morality, of sceptical contempt with his 
 interpretations of men, of ignoble despondency with his 
 conceptions of life and death, will be cautious in their use 
 of the ancient Scriptures, and permit no unregulated access 
 to them within their house. Of course there will be a 
 clamour ; but their duty is not to the bigot-neighbour, but 
 to the child at home. 
 
 And surely the distinction is plain and of easy application, 
 that the disciple is to seek his personal religion at the 
 feet of Christ, while he resorts to the Hebrew writings for 
 the materials of his historical theology. The children who 
 loved and trusted Jesus, the followers who looked upon his 
 
 VOL. IV. D D
 
 402 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 
 
 living face, and were drawn by the power of so heavenly a 
 sanctity to a career of heroic duty, were assuredly in a posi- 
 tion not of " religious destitution," but of highest religious 
 privilege. And in a like position, so far as it can be 
 recovered now, is every mind placed which is brought to 
 him through the record of parable and miracle, and trained 
 to see in him the true image of divine perfection. Let 
 him be presented as the solitary guide, the single rule and 
 standard by which to think of the God who reigns in 
 heaven, and the life we should live on earth ; and whatever 
 in the earlier strains of poet or of prophet is in harmony 
 with this, may then be adopted to enrich its lessons, and 
 give them more various access to the heart ; while all that 
 is repugnant to it is scrupulously disconnected from the idea 
 of God and duty, utterly stripped of their approval and 
 authority, and thrown among the human elements of the 
 past. The great end of spiritual education is to direct the 
 mind's admiration and reverence aright ; to prevent the 
 intrusion of any gross and false homage in place of a true 
 worship ; to impart a Christian conception of what is noble 
 and beautiful ; to present life to the young aspirant as a 
 scene of sacred responsibility, in which the pursuit of 
 natural good is to be regulated by a holy law, and subordin- 
 ated to the aim at a holy perfectness. To attain this end, 
 the Christian element of the Scriptures must be disengaged 
 from all else ; their principles of universal religion be 
 extracted from the temporary and local matter with which 
 they are combined ; the essential obligations of human 
 nature be discriminated from the accidental positions of 
 Judaism, and the living Providence of the universe separated 
 from the obsolete politics of Palestine. Perform this 
 analysis; and, though you '"'mutilate the Scriptures " you 
 teach Christianity : omit it ; and, though you worship the 
 gospel, you miss the evangelic faith. Do this for your 
 children, and the children of our people ; and, though they 
 never heard of Canticles or grew familiar with the curses of 
 David, Christ will receive them in his arms: neglect it;
 
 THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD. 403 
 
 and, though they venerate every letter of the Bible, it will 
 be to them a wooden idol that cannot deliver ; and the 
 Lord of conscience may yet disown them, and say, 
 Depart from me, I never knew you. 
 
 Thus, by leaving the heart alone with the Christian's sole 
 model of perfection, and not by any indoctrination into a 
 technical and narrow creed, will the obligations of parentage 
 meet their wise and adequate fulfilment. Thus will the 
 adoration of God impart its due energy and loftiness to the 
 conscience, and his presence brood over the mind like an 
 atmosphere of transparent holiness. Thus alone shall we 
 suffer little children to come unto Jesus, and make them 
 fit to be his chosen representatives of the kingdom of 
 heaven. Thus shall we ourselves maintain a soul most 
 faithfully and tenderly directed towards God, and act here 
 as those guardian-angels of infancy who ever behold in love 
 the face of the Father who is in heaven. 
 
 I) I) 2
 
 IRELAND AND HER FAMINE.
 
 TO THE 
 
 RIGHT HONORABLE LORD JOHN RUSSELL, 
 
 WHO HAS LONG LABOURED TO EFFACE FROM THE RELIGION'S OF 
 IRELAND THE POLITICAL MEMORIALS OF CONQUEST, 
 
 AND FROM WHOSE HIGH COURAGE AND CAPACITY IS NOW EXPECTED 
 SUCH A SEARCHING REVISION OF HER SOCIAL STATE AS SHALL 
 
 RECALL HER PROPRIETORS TO THEIR DUTY, 
 
 PERMIT HER SOIL TO VINDICATE ITS FERTILITY, 
 
 AND RAISE HER PEASANTRY TO HOPE, 
 
 THIS DISCOURSE, 
 
 PREPARED IN COMPASSION FOR HER MISERIES, 
 
 IS INSCRIBED, 
 
 WITH SENTIMENTS OF RESPECTFUL TRUST, 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE hasty sketch traced in the following pages of the con- 
 dition to which Ireland has been brought by the historical 
 antecedents of the present age, has no pretension to novelty. 
 Its truth would perhaps appear, in ordinary times, too familiar 
 to justify publication. To the painful crisis which renders it 
 seasonable, it owes whatever freshness the hearers of the 
 Discourse attributed to it. As it seemed to harmonize with 
 the generous disposition of the congregation,* the Author could 
 not refuse it the chance of ripening, in a wider field, some 
 further store of rational pity for a wronged and wretched 
 people. 
 
 LIVERPOOL, February 6, 1847. 
 
 * The collection amounted to ^"500.
 
 IRELAND AND HER FAMINE.* 
 
 " All Joy is darkened, the Mirth of the Land is gone. When thus it 
 shall be in the midst of the Land among the People, there shall 
 be as the shaking of an Olive-tree, and as the gleaning Grapes 
 when the Vintage is done." ISAIAH xxiv. n, 13. 
 
 NOTHING more plainly marks the difference between a 
 noble religion and a weak superstition, than the aspect 
 under which great calamities appear before them. Both, 
 indeed, as the stroke descends, must humbly bow beneath 
 it, and own the pressure of the Almighty hand. Both will 
 awake from their dream of security and ease, and start at 
 the image of life bared of its customs, like the well-clad 
 traveller stript of his raiment by the way, and turned off 
 naked on the snow. Both will feel, that they must " talk 
 no more so exceeding proudly," but subside upon that 
 common pity, in whose soil the ultimate fibres of our 
 humanity are nourished. But with this impression of the 
 instant, an unthinking devotion stops ; seeing in the event 
 simply a providential visit, with demand of a transitory 
 duty ; and when that has been faithfully discharged, per- 
 mitting the course of affairs to resume their old direction, 
 till brought to some dread pause again. The shut and 
 dreamy eye of monkish piety can only gaze with submission 
 on the ground. Religion, with open and uplifted look of 
 reason, sees the blow while it falls, as well asfee/s it when 
 it comes ; scans its course, while bruised beneath its 
 weight ; doubts itself, while trusting God ; and is so slow 
 
 * Paradise Street Chapel, Liverpool, Sunday, January 31, 1847.
 
 410 IRELAND AND 
 
 to lay the whole burden of sorrow to his charge, as to say, 
 " What, Lord, have we done, or what forgot to do, that 
 thou dost afflict us so ? " In dealing with the ills of this 
 world, it behoves us to make use of the Eternal name with 
 a cautious and holy fear ; to cover no unworthy thing with 
 that infinite shelter ; and while we rest under its protection 
 in our sorrows, to seek there for no refuge from our sins. 
 Few are the occurrences upon this earth, which can be 
 thrown at the feet of Providence alone. In the mere 
 aspects of nature indeed, which, from the absence of 
 premonitory sign, we cannot foresee or control ; when 
 genial suns look out from the winter skies, and untimely 
 snows hide the young summer's green ; in the earthquake's 
 crash, when it rocks our cities into dust ; in the tornado, 
 ploughing through the forest, and sweeping the fields ; in 
 the solemn thunder, which the steersman hears talking at 
 midnight with the rolling sea ; we recognize the soliloquy 
 of God : we have not a word to answer him, we can but 
 cross our hands upon the breast, and say, " It is the Lord 
 that passeth by." But rarely does he stand apart from us, 
 and act thus awfully alone. He has committed this 
 province of his universe to us, and in almost all its affairs, 
 human agency is mingled with the divine : in its good, 
 some faithfulness of ours makes harmony with his mercy ; 
 in its ill, some guilt creates a discord from the tones of 
 his severer wisdom. When this is so, we have other 
 lessons to learn from the bitterness of experience than 
 those of bare submission : it not only smites our affections, 
 but reproves our will : in addition to self-humiliation and 
 denial, it demands self-judgment : and to lose ourselves 
 wholly in resignation and in pity, is to abdicate our 
 responsibilities, and to refuse, in the darkness of the 
 present, the openings of light for the future. Not indeed 
 that we are to lend ourselves to the shallow and barren 
 impiety, which, without regard to the Providential order of 
 causes and effects, hunts through every public disaster for 
 traces of penal judgment ; which affects to be the con-
 
 HER FAMINE. 411 
 
 fidant of the Everlasting Will, and to discern the motives 
 that interrupt the beneficence of the seasons, and arm the 
 elements with fear. Such arrogancy, while pretending to 
 expound the Divine wisdom, does but unconsciously 
 expose the depth of human folly and weakness. Looking 
 upon the face of this awful universe, it can see only the 
 reflection of its own poor hatreds : and to the breadth of 
 nature and the strides of history it has nothing to apply but 
 the inch-rule of ignorance and the false measures of passion.* 
 It is plain what sort of world we should have, were it 
 disposed of in this temper, instead of being ruled by One, 
 whose Image blessed of old the villages of Samaria with 
 mercy, and who ever repeats, to mortals meddling with the 
 fires of heaven, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." 
 Only so far as present afflictions are clear consequences, 
 according to the known laws of our life and lot, from the 
 past unfaithfulness of men, can we draw from them any 
 moral inference, and regard them as an expression of the 
 justice of God. Within these limits, however, some 
 profitable lessons may be learned. 
 
 In the appalling calamity which is now visiting a large 
 portion of this empire, moral causes are so manifestly 
 blended with physical, that the current language of Provi- 
 dential recognition is apt to sound like an evasion of human 
 accountability. It is a shocking profanation to refer to 
 the Highest Will that which is the plain consequence of 
 our failures and neglects ; to substitute complacent trust 
 for docile penitence; and to give with mere impulsive 
 charity, without reckoning the forgotten claims of past 
 justice. No doubt it is by a hand other than human, that 
 a material article of food has been struck with sudden 
 decay ; and whatever privations are the necessary con- 
 
 * For a recent and truly humiliating example of thi 
 dfj.a6ia, see the correspondence of Mr. Hoare with Lord Robert Gvos- 
 venor, in relation to his Lordship's political estimate of the Irish 
 Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Iloare attributes the potato blight to 
 the Maynooth grant !
 
 412 IRELAND AND 
 
 sequences of this dispensation, are fitly owned as heaven- 
 sent, and regarded as occasions only for mutual help and 
 resignation. But the consequences which were not 
 inevitable, it is wicked to call Divine ; and how great a 
 proportion of the whole these are, may be seen when we 
 compare England with Ireland at the present moment. 
 Both alike have suffered the loss of the same crop ; the 
 physical visitation, which is the hand of God, has dealt the 
 same measure to both. Yet to the one it brings only 
 pressure, to the other ruin ; to the one, privation, to the 
 other, famine ; to the one anxiety, to the other, despair. 
 The whole amount of this difference is due to social and 
 moral causes, and remains as a reproach to the empire, not 
 as a shadow from the Most High. 
 
 Whence the astonishing contrast between two countries, 
 whose hills every clear sunrise brings within sight of one 
 another ; whose interests are inseparably locked together ; 
 and which have lived for ages under the same sway ? 
 Nature has not ordained it. The two islands, as they lay 
 at first unpeopled in the sea, looked like twin sisters of 
 creation, dressed in the same green mantle, screened from 
 the heats by the same canopy of clouds, and guarded by 
 the baying of the same watchful storms. To no native 
 wealth or grace can the one pretend, in which the other 
 may not vie ; and every want and blemish in the one is 
 balanced by some equal imperfection in the other : so that, 
 could they have changed places, no one can doubt that 
 they might have changed lots. Nor is there any plea for 
 saying, that the people drifted by the winds of history upon 
 their shores are essentially different. Taken one by one, 
 even now, they present only harmonious varieties of a 
 single type ; and the fact that the Scottish people are of the 
 very same race, yet differ from them more widely than 
 ourselves, is enough to show that the imaginary difficulties 
 of lineage are pliant under the discipline of events. Yet, 
 though made by birth of the same blood, set by nature 
 within the same latitudes, led by conversion to the same
 
 HER FAMINE. 413 
 
 religion, we have been brought by social agencies into a 
 contrast of condition to which the world presents no 
 ancient or modern parallel. You might travel from Siberia 
 to Normandy, and scarcely find such extremes to compare 
 as Tipperary and Middlesex. If a shapeless cabin were 
 cut out of the Galtee hills, and set down in the court of 
 London Exchange, it would be too true a type of the 
 human differences which have been permitted to separate 
 these provinces. Europe presents no poverty lodged in 
 such holes, fed with such meals, clothed in such rags, 
 cheerful under such hopeless privations, as you find in the 
 one : no wealth so solid, no comfort so established and 
 diffused, no habits of order so fixed, no provision for the 
 future so anxious and abundant, as in the other. England 
 is known over the world as the extreme of opulent civiliza- 
 tion ; Ireland, as the outcast of hungry wretchedness. 
 Along the great rivers of every continent, on the bays of 
 every productive coast, in the isles of every rich archipelago, 
 British factories rise, and bills of exchange speak for us a 
 few telling words : on the same spot appears a slouching 
 figure, with stick and bundle, and careless speech, never 
 far from a blessing or a curse, whose aspect publishes our 
 shame. The Genius of his country is like a mocking 
 Spirit to ours. Full of the wild-fire of life, rich in the 
 unwrought elements of humanity, quick to passion, mellow 
 in affection, deep in humour, he flies over the earth, to 
 track the sedate and well-dressed Genius of England, and 
 spread out the shadow of mendicancy in the train of his 
 sumptuous advance. " Ha ! ha ! " says the laughing 
 spirit, "go where you will, you old impostor, and I'll be 
 with you, and sit at your door ; and men shall look on me 
 and on you ; for the face of us two can tell no lies." And 
 so, along the St. I^iwrence and the Mississippi, on the 
 railways of France and Germany, it is published, that 
 England, with unrivalled resources, with indomitable 
 perseverance, with faculties for governing unsurpassed even 
 by Ancient Rome, with a people abhorrent of oppression
 
 414 IRELAND AND 
 
 and detesting slavery, with a constitution practically free 
 and a religion singularly earnest, cannot, with centuries at 
 its command, organize the barbaric elements it rules, and 
 reduce the beggary of a nation at its gates. 
 
 Among the complications in which this phenomenon is 
 involved, may be discerned perhaps one or two leading 
 agencies, curious and interesting to trace. The greatest 
 difficulties in the sad problem lie deep, I am persuaded, in 
 the influences of the Past. Ireland has not shared the 
 history of England ; yet it is under the methods of rule 
 which that history has created and rendered fat. With us, 
 the whole State is pervaded by the principle of Self-govern- 
 ment. A larger proportion of the affairs of human life are 
 left to Individual Will in Great Britain than in any other 
 European country : and of those which are withdrawn from 
 private control, a greater number are committed to municipal 
 and local authorities, than elsewhere. In the levying of 
 taxes, the administration of justice, the control of public 
 works, the duties of aedileship, of public instruction, and 
 religious worship, an immense work is committed to the 
 people themselves, in vestries, in sessions, in companies, in 
 corporate bodies, in congregations. The civic authority is 
 not in London ; it is everywhere : in its ordinary, healthy 
 operations, it goes on of itself, and says nothing to the 
 metropolitan executive ; whose existence is only recognized 
 for the removal of occasional obstruction, or the increase 
 of defective powers. This characteristic of our country, 
 which is its true political glory, cannot be simply taken up 
 and imitated elsewhere. Tried on an unprepared field, it 
 becomes barren, ridiculous, or corrupt. It requires peculiar 
 aptitudes and sentiments in the people who are to be sub- 
 mitted to the experiment ; and is far more the result of 
 political qualification, than the cause of it. Under the 
 Tudors, the English, I imagine, had no peculiar faculty of 
 this sort. It was the noble struggle of the Puritans against 
 the Stuarts that trained this people. That was the grand 
 apprenticeship of the middle classes of England to the
 
 HER FAMINE. 415 
 
 business of civil government ; of military defence ; of 
 foreign diplomacy ; of ecclesiastical order. Being com- 
 pelled to dismiss their professional rulers, and take their 
 affairs into their own hands, they conquered the mysteries 
 of administration, acquired the habits of authority, and 
 became penetrated with the reverence for law. And that 
 which the social revolution effected in England, the 
 religious conflict achieved in Scotland. The Presbyterian 
 democracy which John Knox called into existence, 
 demanded and created the same qualities ; handed over 
 education and religion to the regulation of parishes ; and 
 filled every province with practical and working interest in 
 the highest concerns of human life. In those grave and 
 glorious times you find the school to which Great Britain is 
 indebted for a larger number of inhabitants capable of 
 serving the state, and, if need were, of ruling it, than 
 could be gathered perhaps out of all Europe besides. 
 Though there also, on the larger scale of continental ex- 
 perience, the same truth receives some illustration. Wherever 
 there has been a popular struggle, either civil or religious, 
 by which voluntary organizations have worked their way up 
 and enthroned themselves among the old prerogatives, in 
 Holland, in Belgium, in Northern Germany, we find a 
 ripeness for provincial government, which even France, 
 first by her treatment of the Huguenots, then by the 
 military character of her great revolution, twice lost the 
 opportunity of acquiring. Ireland, declining all partner- 
 ship both in the Revolution and the Reformation, missed 
 this noble discipline ; never learned the lesson of self-rule ; 
 remains to this hour helpless, distracted, aimless ; and still 
 requires, no less than in Strafford's days, methods of 
 centralization to which the altered habits of our State give 
 the semblance of anachronism and impossibility. The 
 middle classes, on whom the stress of self-government 
 must be laid, do not there exist ; and in their absence, the 
 functions of the magistracy have been confined to a 
 proprietary imposed by conquest, the object of original
 
 4 i 6 IRELAND AND 
 
 and hereditary distrust. The Law, thus early associated 
 with coercion, has never become the emblem of Justice, 
 The ruling classes have not even had the chance of success 
 usually forced upon a conquered country. They have not 
 been left alone with the governed mass committed to them, 
 so as to adjust themselves into settled relations of con- 
 fidence with them : but, being always backed by imperial 
 force, have been entrusted with the power, without the 
 natural responsibilities of government. Meanwhile, among 
 the people themselves, there has prevailed a Religion 
 which gives no exercise whatever to any administrative 
 faculty; a religion of obedience without command; in 
 which it is not even given to a man to manage his own 
 spiritual affairs, much less to touch the Church ; in which 
 his worship itself is done for him, and his salvation needs 
 a sacerdotal conveyance. And thus it is that a system in- 
 capable of transference to a soil quite unprepared, has 
 disappointed the expectations of England, and left the 
 wayward misery of Ireland without control. That unhappy 
 land, needing centralization, has been municipally treated ; 
 and, in the reaction of inevitable failure, it has remained 
 a camp, instead of becoming a country. 
 
 A more conspicuous, but not more real, cause of the 
 permanent social condition of the sister island, is to be 
 found in the criminal neglect of their obligations by the 
 proprietors of the soil : a neglect so serious in its aggre- 
 gate results, that, were it not for the long indifference and 
 connivance allowed to it by the government, it might be 
 held sufficient to weaken all further title to forbearance. It 
 is a principle of natural justice, and of English constitutional 
 usage, that there can be no absolute private property in land: 
 that the State simply administers its possessions by the 
 hands of private individuals, conceding to them privileges 
 of use, alienation and bequest on condition of certain 
 services rendered back ; establishing them in specified 
 rights over it, as against others, but never as against itself. 
 Chattel property and mere money in the purse have been
 
 HER FAMINE. 417 
 
 considered as the characteristic of the Jew and the Alien, 
 about the management of which no public question need 
 be asked ; while real estate is the citizen's trust, over which 
 his country keeps a watch, and Justice herself stands ready 
 with the voice of approbation or of anger. Its owners arc- 
 virtually officers of the Commonwealth, entrusted with the 
 gravest elements of its wellbeing, and expected to perform 
 certain social obligations inseparable from their position. 
 They are in fact the natural lords and rulers of their neigh- 
 bourhood, morally responsible for its good order, its wise 
 economy, and the essential equity of prevalent relations 
 among its people. It is only on these understood con- 
 ditions, that society can undertake to protect hereditary 
 estate : and of all these conditions the very first in order 
 undoubtedly is, that the land shall support its people; that 
 the cultivator shall live, before the owner may gather ; that 
 no rent can be touched, till labour has been fed ; seeing 
 that the spade and the plough give an earlier and more in- 
 defeasible title than the parchment-roll. That these 
 primary conditions have been overlooked and violated by a 
 large proportion of Irish proprietors, is manifest on the 
 most cursory glance at the permanent features of their 
 country. Without appealing to the wide reign of death 
 and desolation now, take only one or two ordinary and 
 standard facts, and consider what they imply. About a 
 million of small occupiers have under tillage something 
 more than their rood or two of con-acre : they have per- 
 haps four or five acres, and raise a few oats, and have 
 poultry about their cabins, and their cow in the field. 
 Here, you will say, is some wholesome and comfortable 
 produce, on which the children may thrive, though meat 
 is never seen upon the board. But not a touch of these 
 good things ever crosses their lips from year's end to year's 
 end. The eggs are gathered into the basket for sale ; the 
 pig is driven off to market ; the corn is stacked, but they 
 never see the meal ; and morning and night the farmer's 
 wife or daughter milks the cow, and the bare-legged 
 
 VOL. IV. E E
 
 41 8 IRELAND AND 
 
 children that run after her are familiar with the frothy 
 look, but do not know the taste of it. Day by day, while 
 labouring for the creation of abundance, they all return to 
 the dry potatoes and the pinch of salt. The rent-roll takes 
 the butter and the corn ; the agent's horse must have the 
 oats : tnc spade may dig its roots and be thankful. Nay, 
 even of these so scanty is the supply beyond the margin of 
 the rent, that for the months of July and August of every 
 common year, when the old crop is exhausted and in decay, 
 and the new unfit to raise, the miseries of famine spread 
 over the land. The rotting food that was thrown aside is 
 gathered up again ; the pot is boiled once a day instead of 
 twice ; the half poisonous charlock is plucked from the 
 hedge and eaten, as you may know by the faces as 
 jaundiced as its flower : and, after watching his plot every 
 morning and thinking how slow the growth, the peasant 
 loses patience as the children cry, digs up the green 
 potatoes no larger than a marble, and by ruinous unwhole- 
 someness and waste rescues his family from despair. 
 
 Again, have we not a right to require of the possessors of 
 the soil, that it shall be made to yield some fair proportion 
 of its attainable produce ? Is it not an admitted principle, 
 that tribes who live by hunting have no title against a 
 people that will till the ground ? that the natural gifts of 
 God are not to be kept out of use by any prescriptive 
 claims of man ? And does not the same rule which forbids 
 to leave the earth an uncultivated wilderness, debar men 
 from making it little better than a cultivated weed-bed ? 
 Now so wretched is the economy which has grown up in 
 Ireland, that more than two-thirds of her population are 
 engaged in raising food (such as it is) for the whole ; while 
 the entire maintenance of Great Britain is produced by the 
 labour of less than a third of the inhabitants. Yet, though 
 the fields, fertile as our own, are thus doubly manned, they 
 scarcely yield one-third of the produce on which a skilful 
 culture might rely. It cannot possibly be pretended that 
 this is not the landlord's fault. It arises mainly, though
 
 HER FAMINE. 419 
 
 not wholly, from the system of nominal rents, a system 
 which every owner may, by a mere act of will, extinguish 
 at any instant upon his estate. When there is a holding to 
 let, so intense is the competition for land, that twenty-four 
 hours cannot elapse without fifty offers for the ground : it 
 usually goes to the highest bidder, on terms preposterously 
 above the probable produce of the soil. The landlord 
 knows that he shall never get this sum : but he takes all 
 the value that is raised over and above the tenants' 
 potatoes ; registers the difference as a debt against him ; 
 and avails himself of the chance of a fortunate year, or of 
 the occupier's incidental gains, to pay himself the rest. 
 Hence, the cultivator dares not save, or show any thing 
 but the ever-ragged edge of his property. Not a shilling 
 of capital can venture to appear in his fields : the slightest 
 improvement in his negligent and wasteful culture will 
 bring down a fresh claim upon him and he is safe only 
 on the verge of pauperism, and with a farm that quiets the 
 suspicions of cupidity by its very look of beggary. And 
 this, it must be remembered, takes place in a country where 
 the occupancy of land is identical with the holding of 
 existence itself. The cottier turned off an estate becomes 
 thenceforth a mendicant till he dies : for the class of field- 
 labourers for the wages of subsistence does not there exist. 
 When the tenant-farmer is cut off in his prime, the neigh- 
 bours will keep his widow on the land for the remainder of 
 the season, by working for her in her fields in the dusk of 
 evening, and after the chapel service on the Sunday morn- 
 ing. But when the time comes round, she must go from 
 the plot where her good-man toiled ; and, for the rest of 
 their days, she and the children must beg their bread. 
 Thus, nothing lies between the fields and death. And 
 how then can we deny that the ejecting landlord, in Ireland, 
 performs an act quite different from the mere notice to quit 
 in England ? Does he not take away the last plank ? Can 
 you wonder that he is regarded, in the passion of despair, 
 as himself beginning the game of life against life, and 
 
 E K 2
 
 420 IRELAND AND 
 
 provoking the guilty retaliation ? And until the fatal con- 
 nection is divorced between the land-tenure and the life- 
 tenure, will not the statute-law be engaged in a hopeless 
 struggle with the earliest law of our humanity ? The rights 
 of property will not bear the strain of a conflict with the 
 affections of nature and the fear of death. When the 
 outcry against English misgovernment comes over to us 
 here, whether in plaints of misery, or in tones of exaspera- 
 tion, assuredly it is for us to own its truth. But it is a cry 
 which the Irish Landlord has, of all men, the least right to 
 raise ; for the misgovernment has mainly consisted in not 
 constraining him; in leaving him to rule under semblance 
 of law, instead of serving the realities of justice. There 
 are, in truth, so many partners in this old historic wrong, 
 that crimination is out of place, except as involved in the 
 very definition of a cure. The retribution with which 
 nations are visited, is ever cumulative : after a few genera- 
 tions, the evil attains an enormity disproportioned to the 
 fault of any living men ; and the censures, just in their 
 distribution over ages, sound harsh in their immediate fall. 
 The only temper suited to all who share in the responsi- 
 bilities of this time, is that not of mutual accusation, but 
 of universal confession and hearty zeal in better ways. The 
 repentance of society, like its sins, is at best an affair of 
 tedious centuries ; and the penance is prolonged by every 
 failure in disinterestedness, on the part of government or 
 people. 
 
 This, then, my fellow-Christians, this is the land on which 
 the blight of an unparalleled dearth has fallen ; in which 
 the scant supplies are but as "the shaking of the plucked 
 olive-tree, and as the gleaning grapes, when the vintage is 
 done. 7 ' It scarcely needs a reporter to tell us what is going 
 on in its poor-houses, its villages, its towns : nor does the 
 soul of Christian pity require a picture of the unimaginable 
 horrors that make its very mountains and valleys groan. 
 If the axe and the hammer drop from the wasted hand of 
 manhood on the public works, which are the sole hope
 
 HER FAMINE. 421 
 
 of life ; if the mother has to carry off upon her back the 
 fainting youth who has earned for her the sustenance he 
 wanted for himself ; if the ghastly look and staggering gait 
 of famine is terrible among the crowds upon the road, you 
 know what must be hidden in the cabins retired from 
 reach ; in which there is no man to work ; only Age which, 
 in greatest need, never thought of sinking thus ; or Widow- 
 hood without a hope ; and Children with the mirth all 
 gone, with even the stout cry sunk into the feeble wail, and 
 that drag upon the face, which even Death can never 
 smooth into placidity again. In the dark night, the woman, 
 hearing an awful sound, and having no rush-light to show 
 the way to help, tears a bit of thatch from the roof, and 
 kindles it in the turf-embers, to see her husband die ; his 
 life and its fitful flame flicker out together. Oh ! at a time 
 like this, who shall say that we " Saxons " have no hearts 
 to help ? Who shall tell us, of that perishing race, that 
 they are "aliens in blood, in language, in religion? The 
 soul sickening within you at thought of the pale death that 
 stalks abroad, compels you to know yourself of one "blood" : 
 the lifted eye of tearless misery speaks to you in the great 
 "language"' which only the "alien" from humanity can 
 fail to answer ; and the solemn anguish of compassion, the 
 awful sense of docl, the silent prayer for mercy in our need, 
 sink us all down in the same " religion."
 
 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE following Sermon was preached on Sunday Morning, 
 July 1 6th, on taking leave of my Congregation, previously to a 
 year's absence, for the purposes of needful rest and foreign 
 travel. This term, granted to me with generous indulgence, 
 will bring the history of the present Chapel to a close : and on 
 my return, the new Church, now in process of erection in Hope 
 Street, will be opened for worship. Whilst to the society, and 
 to myself alike, the services of the day stood at the commence- 
 ment of a temporary separation, to me they permanently closed 
 the sight of a place consecrated by many ineffaceable recol- 
 lections. The various memories and hopes incident to such 
 an occasion will serve to explain, on the one hand, a few 
 allusions in the discourse, and, on the other hand, the desire of 
 my hearers for its publication. I am well aware that it owes 
 its interest entirely to adventitious opportunity : but the time 
 naturally gave to the mere wish of friends a deserved authority ; 
 and I throw off the following pages in their original form, 
 without further thought of their imperfections. 
 
 Appended to the Sermon is the substance of a speech 
 delivered on occasion of laying the foundation-stone of Hope 
 Street New Church : reprinted from the report in the Christian 
 Reformer for June. This addition is made in compliance with 
 a desire frequently expressed, to have, in a more convenient 
 form, some record of a day memorable to those whom it con- 
 cerned. 
 
 J. M. 
 
 LIVERPOOL, July 19, 1848.
 
 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 " Now I pray to God that ye do no evil ; not that we should appeal- 
 approved, but that ye should do that which is honest, though we 
 may be as reprobates. For we are glad when we are weak, and 
 ye are strong : and this also we wish, even your perfection." 
 2 CORINTHIANS, xiii. 7, 9. 
 
 FRIENDS AND FELLOW-WORSHIPPERS, 
 
 THE peculiarity of our mutual position this day, 
 may not only allow, but require me to depart a little from 
 the usual course of reflection and appeal. It is not my 
 practice, as you will bear me witness, to introduce any 
 personal element into the services of this place ; or to turn 
 the footstool of worship into the throne of egotism. It is 
 my office, and my joy, to be the mere organ and vehicle of 
 truths and sanctities, that claim and command us all ; to 
 lose myself in the solemn universe which I endeavour to 
 interpret ; to open a medium of contact between the highest 
 spirit and the humblest want. But, to-day, I close the 
 history of sixteen years ; and the second stage of a service, 
 which can have only a third, reaches its end. Many, whose 
 venerable support, when I began, was as the staff of my 
 strength, are here no more : and children, who could then 
 notice nothing but the novelty in this place, now listen 
 with understanding heart. The voice of young experience 
 which then addressed you, has learned, not without the 
 discipline of sorrow and humiliation, to tell something of
 
 426 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 the tale of our humanity. It is impossible not to take a 
 retrospect of the way which we have trod. Another such 
 term, on which, however, it were presumption to reckon, 
 and opportunity will be drawing to its close. The time 
 calls for review : not in the spirit of a miserable pride, as 
 if our work were not greater than ourselves ; nor in that 
 of abject self-depreciation, as if such a work did not 
 ennoble any powers that can bear it ; but with a hopeful 
 and humble eye to effectual revision. Before you then, 
 my hearers, in whose hearts are hid the fruits of all my 
 work ; and before Him, who alone knows its secret seed 
 and aliment, would I render some account of my Ministry, 
 and refer to its characteristic aims and spirit. 
 
 Nothing has been nearer to my heart, than to substitute 
 among you the Religion of Consciousness for the Religion of 
 Custom. It is quite true, and it is a truth too plain to 
 miss, that it is the business of religion to preside over our 
 inner world, to rule the thoughts, to quiet the passions, 
 to elevate the will. It is also true, and it is a truth far less 
 understood, that the condition of that inner world itself 
 determines our religion ; that, precisely in proportion as 
 the affections are pure and deep, the conscience clear and 
 strong, and the imagination familiar with great and beau- 
 tiful examples, are heavenly realities discerned, and the 
 windows of Reason thrown open to the empyrean light. 
 In the mind barren with selfishness, the very root is 
 withered from which the blossom and the shade of holy 
 hope must spring. To one who dishonours himself by 
 sloth and excess, Clod becomes invisible and incredible. 
 From him who quickens his business, or hurries in his 
 talk, in order to push aside the whispers of a smaller but 
 a truer voice, the awful form of Duty sorrowfully retires, 
 and lets him believe that life is given to play his own 
 game, and not to serve another's will. From such men, 
 the very power of perception itself is absent : they look 
 through no transparent medium, but through a glass 
 clouded with earthly steams : so that, demonstrate as you
 
 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 427 
 
 will the realities beyond, they cannot see. Moral and 
 emotional disorder as effectually excludes religious truth, as 
 intellectual mania vitiates ordinary judgment ; and the 
 best schooling will teach nothing, till the wounded nature 
 is healed, and the fever of the soul abates. Both the 
 theoretical doubts, and the practical deadness of religion 
 will remain, I believe, untouched, till they are dealt with 
 by this rule. They are but symptoms, which it is useless 
 directly to attack, and which can vanish only with an 
 altered mind. Till the soul attains some loftiness, by the 
 free and faithful activity of its best powers, faith is not 
 really possible to it : and when it has assumed this temper, 
 misgivings will trouble it no more. Men rise into holy 
 truth, as into a vision denied to the low level and sluggish 
 atmosphere of a flat spirit : you must lift their feet upon 
 the mountains, and make them feel the wing of the upland 
 air, and pierce the cloud-belt that floats between earth and 
 sky : and then, amid the wilderness of glories, they will 
 discern the palace of the Infinite, and feel the silence of the 
 Eternal. It is not light that we want, but eye. With our 
 utmost labour and ingenuity of research, we can do little 
 to increase the outward testimony, by which God, Perfec- 
 tion, Immortality, are disclosed to us. That testimony, 
 fixed in creation and in history, is open to all men, and 
 nearly constant for all ages : it tells its tale without our 
 help. But we may waken into consciousness the faculties 
 to which it speaks : we may touch a sense which had never 
 revealed itself before : we may begin a low sweet music, at 
 which the sleeping soul may turn with wondering face, and 
 gently cross the bridge of dreams, and open at length the 
 living eye, and say, " What world is this ; and wherefore 
 am I here ? " I have ever been profoundly convinced that 
 the ultimate source and abode of religion is in those powers 
 of our nature which the artificial habits and ordinary culture 
 of our civilization tend to repress ; and have esteemed it 
 the blessing and the glory of a clay of prayer, not to 
 perpetuate, but to counteract, the modes of thought, the
 
 428 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 rules of judgment, the standards of feeling, which lower 
 us every day. No holdfasts or securities of reasoning are 
 of the least avail, till the fundamental reverence is reached : 
 you must find your ground, before your anchor can be 
 thrown. I have known from myself, and have felt for 
 others, that when once we have descended to the true 
 springs of devotion in our nature, doubt and fears sponta- 
 neously clear away : and whatever may befall, the solemn 
 guiding truths are thenceforth interwoven, as a work of 
 divine art, into the very texture of the soul, and by no 
 access of light can be ever bleached away. 
 
 In immediate correspondence with this view, I have also 
 wished to elicit the moral beauty, the inherent sublimity, and 
 the natural authority, of Christianity. Without the full 
 feeling of these characteristics, I have feared that an appeal 
 to the external attestation of preternatural events would 
 produce a feeble, or even an unhappy, impression : while, 
 on the other hand, the largest amount of historical belief, 
 when gained, can do no more than awaken this feeling, 
 and bring us in discipleship to the feet of Christ. The 
 imperfect media through which the incidents of the Advent 
 are transmittted to our knowledge, may render it difficult 
 to obtain assurance as to many of its external facts. But 
 they leave no doubt as to that grand central figure, in 
 which all that is august and tender in the religion is 
 collected and impersonated. To look upon that form, 
 blending the majesty of the Prophet with the sweetness of 
 the child : to hear that voice of grace and truth, revealing 
 the open secrets of the heart, and, with the ease of selt- 
 renunciation, giving precepts that have the depth of prayer ; 
 to watch the vicissitudes of his mind, the flush of early 
 hope, the shade of deepening grief, the light of constant 
 trust : to follow him to the beach, the village home, the 
 leper's haunt, the temple courts, the upper room, the moon- 
 lit mount, the cross, the skies ; and to feel, as he speaks 
 to the various lot and many-coloured guilt of men, the 
 penetration of his simplicity ; if this be not enough to
 
 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 429 
 
 bring us to his feet, I do not think that we are of his sheep, 
 or shall ever know his voice. If we discern the perfect- 
 ness of his spirit, if we recognize it as divine, is anything 
 wanting to the sense of its authority! And if we do not 
 discern this, could any coercion of outward demonstration 
 create the feeling ? Nothing surely can have authority 
 with us, save that which touches the seat of all authority, 
 the conscience. Hence, to harmonize the teachings of 
 Christ with the moral intuitions of the mind, to show how 
 they raise us to a consciousness of duty and capacity unfelt 
 before, to clear away the confused rivalry of other images, 
 and make it apparent that, in all human history, he stands 
 at the unapproached summit, the mingling point of the 
 ideal and the real ; this has been the purpose I have 
 followed with the fullest heart. We have learned to regard 
 all minds as of one race, variously partakers of one inspira- 
 tion, melting at their upper margin, beyond the centre of 
 their will, into the all-comprehending Spirit, that holds 
 them, " as the sea her waves." And such are their affini- 
 ties together, that the highest which we see carries us on to 
 a higher, in whom we believe : and thus is Christ the 
 image and representative of God. This appreciation of 
 Jesus, resting upon intrinsic personal ascendency of soul, 
 being once secured, the historical limitations of his life, 
 its human colouring with the sentiments of a nation and a 
 time, lie outside its religions office, its relation to our faith 
 and trust : they become simple matters of secular criti- 
 cism ; and the temporary form of the first Christianity is 
 harmonized with its essential perpetuity. The due under- 
 standing of this form, however, being very needful to an 
 apprehension of the spirit, it has been my care, through all 
 the years of our connexion, to prepare for the hour of 
 worship by one of instruction ; and to present whatever 
 light I could collect, for the reproduction in your imagina- 
 tion of the first age of Christian literature, and the long 
 antecedents of Hebrew history. Teaching a little, I have 
 learned much. And, if I think the records, which are the
 
 430 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 vehicle of Christianity, less perfect than I once supposed ; 
 if they leave some things uncertain, on which I should be 
 grateful to be assured ; if the element of Hellenistic 
 theory, and Jewish misconception, seems larger than I had 
 thought ; yet all this does but disengage the inspired 
 Author in greatness more solitary and signal ; and, by sub- 
 stituting for the vague gaze of reverence, a real, human 
 view of that amazing time, fills me with a far deeper in- 
 terest in the men, and a profounder trust in the religion. 
 
 Another favourite task with me has been, to find some 
 " soul of goodness in things evil;" not indeed in things 
 morally evil, which it is quite beyond our province to 
 palliate and indulge, but in things intellectually wrong, 
 in those forms of opinion and worship which shock and 
 repel us, and constitute, in our view, the errors and super- 
 stitions of Christendom. There are times, indeed, when it 
 becomes a plain duty of sincerity, a simple expression of 
 manly confidence in truth, to say why these doctrines 
 offend us, and why we cannot listen to the invitation to 
 exchange the simplicity of our living faith, for the perplexi- 
 ties of Greek, or African, or Medieval creeds. Nor have 
 we been unmindful of this obligation, when imposed upon 
 us by the aggression of proselytism. But, I think, we draw 
 from error a better prize, when we make it yield us pro- 
 ductive truth, than when we compel it to grant us barren 
 victory. And it has ever been my delight to find out, 
 what it is that endears and recommends to men representa- 
 tions of God and divine things, which to us appear so dark 
 and intricate ; what sentiment they touch ; what want they 
 satisfy. For my own part, I have entire and ineradicable 
 faith in the loving instincts of pure hearts ; far more than 
 in the range and clearness of my own particular under- 
 standing. I feel assured that all minds, in proportion a* 
 they are good and faithful, attain to like proportions of 
 things beautiful and sacred : that they mean at bottom very 
 much the same thing ; that the reason, conscience, and 
 affection, from which faith is the immaculate birth, are not
 
 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 431 
 
 personal accidents, different in different men, but an indi- 
 divisible emanation of the infinite and illuminating Spirit ; 
 .seemingly broken, indeed, by the media of transmission, 
 into the several colours, yet the undulation still of one 
 ethereal base, and capable of reunion into the same white 
 flood of truth. We have always something to learn, till we 
 have traced the beliefs which we disown and others trust, 
 up to their inmost seat in human nature, and detected 
 what good and holy thing it is, which they poorly struggle 
 to express. This insight gained, we dissent no longer with 
 the heat of a narrow antipathy, but with the quiet of a 
 large sympathy. We become conscious of seeing only in 
 part ; aware of the immense firmament of truth in which 
 \ve float, and wakeful for every new star, which the gliding 
 heavens may reveal. It has seemed to me that thus only can 
 a truly deep-souled and Catholic charity clearly be reached ; 
 a charity not of contemptuous indolence, " caring for none 
 of these things " ; not of constitutional good-nature, negli- 
 gent of the sound heart, be there only a bland surface : 
 of life ; not of self-complacent forbearance, uttering plati- 
 tudes about the innocence of error, and amiably pitying 
 the delusions of mankind ; but of genuine reverence ; of 
 joint partnership in the heritage of truth and goodness ; of 
 affectionate self-distrust and earnest outlook on a future, 
 affluent in discovery, and sublime in harmonies. 
 
 Once more. I have sought, with an urgency of heart 
 which I believe no failure can exhaust, to give you a sense 
 of the Infinite Nature of Duty, and to sustain that temper 
 of aspiration, in which is found the great Christian secret 
 of blended humility and hope ; of self-reverence and self- 
 denial ; of penitence and dignity ; of resignation and re- 
 solve ; of energy and repose. There is scarcely a truth 
 which impresses me more deeply than this ; that Infini- 
 tude attaches not, as is generally conceived, merely to 
 ttiia/i/itics, like Space and Time, but to certain qualities, as 
 Beauty and Sanctity. The Universe, which is every where 
 and always, has infinity of one kind ; the free human Soul,
 
 432 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 which may be fair and good, has infinity of the other. In 
 God, the two currents of immensity mingle, and make one 
 shoreless ocean of perfection. It is one of the signatures 
 of our immortality, that while we may always choose the 
 better part, we never realize the best ; that when we have 
 put forth a conquering resolve, the victory, in being won, 
 loses its glory, and becomes a dream ; that every thing 
 kindles us in the future, and then fades when past, a pure 
 and lambent fire on the altar of our worship, but declining 
 to light the gross fuel of our self-content. In this feature of 
 our nature, which Christianity alone interprets aright, and 
 which has nowhere such expression as on the countenance 
 of Christ, we see the law of our progress, and the explana- 
 tion of our griefs. It rebukes our poor attainments and 
 mean estimates ; it wakes us from the sleep of habit on the 
 ground, and throws us off on the wing of aspiration, 
 through the higher air. I confess then, it has been my 
 desire to prevent your ever having what are called " the 
 pleasures of a good conscience." I have hoped to make 
 it clear, that these belong to the little life of the child, 
 moving in a bounded circle of law, which obedience may 
 entirely fill ; and that they exist not in the Christian's 
 universal empire of love, through which duty ever expands 
 with the enlarging limits of conception, and bursting the 
 bounds of the actual, occupies, with God, the sphere of the 
 possible. True, there must ever be a certain shadoiv 
 attending this temper of aspiration. But it is a shade, 
 like that upon the soul of Christ when he said, ' : Peace I 
 leave with you, my peace I give unto you " ; a shade of 
 sanctity, rather than of sadness ; of waiting promise, 
 rather than of barren regret : and ever implying a heavenly 
 light in the future, throwing the darkness of our earthly 
 form upon the past. 
 
 By such leading aims have I been guided in my attempt 
 to reach the secret seats of Faith, Hope, Charity, and Duty. 
 But now, having said thus much, I start back at the 
 Image I have raised. I shrink before it abashed and
 
 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 433 
 
 humbled. When I look at the pure ideal of the Christian 
 Life, when I discern in it the infinite depth of beauty, 
 when I reflect what sort of soul it must be to represent it 
 truly, and impart to it in thought and deed no colour 
 of dishonour, I am bent down in consciousness of deform- 
 ity and defect ; and, did I dwell on the reflections which 
 fill me with distrust, I should lay down a burden too noble 
 for me to bear. But you know, my hearers, that this 
 supreme standard is an object of endless approach, not of 
 instant realization ; that simply to keep it ever at the 
 heart, never to forget it, to recur to it again and again 
 after every failure, and to hold it still faithfully up, re- 
 gardless whom it may condemn, is, I will not say, all 
 that should be required, but at least an evidence of 
 honest and unabated purpose. It has assuredly been my 
 effort and resolve to keep near the fountains of truth and 
 goodness ; perhaps, too much by way of solitary thought, 
 and communion with the great minds of the past, 
 rather than with the lesser world abroad in the streets. 
 But, you will allow for the diversities of gifts ; and will 
 believe that the services least copiously rendered are those 
 in which I have felt the least confidence of good. And 
 this one thing gratitude requires me to say, that the good 
 providence of God has, in some way and degree, supplied 
 my manifold defects ; enabling us, at the end of this stage 
 of our career, to look round on a Society, not weakened 
 in numbers, or, I trust, degenerate in spirit. 
 
 And now, my hearers, I look round for the last time, 
 upon a scene, more precious to me than any I shall see. 
 Every week, as the sacred day comes round, will it rise 
 before me, and mingle its picture with my prayers : I 
 shall dwell upon the countenances and forms so dear ; 
 and wonder what answers would come, could I crowd upon 
 you the inquiries of my heart. Others, too, as I now 
 ga/e back across the space of sixteen years, others whom 
 I do not see, seem present here, friends from whom 
 local change can remove us no further now. In the face 
 
 VOL. IV. F F
 
 434 PAUSE AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 of that heavenly group, of elders who have left to us a 
 graver life ; of children, who have been the saintly lustre 
 of our homes ; of comrades, who have helped us in our 
 strife; and, in the presence of that God, to whom all 
 lands and times are equal ; who dwells with us at our 
 stations, and goes not from us on the pathless seas ; who 
 speaks to us in the wisdom and gentleness of strange 
 tongues, but more sweetly far in the familiar music of our 
 own ; under whom, vicissitudes are but varieties of Pro- 
 vidence, and afflictions but the shadows of Mercy ; who 
 is the same whether his light sleeps, as the morning, on 
 our private homes, or streaks the atmosphere of continents 
 with storm ; who, having sweetened the communion of 
 mortals, will inspire the communion of saints : I close a 
 record which may never be reopened ; I leave it at the feet 
 of Him I love and serve ; I take of you a hopeful and 
 grateful farewell ; and commend you to Him from whom 
 our pathway is not hid.
 
 435 
 
 ADDRESS, 
 
 ON OCCASION OF LAVING THE FOUNDATION STONE OF 
 A NEW CHURCH IN HOPE STREET, 
 
 Tuesday, May 9, 1848. 
 
 FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CHRISTIANS, 
 
 There are times when those who are most dis- 
 trustful of themselves lose for a while the depressing con- 
 sciousness of fear and frailty, and are constrained, by the 
 bright aspect of the present, to look upon the future with 
 joy and hope. Even when standing at the solemn birth of 
 a great undertaking, I cannot contradict the glorious sun- 
 shine above us, and the multitude of glad faces before me, 
 by suffering any shadow of despondency to rest upon this 
 moment. It is a happy augury for any enterprise, when 
 its foundation descends to its place beneath an eye so 
 steady and a hand so firm as those of our honoured 
 friend.* Nor is this the only encouragement that cheers 
 the day. If to have lasted long already is evidence for an 
 institution that it will not speedily perish ; if to have deep 
 roots in the past affords promise of blossom and fruitage 
 in the future; then we are not without assurance of a 
 lasting blessing on our work. The memorials of a cen- 
 tury and a half lie beneath that stone, and constitute the 
 autobiography of our society. There is a singular mixture 
 of resemblance and contrast between the present occasion 
 and the corresponding period when the chapel in which 
 we now worship was commenced. The newspapers just 
 
 '"" Thomas Lolton, Ksr;.
 
 436 ADDRESS. 
 
 deposited in the vase contain tidings of recent revolution 
 in a neighbouring country, whose fates, interesting to all 
 thoughtful men, are doubly so to the descendant of an 
 exiled Huguenot. And if, when the walls of Paradise 
 Street chapel are levelled, any similar documents should 
 be found beneath its corner-stone, they, the journals of 
 1789, will be filled with the traces of parallel events, then 
 equally fresh and equally portentous. Yet there are 
 grounds to hope that the intervening sixty years have not 
 been lost on European society, and that many a folly of 
 the receding generation will escape repetition now. The 
 outskirts of the last century's great storm reached even the 
 seclusion of our own societies. In September, 1791, the 
 chapel which we still occupy was to have been opened 
 by Dr. Priestley ; but, two months before, he was driven by 
 the madness of riot from the town which he adorned by 
 his virtues, his philosophy, and his fame : 
 
 " Patriot, and saint, and snge, 
 Him full of years, from his lov'd native land, 
 Statesmen blood-stained, and priests idolatrous, 
 By dark lies maddening the blind multitude, 
 Drove with vain hate. Calm, pitying, he retired. 
 And mused expectant on the coming years." 
 
 I see near me some venerable men, whose memory bears 
 witness of that time ; and others again so new to life, that 
 its traditions sound like the old voice of history. When 
 thus we link ourselves, on the right hand, with aged who 
 can tell us of these things behind, and, on the left, witli 
 the child whose eye shall look forward no less far into the 
 story of humanity, we seem to brood over a solemn expanse 
 of time, and to feel upon the wing of our thought the 
 breath of the iSth and the 2oth century, as well as the 
 .sunshine of our o\vn. 
 
 Under favour of this genial sky, I would detain you 
 while I say something as to the principles and purposes to 
 which this church is consecrated. Its claim and its
 
 ADDRESS, 437 
 
 disclaim concur, as I fully believe, to justify the hopes 
 with which you will watch its rising walls. 
 
 We dedicate it to no priestly offices. No mystic rites, no 
 discipline of the secret, no magic spells of salvation, will 
 find a shelter here. The structure rising from this spot is 
 not destined to interpose between the soul and God, but to 
 bring them into intimate and personal communion ; not to 
 provide a sacerdotal medium of approach, but to shut out 
 the secular causes of forgetfulness and separation. We 
 build a place, not for the high altar, but for the humble 
 spirit ; where the worship will be, not for the people, but 
 by them ; where the minister appears as a man amongst 
 men, conscious of their frailties, their sorrows, their aspira- 
 tions, and, only through his sad partnership in these, able 
 to interpret them aright in preaching, and, without pre- 
 tence, acknowledge them in prayer. It is but by the 
 sympathy of mind with mind, the attraction of like to like, 
 that the lines of supplication from each separate and silent 
 heart converge to the place in which he stands, and finding 
 a representative spirit there, burst into open voice. We 
 accept here the deposit of no man's faith ; but will help 
 him, if we can, to use the talent with a faithful trust. 
 
 We dedicate this place to no individual's teaching, and 
 erect no throne for mere personal influence. A stranger has 
 but to cast his eye upon the design of this building, to see 
 that you are raising something nobler than a lecture-room, 
 and are inspired with a reliance which no man's wisdom can 
 receive. You have kept it in wholesome remembrance 
 that, while teachers are transitory, the things to be taught 
 are imperishable ; and in these days of giddy tastes and 
 slight convictions, have brought your homage still to the 
 eternal essence of Christian truth, not to the accident of its 
 mutable representation. You have provided for a per- 
 manent society of persons, bound together by common 
 attachment to certain sentiments and purposes which will 
 survive the lapse of successive lives and the vicissitudes of 
 human admiration. Unworthy should we be of the free-
 
 438 ADDRESS. 
 
 hold we have received from our fathers, did we think only 
 of a life-interest for our children. 
 
 We dedicate our church to no cfeed. It is indeed most 
 natural, indeed inevitable, that all the successive dis- 
 coverers of new doctrine, and all its simple disciples, 
 should hold it to be everlasting ; should build temples, and 
 organize enduring institutions, to serve as its receptacles. 
 Did they for an instant allow that it might be perishable, 
 they would suspect it to be false. Yet who can follow the 
 history of Christendom, who observe the phenomena of 
 any one period of intellectual activity, who even register 
 the experience of his own mind, without a check to this 
 unthinking faith ? How plainly is it the law of Pro- 
 vidence, that there shall be a perpetual change, be it cycle 
 or be it progress, in the forms under which the same inde- 
 structible ideas operate in our nature ! // is time that this 
 should be openly recognized as fact, and allowed for in our 
 provisions for the future. We therefore forego all attempt 
 to fix the type of belief from age to age : and through such 
 abstinence, do we conceive, the inevitable movements of 
 opinion are likely to take place, less by polemic convulsion 
 than by peaceful development. 
 
 Not, let me be understood, that we are, individually, 
 without definite belief ; or, collectively, without a belief 
 strongly marked by common characteristics. We do not 
 pretend to be mere seekers, with a system awaiting us in 
 the future. We are not drawn together by the sympathies 
 of a universal unsettledness, and the resolve to discuss an 
 indefinite series of open questions. Xo, we raise here, not 
 a school, but a church ; not a hall of debate, but a shrine 
 of God ; and shall collect, not a parliament of critics, but a 
 brotherhood of worshippers. For this end there must be a 
 faith in each not wandering very far from the faith of all. 
 Only where there is essentially one heart and mind can the 
 many find themselves represented by the breathings of a 
 single spirit. We do not look, therefore, for the presence 
 of various creeds together ; we simply offer no hindrance to
 
 ADDRESS. 439 
 
 their appearing successively. And as we possess, not our 
 own acquisitions only, but a heritage from predecessors j 
 as we build, not for ourselves alone, but for our descend- 
 ants ; as our society runs through generations, constant 
 indeed in their religion, but variable (may I say, pro- 
 gressive ?) in their theology ; we presume not to impress 
 our own peculiarities on this church. We own the partner- 
 ship of other ages in the baptism and character of this 
 place, and will not forfeit our affinity with the ancient and 
 the unborn to gratify the egotism of a sect. Let it not be 
 said that we -want a refuge for vagueness of conviction, an 
 excuse for cowardice of profession. We know what we 
 believe ; we love what we believe ; we plainly tell what we 
 believe. I am a Unitarian ; you, who will meet here from 
 week to week, are doubtless Unitarian too ; but the society 
 of worshippers, of which we are only the living members, 
 and the Church erected here, of which we shall be but 
 transient tenants, these are not to be defined as Unitarian. 
 To stamp them with such doctrinal name, would be to per- 
 form an act of posthumous expulsion against many noble 
 dead whom it is an honour to revere ; and perhaps to pro- 
 voke against ourselves, from a future age, the retribution of 
 a like excommunication. In refusing to commit our 
 churches to a determinate system, we protest against the 
 imputation of the least indifference to truth. We simply 
 carry out, in affairs of religion, the rule which is followed in 
 all wise endowments for the advancement of knowledge, 
 and provision for the administration of states. Institutes 
 of Science and halls of learning are created, not to sustain 
 the theories of their day, however earnestly adopted by the 
 first founders ; but in the assurance that Nature and the 
 human intellect will ever seek to converse together, and 
 that a place which aids their meeting will be a welcome 
 heritage to any age. The structure of Government is 
 raised, not to preserve irrevocably the political doctrines, 
 or even the constitutional traditions, which make a 
 nation's momentary faith ; but in simple reliance on the
 
 440 ADDRESS. 
 
 permanent need of human weakness for control, and the 
 demand of the human conscience for Law. And why may 
 not our Churches rise, not in blind expectation of per- 
 petuity for the present types and classifications of theology, 
 but in pure faith that God and the human soul will ever 
 seek each other ; and that, so long as Heavenly Mercy 
 shall stoop, and earthly aspiration rise, a court of audience 
 for trust and prayer cannot be obsolete ? 
 
 Do you ask me, then, to desist from the negative 
 language of disclaimer, and to say positively what is the 
 ground and principle of our undertaking ? I reply, A 
 church is set up to embody and preserve a perfect image or 
 ideal of human life. It is ultimately based upon the fact, 
 that in each man there is a strife between his reality and 
 his conception, between his temptations and his resolves, 
 between the actual to which he descends, and the pos- 
 sible to which he climbs. The theatre of the one we call 
 " the world '' ; the refuge of the other we call " the 
 church." Were we surrendered without reserve to the 
 crush of labour and the weariness of care ; did the voice of 
 our kind never speak but in the cries of the market and 
 the greetings of the street ; were our days unmarked by 
 any purer chalk than the scores of business, and our towns 
 unrelieved by loftier structures than the dwelling, the office, 
 and the shop, the truest, deepest, most authoritative part 
 of our nature would be without expression, would become 
 faint and latent in many, and would live but for sorrow in 
 the few with whom it could not die. We stand here this 
 day to forbid that sad issue. We create here a centre and 
 shrine for our highest affections. This is to be a converg- 
 ing point for the scattered lights cf love and hope and 
 faith, that come athwart us in the path of our cares or the 
 darkness of our griefs. Here is the focus of our worship, 
 without passage through whose atmosphere, without 
 refraction through whose tears, no tint of glory, no painted 
 bow of promise, would ever touch the leaden clouds of our 
 experience. In whatever way men own the authority, and
 
 ADDRESS. 441 
 
 find the aliment, of these devout convictions and aspira- 
 tions, and associate for the expression of them, there is a 
 Church. 
 
 And that is specifically a Christian church which accepts 
 Jesus of Nazareth as (under the limitations of humanity) 
 the realization of this ideal, the blending point of historical 
 fact and divine perfection. For those who thus accept 
 him, the eye of reverence becomes fixed in content. The 
 craving imagination, roving over the universe for con- 
 stituent atoms of moral truth and heavenly beauty, is 
 restrained : veneration and love can stay at home, and sit 
 at the feet of the domestic prophet of this dear world. 
 Not that we need, as Christians, blind our hearts to any 
 fresh admirations, read history or life with a critic's super- 
 ciliousness, and shut up the Pantheon of our natural hom- 
 age. On the contrary, he who has most discernment of 
 supreme perfection, will have the quickest sense of all 
 other good. But still there will be no passionate quest of 
 objects to satiate the fever of the heart ; no straining of the 
 eye, as across a desert-world, to detect the cooling spring ; 
 no mistake of the mocking mirage for the pure lake. He 
 that hath drunk of the living water shall never thirst again. 
 This, and no servile self-surrender, is the true and only 
 " rest in the church." 
 
 In a word, then, we unite for advancement of the Chris- 
 tian Life. The whole sphere of our thought we would 
 bring into harmony with the image of Christ's mind : in 
 our worship, looking up through it to God ; in our efforts 
 of will, lifting ever nearer to it both ourselves and the 
 world. The scope of a church, like the sweep of con- 
 science, is all-comprehensive : to perfect the life personal, 
 domestic, industrial, political, social, I claim it all as the 
 aim of the heavenly law which seeks expression here. 
 And in the mere fact of association for this end, there is an 
 acknowledgment by each member that others can aid him 
 to perfect the highest relations of his life. He owns that 
 they are not wholly at the disposal of his private self-will.
 
 442 ADDRESS. 
 
 He renounces his freedom to do as he likes, and asks at 
 once liberty and help to do as he ought ; not liberty for 
 himself against others, but help from others against him- 
 self. Here, then, that truth may keep its health, may 
 there ever be free teaching and free learning ! Here, 
 that duty may hold its gentleness, may internal provision 
 be made that the strong shall help the weak ; and, that it 
 may not lose its courage, may hearty protests be uttered 
 against external wrongs, and a welcome to the birth of 
 every good ! Here, that piety may resume its divine 
 ascendency, may only guileless worship be paid, and true 
 interpreters be found of the sorrows and aspirations of 
 good hearts. 
 
 In such an attempt to organize the Christian life, there 
 is nothing exclusive ; and in the cluster of neighbouring 
 churches that look down upon us here, we discern only a 
 fraternity of coadjutors whose work, a part of the same 
 husbandry of God. lies in a field our tillage cannot reach. 
 In such attempt, moreover, there is nothing temporary and 
 perishable. It is insured by the laws of our nature and the 
 providence of God. Amid the imposing growth of 
 material wealth and pride, it is not unseasonable to remem- 
 ber that temple-architecture is the oldest in the world, and 
 to ask, after so impressive a vindication of its longevity, 
 whether, having been the earliest, it may not prove the 
 latest term of human civilization. I am persuaded that so 
 it will be. For there is in the soul of man "a temple not 
 made with hands/' which demands and shapes forth the 
 visible structure as its shell of life ; which is ever fresh 
 amid the change and wreck of ages, and can build again 
 from the ruins of the past ; indeed, the hidden cloister of 
 whose worship will remain still open, and thrill with higher 
 strains, when time and its structures shall be no more.
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS.
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS.* 
 
 Now does the Heavenly Mercy rebuke all my fears. The 
 long-imagined moment is really come : God restores us 
 to each other. Beneath his eye we parted, and before 
 his face we meet; and that Infinite Light scatters the 
 lingering shadows of misgiving which have hung around 
 the forecast of this hour. We have not hoped in vain 
 that he would remove with us to the shrine we have 
 devoutly raised ; and now in his eternal memory he sets 
 the vows and prayers by which this new opportunity is 
 to be consecrated or condemned. In distant lands, 
 through waiting months, my eye has rested upon this 
 day ; which has appeared as a star of hope behind the 
 perspective of every scene, and looked down, with a clear 
 and guiding sanctity, on intervening tracts that had 
 sometimes no other, and never a diviner, ray. Standing 
 here at length, and looking round on this strange mix- 
 ture of the new and old, the outward structure new 
 and beautiful, the living temple of faithful hearts both 
 old and dearer far, First, I greet you with all the warmth 
 of my affection and the fresh devotion of all my powers ; 
 consecrating myself anew to the service, not indeed of your 
 will, but of your faith and highest hope, your love and 
 conscience, your remorse and aspiration, which you know 
 to be interpreters of a Will that must be monarch of your 
 own. Next, I remember some whom we had thought 
 to have with us as sharers of our joy, but whom the voice 
 of our salutation can no longer reach. Those close-filled 
 
 * First Sunday of Public Worship in Hope Street Chinch, Liver- 
 pool, October 21, 1849.
 
 446 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 ranks cannot hide from me the vacancies in their midst ; 
 and I miss here the sweet attentive look of maidenly 
 docility, there the dear and venerable form of one from 
 whose eyes age had exhausted the vision but not the tears, 
 and whose features were quickened and kindled by the 
 light within. Greeting to others, Farewell to them ; and to 
 Him, with whom we and they alike live ; from whose 
 presence no pathless sea, no Alpine height, no gulph of 
 death, can e'er divide ; who spares us for his work, or calls 
 us to his rest ; who makes sweet the memory of dreadful 
 hours, and turns our tremblings into joy ; to Him, the 
 assuager of care, the reviver of hope, the giver of oppor- 
 tunity, I render for this hour a glad thanksgiving and 
 renew my vow to bear again his glorious yoke. 
 
 My purpose this morning is very simple. I ask you 
 only to think what you have done in raising this building, 
 and to find for your own act its true ground of thought. 
 That you have built this house at all, places you at once 
 in the great commonwealth of Christendom, and detaches 
 you from all faiths or ;jfaiths that would destroy it. 
 That you have joined together to build it, proclaims that 
 through your religion there runs a common consciousness 
 which blends and organizes your individual wills into a 
 higher unity, and makes a Church. The forms you have 
 given to its outline, and the memorials embodied in its 
 stones, speak everywhere the sentiments of Worship, and 
 promise here, not the severity of teaching, but the mel- 
 lowed tones of meditation and prayer. That you throw 
 open its gates on this sacred da}', and ever, when a week 
 is gone, think to come back to it again, is a confession 
 that you cannot make your every day a Sabbath, and would 
 not turn your Sabbath into an every clay; but would still 
 intersect the time with holy lines, and help to prolong that 
 ladder of heaven which climbs as yet through all Christian 
 duration, the favourite pathway of saintly souls. These 
 cardinal points I silently assume as fixed upon the very 
 face of your design ; and what further may be the funcu'on
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 447 
 
 of a Church, and ought to be the function of this Church, 
 in the present age of the world, I would explain from the 
 words of the parable, 
 
 " The wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps." MATT. xxv. 4. 
 
 And then, presuming on their supplies, they took their 
 ease, like the foolish, and while the bridegroom tarried 
 they all slumbered and slept. So must it not be in that 
 great watch-night, that solemn eve of an eternal day, 
 which we call Human Life. The spirit that sits sentinel 
 through its hours, intent for the Master's voice and ex- 
 pectant of his approach, cannot, however rich her stores, 
 set the lamp of duty idly on the ground, while she dreams 
 away beneath the stars ; and then hope, by a sudden start, 
 at the last knock, to refit the neglected fires and join the 
 pomp and mingle with the everlasting train. The watch- 
 lights which we must burn before God are no outward 
 thing, no ritual adornment, but, like the glow-worm's, the 
 intensest kindling of our own life, rising and sinking with 
 the tone of our energies ; and the oil that feeds them is too 
 ethereal to be set by ; it exists only by being ever used and 
 ever re-distilled. To keep the heart awake, to resist all 
 collapse of the will and the affections, to bring the angels 
 of our nature to a mood not merely less heedless than the 
 foolish virgins, but more faithful than the wise ; this is the 
 disciple's great thought, ever ringing like a midnight bell 
 upon his ear, from the Master's awful word, '"' Watcli ! " 
 A Church is a fraternity for accomplishing this thought ; 
 an association for realizing the Christian life, creating the 
 Christian mind, and guarding from deterioration the pure 
 type of Christian perfection ; and its agency is designed for 
 keeping to their vigils the several Graces of the soul com- 
 missioned to wait upon their Lord ; for trimming the 
 lamps they severally bear, and screening them from the 
 winds and damps of this world's night. Let us number 
 these Graces as they stand. Till their lamps were lighted 
 thev were themselves invisible, dark negations en the ojand
 
 448 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 summit of human nature, looking into the dark : but since 
 the glory of Christ has caught them, they shine afar, and 
 we see in their forms the distinctive spirits of our religion. 
 First, I discern the Spirit of 
 
 ENDEAVOUR. Foremost among the elements of the 
 Christian consciousness do I place this, that we must 
 strive and wrestle to achieve the Will of God, and that 
 only he who faints can fail. What else means the deep 
 doctrine of self-denial, which it has ever been the lowest 
 impertinence of philosophy to doubt, and the last degra- 
 dation of human nature to reject ? How else can we 
 read the contempt we feel for those who evade martyrdom 
 with a lie, the throbbing of our hearts as we watch 
 the tempted in the crisis of his trial, and their leap of 
 exultation when he decides, " Better perish than be false"? 
 These sentiments, than which none are more ineradicable 
 in man, and none more intensely stamped into Christian 
 history, would be absurd illusions, if we were not endowed 
 with a knowledge, placed under a law, and invested with a 
 power of right or wrong : they are founded on the con- 
 ception of life as an Obedience due, and of mere Self-will as 
 an insurrection against authority infinitely venerable. This 
 faith, which assigns a moral basis to all religion, touches, I 
 believe, the ultimate point of all certainty : older than this 
 or newer, more authentic, more infallible, no revelation 
 can ever be. Its very contrarieties, which offend the one- 
 sidedness of logicians and enthusiasts, constitute its truth, 
 and accurately represent man's balanced position ; whom 
 you can neither turn into the mere realm of nature nor 
 invest with the dignity of a God ; who is at once bound, 
 yet free to slip his bonds, and strangely finds in his 
 thraldom a true liberty, in escape a wretched slavery ; and 
 is conscious of divine and infinite prerogatives immersed 
 and struggling in finite conditions. All religion is Christian 
 in proportion as it takes up into its very substance this law 
 of conscience, and resolves itself into a consecration of 
 Duty. It is the great glory of the Catholic religion, that it
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 449 
 
 adopts and proclaims this principle : to this one deep root, 
 which penetrates through the soil and very structure of 
 our human world, far beyond the reach of ecclesiastical 
 storms, does it owe the width of its branches and the rich- 
 ness of its shade. Conscience, indeed, in reference to the 
 universe of Persons, like Reason in relation to the universe 
 of Things, is the Catholic faculty of human nature ; and no 
 faith which does not interpret and sanctify it can take as its 
 motto, " Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.' 1 '' I 
 am not forgetful of St. Paul's depreciation of legal religion, 
 and of the triumphs, asserted in all the churches of the 
 reformation, of a Gospel of Love over a System of Law. 
 This also I embrace with all my soul, and chime in with 
 the hymn of Grace led by Luther's mighty voice. But this 
 truth is only the other's second half, and without it could 
 no more exist than the complement without the primal arc, 
 or the joy of convalescence without the lassitude of illness. 
 Did not Conscience propose the awful problem, and the Will 
 struggle into its midst, Faith and Affection could never 
 bring the relief of solution. Law and love are but the 
 strophe and antistrophe of the great chorus of redemption ; 
 and without both the opening and the answering voices, 
 the thought and melody must alike be broken. The moral 
 law of God then, and the moral freedom of man, consti- 
 tuting life a theatre of endeavour, we lay as the granite 
 pillars of an everlasting faith, the Rock on which we build 
 our Church ; and whoever, in the partial spirit of one age, 
 builds on any more inflammable material, on the wood, 
 hay, stubble, of a disenthralled enthusiasm, shall find, 
 when his work is tried by fire, that, however poised for 
 awhile on the upward pressure of elastic heats, it will lean 
 and totter as the temperature declines, and either drop on 
 to some more primitive foundation, or collapse among the 
 ruins of the past. 
 
 Is Christianity, then, a mere Ethical System ? and do 
 we identify religion and morality? Shall we say that 
 the man who commits no fraud, or violence, or excess, is 
 
 VOL. IV. G G
 
 450 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 forthwith a denizen of the Kingdom of Heaven? God 
 forbid ! as soon might we say that every scribbler who 
 makes no slip in scanning his metres and tuning his 
 rhymes is a great Poet. Morality speaks like the defiance 
 of the hero to his foe, " Depart " ; Religion like the 
 summons of the leader to his impatient host, " Arise, 
 come on ! " As a prison-task to an Olympic race, so is 
 the duty copied from a code to the service inspired by a 
 faith. So long as moral restraints and obligations are 
 urged upon us we hardly know how, by usage, by opinion, 
 by taste, by good sense and regard to consequences, 
 they appear to lie within a very moderate and definable 
 compass, and to be matters of dry necessity included in 
 the conditions of respectability. But when the voice of 
 Christ has opened our spirit to their true nature, and from 
 utterances of human police they become tones, stealing 
 through the foliage of the soul, from enshadowed oracles of 
 God, their whole character and proportion are as much 
 changed as if the dull guest had turned into an angel, and 
 the stifling tent expanded to the midnight skies. From the 
 drowsy figure emerges the sleepless immortal ; upon the 
 heavy body grow the glorious wings ; and the sheet which 
 seemed a tiresome limit to our head, passes into the deep 
 of stars open for an everlasting flight. The feeling of duty, 
 no longer negative, ceases to act like an external hindrance 
 and prohibition, and becomes a positive eternal power 
 of endless aspiration. Yes, of endless aspiration ; for if the 
 suggestions of conscience are breathings from the Holiest, 
 they are no finite whole, but parts of an infinite Thought, 
 the surface movements of a boundless deep. When we 
 have brought ourselves to be at one with them, when they 
 are no longer dashed and broken by the resistance of our 
 spirits, but carry harmoniously with them all the move- 
 ments of our nature, still all is not over ; God will now try 
 us with a quicker time : wave after wave of impulse will 
 roll in with intenser speed from the tides of his eternal 
 Will till the undulations reach the limits of a new element,
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 451 
 
 and our thrilling spirits burst into an immortal light. To 
 whomsoever God is holy, to him is Duty Infinite. The 
 good habits, in which others abide content, give him no 
 rest; they are but half his world, and that not the illumined 
 half: by the rotatory law of all custom, they have gone off 
 into the dark, and make now but the negative hemisphere 
 of his obligations ; and this must be completed by another, 
 where the morning light of thought is fresh, and the genial 
 warmth of love yet glows. To such a mind is revealed the 
 depth of that word, "There is none good save One"; and 
 of that other, '" I must work the work of Him that sent me, 
 while it is day " ; and life appears simply as the appointed 
 scene of holy Endeavour. 
 
 Now, to awaken this consciousness of infinite obligation, 
 to draw forth and interpret its solemn intimations; to 
 resist and expose, as a Satanic delusion, every sluggish 
 doubt or mean doctrine which denies it, and to sustain it 
 in its noblest resolves, is the first function of a Christian 
 Church. The great antagonist to it is that corruption of 
 ease, that poisonous notion of enjoyment as the end of life, 
 which in so many men absolutely stifles the higher soul, 
 and suppresses in them the belief in its existence. In that 
 lowest condition of human nature, man enjoys a certain 
 unity with himself, because all powers above his animal 
 and intellectual being are fast asleep, and give him no 
 contradiction in his unworthy career. In its highest con- 
 dition, his nature reaches again a unity with itself, because 
 faith and conscience have carried their demands, and 
 rule without dispute whatever is below. It is the aim of 
 the Church to urge him through the vast interval between 
 these two limits ; during the whole of which he is at 
 variance with himself, and cries out for deliverance from 
 that " body of death," which at first made up his entire 
 consciousness and is no other than his unawakened self. 
 When that fatal sleep is once broken, it is the business of 
 a Church to suggest, perhaps even to provide, a discipline 
 of voluntary self-denial, without which the incipient insight 
 
 G O 2
 
 452 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 will not last, but relapse into the darkness which it is so 
 difficult to dispel from the infinite. It is wonderful how 
 faithful endeavour withdraws the curtain from before the 
 opening eye of the late slumbering soul. As one who just 
 turns on his pillow, with another folding of the hands to 
 sleep, -feels without recognizing the dazzling light, and it 
 only passes through into his dreams to paint anew their 
 empty phantasies ; so the mind, just stirring from the 
 dead repose of self, does not yet treat as real the dawning 
 glow of a diviner consciousness ; which, stopping there, 
 will only glide as a bewildering spectrum over the scenery 
 which the man takes to be the world. But let him spring 
 up and break the bands of sleep ; let him move about 
 among the objects which the new light shows, and do the 
 things which it requires ; and anon he finds what's true, 
 and feels how he is transferred from the subterranean den 
 of dreams into the open and lustrous universe. Effort 
 is the condition of the commonest intellectual knowledge ; 
 much more, of insight into things moral and divine. Is 
 there a poem or a landscape which you are anxious to 
 remember ? So long as you only look at it and take it in, 
 though with attention ever so fixed, its hold upon you will 
 be slight and transient : but invert the mental order, begin 
 at the active instead of the passive end, and force yourself 
 to reproduce it by pencil or by word ; and it becomes a 
 part of yourself, incorporated with the very fabric of your 
 mind. So with the whispers of the holiest spirit ; while 
 they only pass across the still, though it be listening, 
 ear of the soul, they are evanescent as the traceless wind : 
 but act on them, and you will believe in them ; produce 
 their issue, and you shall know their source ; and he with 
 whom God's presence has quieted a passion or subdued a 
 grief is surprised by the nearness of His reality. Such 
 Endeavour, such earnestness of life, do the members of a 
 Church undertake to preserve in one another's remem- 
 brance. 
 
 But next to this hicrh Angel of the Soul, I observe
 
 THE IVA TCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 453 
 
 a downcast spirit, bearing in her hand the lamp of 
 HUMILIATION : and she too must never cease from her 
 sorrowing watch. 
 
 Endeavour has its seat in the Will. If there were no 
 sense of difficulty in the exercise of Will, if all resistance 
 crumbled away at the first touch of purpose, and thought 
 could fly off into instant execution, failure, shame, remorse 
 would be unknown ; conscience would realize whatever it 
 conceived \ and though the infinite character of holy 
 obligation would leave an ineffaceable interval between 
 our position and our aspirations, the one would for ever 
 tend to overtake the other ; and the chase, albeit without 
 a goal, would be inspired by the joy of an eternal success. 
 No deeper shade than the mild sense of imperfection 
 would fall upon the spirit. But our actual condition is 
 very different. The suggestions of God are ever fresh and 
 his enterprises always new, demanding, if not new matter, 
 at least a new spirit : and it is hard to our W T ill to quit 
 the old track, to snap the old restraints, to lash itself into 
 a higher speed. And thus, with a sentient nature that 
 loves the easiest, and a conscience that reveres the best, we 
 feel that Epicurus and Christ meet face to face within our 
 soul ; which becomes at once the theatre, the stake, the 
 arbiter, of the most solemn of our conflicts. The pleasant 
 pleadings, so persuasive to our languid strength, make our 
 Temptation ; and their triumph plunges us into the Sense 
 of Guilt. This utterly changes the relations of the mind 
 to God; breaks the springs of Endeavour; turns every 
 blessed sanctity from a life within the heart to a load upon 
 it; and condenses the infinite heaven of duty into a leaden 
 universe of nightmare on the breast. So sinks in sadness 
 .the pure enthusiasm that had flung itself upon the godlike 
 track ; and the wing that had soared so high hangs droop- 
 ing and broken down. It is less the anguish of this fallen 
 state, than its weakness, that makes it awful. Who shall 
 remove this burden of sin, which paralyses the soul's 
 .native strength and restrains it in terror from seeking
 
 454 THE IVA TCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 God's? Could the immediate remorse be banished or 
 outlived, yet who can resume an infinite race with a 
 lowered hope, or faith abashed ? This crisis is the turning 
 point of many a life. By either fall or rise may the mind 
 escape from it ; in the one case relapsing by the gravitation 
 of the world into the stupor of indifference and the old 
 belief in the dreams of sense : in the other, lifted once 
 more into a light of heaven, milder perhaps, but less 
 precarious. Lifted, I say ; for sure it is that the fallen, 
 though he may hold his place and fall no more, has 
 crippled his power to lift himself. Even an archangel's 
 wing cannot rise without an atmosphere ; and the human 
 will (in things divine) is ineffectual with its mightiest 
 strokes, unless surrounded by a certain air of pure and 
 clear affection,- which recent sin exhausts and spoils. 
 While the sweet element of love and hope and self- 
 reverence is lost to the mind, the spasms of resolution are 
 but pitiable distortions, cramps of uneasiness and fear, 
 not the progressive action of a vigorous health. It is the 
 awful punishment of all unfaithfulness, that it turns the 
 mind in upon itself ; makes it look at its disease, and put 
 forth a writhing movement to escape it, with no effect but 
 to renew the anguish, to feel all the weakness, and sink 
 down again in faintness and despair. The intense power 
 which conscious evil gives to considerations of Interest, 
 the tumult of anxiety and alarm it induces, is in itself the 
 most fatal obstacle to recovery : on which, however, with 
 the delusion common to all empirics, the mere moralist 
 rests all his hopes. There are no terms in God's universe 
 on which the selfish can be saved ; no, not if a thousand 
 Calvaries were to repeat to him the divine tragedy of the 
 world. And the more you set upon him with lists of 
 unanswerable reasons, the more do you make him the 
 sharp-witted alien from God. What opening then is 
 there for the offender prostrate under the sense of sin ? 
 Shall I be told that expiation must be made by another. 
 who will bear the burden for him? Doubtless, with the
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 455 
 
 low mood to which guilt has brought him, he is just in the 
 state to accept that mercantile view of sin, and reckon it as 
 a debt against him on the ledger of the universe, which the 
 overflowing wealth of some perfect nature might gratui- 
 tously wipe off. And if you can then convince him that 
 such free sacrifice has actually been made, that for him 
 in his degradation a heavenly nature has been moved with 
 pity, taken up the conditions of sorrow, laid down the 
 immortal prerogative and died ; I do not deny that you 
 may touch the springs of wonder and delight, and that a 
 burst of thankfulness may break his ice-bound spirit and 
 set it free. Gratitude for an immense personal benefit is 
 an affection of which a previously selfish mind may be 
 susceptible ; its very selfishness rendering an act of gener- 
 osity in another the more surprising. The passionate 
 emotion thus awakened may certainly tear him from his 
 prison ; and as the object to which your fiction conducts 
 him is the Jesus Christ of sacred history, that sublime and 
 holy being, the gentle and winning type of God's own 
 perfectness, it will be strange if the false and immoral 
 grounds of his first homage are not insensibly exchanged for 
 a veneration purer and more disinterested. As it is some- 
 times easiest at the moment to cure a morbid patient by a 
 trick, the immediate case of many souls may be met by 
 this disenchanting legerdemain ; but not without the cost 
 
 O O f 
 
 inseparable from untruth. The great doctrine of mediation 
 is here corrupted by a complete inversion of its truth. 
 There are two parts of our nature essential to our first 
 approaches to God ; the Imagination places him before us 
 as an object of conception external to the mind ; the 
 Conscience interprets his personal relations of communion 
 with ourselves. The first of these emphatically needs a 
 mediator ; the function of the second perishes, the moment 
 he appears. We cannot trust the representative faculty of 
 our nature whose pencil of design varies with the scope of 
 Reason, and whose colours change with the moods and 
 lights of Passion, to uo direct to the sheet of heaven, and
 
 456 THE WA TCH- NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 show us the Almighty there : else, what watery ghost, or 
 what glaring image, might we not have of the Eternal 
 Providence ? Only through what has been upon earth can 
 we safely look to what is in heaven, through historical to 
 divine perfection ; and by keeping the eye intently fixed on 
 the highest and most majestic forms in which living minds 
 have ever actually revealed their thoughts and ways, we 
 have a steady type, with hues that do not change or fly, of 
 the great source of souls. Jesus of Nazareth, the centre 
 of- the scattered moral possibilities of history, is thus 
 mediator to our imagination between God and man. On 
 the other hand, we cannot allow the Conscience to resign 
 for an instant its native right of immediate contact and 
 audience with God : to delegate the privilege is treason ; 
 and to quit his eye is death. Yet the current theology 
 reverses this. The imagination of the offender, at the very 
 instant that it is throwing out the fire and smoke of 
 conscious guilt, is invited to paint its own unmediated 
 image of the Most High, and rely upon the terrible picture 
 with unquestioning faith ; and while the corrupted fancy is 
 thus sustained in its audacity, the shuddering Conscience 
 is encouraged in its cowardice, and allowed to hand over 
 its burthen to a mediator, under pretence of forfeited 
 approach. Who says, that the sinner must fly the terror of 
 the Lord ? I say, he must face the terror of the Lord, and 
 instead of blasting it will only melt him then. You say, 
 he dares not tell his tale and cannot pray ? Then, I 
 answer, not yet is he true and contrite ; and it is not his 
 humility, but the little speck of insincerity still spoiling it, 
 that asks for a mediator. He must accept his whole 
 abasement ; must desire, not to escape, but to endure his 
 woe ; must not even hang the head and veil the face 
 before God ; but look full up into the eye of infinite 
 Purity, and, as he disburthens himself, seek its most 
 piercing glance, that nothing may escape. Nothing but 
 truth can appear before God ; but truth always can appear, 
 and loses its very nature in parting with its rights to an
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 457 
 
 intercessor. And, as dreaded duties are apt in the per- 
 formance to surprise us by their lightness, so the moment 
 the soul lies thus exposed and transparent before God, he 
 appears terrible no more : the dark reserve thrown from 
 the heart seems to sweep away the cloud from him ; and 
 he shines upon us, not indeed with the sudden blaze of 
 clearness after storm, but with the affectionateness of an 
 eternal constancy. We have trusted him, and he is distant 
 no more ; we are emancipated into sympathy with his pure 
 nature ; the old aspirations find way again ; and instead of 
 looking at him with outside recoil, we go up into his glory, 
 losing ourselves once more in those positive admirations 
 and desires for perfection, which are the very glow of his 
 spirit, and which, far more than any passionate gratitude 
 for personal benefits, are fitted to restore our union with 
 him. And in this crisis it is that the repentant eye, now 
 purified by tears, turns with infinite refreshment from 
 the false forms that have beguiled it, to rest on Christ, as 
 the divine repository of the sanctity we have lost and 
 seek again ; and that the ear feels the deep sweetness of 
 that call, " Come unto me, ye weary and heavy-laden, and 
 I will give you rest." 
 
 Now to give this humiliating self-knowledge, to open the 
 sources of remorse, to prevent its lingering into morbid and 
 credulous woe, to cause every film of pride and fear to 
 drop away, and bring the penitent to make a clear heart 
 before God, is the proper aim and function of a Church ; 
 which thus humanizes, while it sanctifies, and uses our own 
 sins as ground for pity to others, not others' as excuses for 
 our own. In the early Christian societies, penitents were 
 recognized and distinguished as a class, a practice which, 
 however needed in evil times as a check to apostacy, could 
 have no place now, without drawing lines of classification 
 not truly distinguishing the characters of men. In later 
 times, the still more dangerous practice of confession to a 
 human, yet hardly human, because a sacerdotal, ear, 
 bears witness to the boundless power of repentance in the
 
 458 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 heart of Christendom. Perhaps the reaction into the jealous 
 individuality of modern times, in which each soul not only 
 repels the intrusion, but declines the sympathy of another, 
 has been carried beyond the point of natural equilibrium. 
 At least it is not natural that, in fraternities under common 
 vows of Christian obligation, flourishing selfishness should 
 often hold a higher place than humble sanctity ; and unre- 
 paired, therefore impenitent, injustice should lift its head 
 unabashed amid indulgent worshippers. Surely the power 
 of rebuke is too much lost in an easy indifference ; the esti- 
 mates of the world, ranging greatly by outward fortune 
 and condition, have extravagantly encroached on those of 
 the Church, which can look only to internal soundness and 
 affluence of soul. That is not a true community of dis- 
 ciples, in which a collective Christian opinion does not 
 make itself felt by at least some silent and significant 
 expression. So long as the trumpet gives an uncertain 
 sound, who will prepare himself for the battle ? By its 
 revelations of self-knowledge, its echo to the voice of self- 
 reproach ; by its suggestion of a restorative discipline ; by 
 its appeal to that faith in infinite possibilities which alone 
 sustains the burthen of penitential self-denial ; by leading 
 the soul at once to suffer, to aspire, and to love much, 
 must every Church of Christ pour into the energy of 
 endeavour, the lowly spirit of humiliation. 
 
 Side by side with this sad Angel of the Soul stands 
 another, with look of equal meekness, only clear of shame : 
 and the small fair light in her hand, shining a few steps 
 into the dark around, is the lamp of 
 
 TRUST. The companion Spirits of which we have 
 hitherto spoken preside over the work and temper of the 
 Conscience in its relation to God : and they would still have 
 to stand upon their watch, though the soul (were such a 
 thing possible) lived in empty space, in mere private 
 audience with its Creator. But now comes before it another 
 object, forcing it to look a different way, and pressing for 
 some orderly interpretation ; viz., Nature or the outward
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 459 
 
 Universe. To a mind that, through moral experience, has 
 already begun its life with God, the glorious spectacle of the 
 heavens and the earth will instantly appear divine : the 
 voice of the waters and the winds, the procession of the 
 sun and stars, the mountain's everlasting slopes, smiling 
 upwards with pastures till they frown in storms, will seem 
 the expressions of Eternal Thought. Well would it be if 
 this first absorption of nature into the substance of faith 
 enabled them permanently to grow harmoniously together. 
 But the universe, which ought to be the abode, becomes to 
 us the rival, of the living and indwelling God. Its inflexible 
 steadiness, its relentless march, so often crushing beneath 
 the wheels of a blind law the fairest flowers of beauty and 
 the unripened fruits of patient hope, look so unlike the 
 free movements of a living and loving mind, that the 
 decrees impressed on finite matter begin to contest the sway 
 of the Infinite Spirit. Other sorrows than any mentioned 
 yet, sorrows not merited or self-incurred,- and which even 
 fancy cannot plausibly link with any sin, come upon us : 
 and as we cannot sincerely meet them with humiliation, we 
 need some other guide from infidel despair. The order of 
 Cause and Effect crosses and conflicts with the order of 
 Moral Law. This is plainly seen in the history of the 
 physical sciences ; whose exclusive pursuit first lowers the 
 conception of God to that of the primal force, or at best 
 the scientific director of creation ; and then lapses, con- 
 sistently enough, into a fatalistic atheism. And the same 
 thing is keenly felt in that inexplicable distribution of 
 suffering in human life, which, in every age, has perplexed 
 the faith and saddened the love, of hearts not alien to God. 
 How must this controversy be ended in our souls, between 
 the physical God omnipotent in nature, and the holy God 
 who reveals himself in Conscience ? I will not say here 
 what may be the solution which the thoughtful may draw 
 from a devout Philosophy ; only that it must be one which 
 charges no evil upon God. Whatever cannot be glorified 
 into good, let it be referred, so far as it i.s not from the
 
 460 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 human will, to that negative datum, that shapeless assem- 
 blage of conditions, which constitute the ground of the 
 Creator's work ; but it must be withheld on any terms from 
 him who is the perfectly and only Good. He must be ever 
 worshipped, not as the source, but as the antagonist, of ill ; 
 the august and ever-living check to its desolating power, 
 who never rides upon the whirlwind, but that he may curb 
 the storm. It is only in this view that He can have pity 
 on our sorrows ; for who could pity the sufferings which he 
 himself, without the least necessity, invents and executes ? 
 That cry on Calvary, " My God, my God, why hast thou 
 forsaken me ? " was it not a cry for rescue, rescue as from 
 a. foreign foe, from a power wwdivine? And did it not then 
 burst from One who felt the anguish of that hour as the 
 inrush of a tide from which the barrier of God's volition 
 had withdrawn ? And so the faith which gave way in that 
 momentary cry is just the opposite of this ; a faith that no 
 evil is let loose without his will ; that he knows the utmost 
 it can do, keeps it ever in his eye, and will yield to it no 
 portion of his holy and affectionate designs ; that he has 
 considered all our case, and will not fail to bring it out clear, 
 if we are true to him. Trust has no other bearable 
 meaning than this ; for else it would only say that God, 
 being the unquestionable cause of evil, is not malicious in 
 producing it, and would thus merely silence a doubt 
 impossible in a Christian, and scarcely pardonable in the 
 grossest heathenism. Trust therefore in the ascendency of 
 divine Thought and Affection in the universe, serene con- 
 fidence in their perfect victory, I take to be the essence of 
 the Christian faith respecting nature. The particular 
 thought of God that may be hid amid events, moulding 
 their forms and preparing their tissues for some growth of 
 incomparable beauty, it may be impossible to trace : but 
 He is there and never leaves his everlasting work ; which is 
 the same in the shrine of conscience, in the mind of Christ, 
 and through the sphere of universal nature. 
 
 Now to interpret life and all visible things in the spirit
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 461 
 
 of this Trust ; to raise the mind oppressed by the sense of 
 material necessity : to meet the tendencies towards passive- 
 ness and despair, and, for the consolation of memory and 
 the kindling of hope, show where the order, not of a hard 
 mechanism, but of beauty, love and goodness is everywhere 
 enthroned ; this also is the duty of a Church. In this 
 relation we must contradict the doctrine of mere science, 
 which proclaims Force, rather than Thought, as the source 
 of all : we must counteract its purely causal and fatalistic 
 explanations ; must detain in the living present that God 
 whom it would allow to recede indefinitely into the Past, 
 and must lean upon Him as the nearest to us in our weak- 
 ness, the most loving in our sadness, and the Rock beneath 
 our feet in our alarms. We agree together to sustain each 
 other in this sacred trust ; to withstand the godless doubts 
 and grievings suggested by our lower mind; to defy nature's 
 inexorable Laws to disguise for us the supernatural light 
 and love within ; and to feel the hardest matter of life, as 
 well as the severest work of conscience, burning at heart 
 with his dear spirit. 
 
 This triple group, however, of Endeavour, Humiliation, 
 and Trust, are never found apart from a sister Spirit, in 
 whose features you trace more human lineaments, and in 
 whose hand is borne the lamp of 
 
 SERVICE. An individual mind, alone in the universe 
 with God, might hold the latent germs of all that is human, 
 and yet, in that solitude, could hardly enter, perhaps, on 
 the real experience of endeavour, humiliation, or trust. It 
 is only amid other minds, in the reflection of eye upon eye 
 and soul upon soul, that we so read our impulses, and 
 decipher our inspirations, as to be really capable of the 
 religious life. Society, which opens the sphere of mutual 
 sympathy, touches also the springs of reverence and worship. 
 And I entreat you to notice how it is that the companion- 
 ship of our fellows operates to bring out these individual 
 affections. We hear much in this connection about the 
 natural equality of souls, implied in their common source
 
 462 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 and common work and common end, and are referred to 
 this evident brotherhood as the true basis of both fraternal 
 love to one another and filial acknowledgment of God. 
 And, no doubt, this identity of spiritual nature is indis- 
 pensable to all sympathy and all devotion ; not, however, 
 as their positive and exciting cause, but only as their nega- 
 tive condition. Like only can comprehend like : and if the 
 being next me had not the same nature and the same 
 experiences with myself, I should have no key by which to 
 read him : he would belong to an unintelligible type ; 
 and fellow-feeling could have no place. But the likeness 
 here required is not in the minds as they are, only as 
 they might be. Their circles of possibility must coalesce ; 
 the same capacities must sleep within them, and the 
 same Law must rule over them. This similitude of 
 kind, the silent assumption of which lies in all our affec- 
 tions, merely expresses an ultimate and unrealized tendency, 
 to which present and actual facts will continually approxi- 
 mate. Meanwhile, these facts present a very different 
 picture ; not of resemblance between man and man, but 
 of variety so vast and contrast so startling, as almost to 
 perplex our faith in the unity of nature. Now it is 
 precisely this inequality of souls which is the positive 
 awakener of all our higher affections. No man could love 
 or venerate in a universe stocked with mere repetitions of 
 himself; the endless portrait would be a barren weariness. 
 He pities what is below him in happiness : he reveres what 
 is above him in excellence : he loves what is different from 
 him in beauty. His affections rest on those whom he 
 blesses and those who bless him, on his clients and his 
 Clod. At the shock of lower lives and the startling spectacle 
 of higher, he is driven to moral recoil and drawn to moral 
 aspiration ; in the one case invested with armour for the 
 resistance of evil, in the other equipped with wings to soar 
 after the good. Whatever is purer and nobler in another 
 than in ourselves opens to us a new possibility, and wields 
 over us a new authority ; and thus it is that, ascending
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 463 
 
 through the gradations of souls which culminate in Christ, 
 we find ourselves carried thence at a bound over the chasm 
 between finite and infinite, and present at the feet of the 
 Most High, saying, "Just and true are Thy ways, Thou 
 King of Saints ; who shall not fear Thee, O Lord, and 
 glorify thy name, for Thou only art holy ! " 
 
 It is therefore precisely through the diversity of minds 
 that the unity of the Divine law reveals and asserts itself 
 within us ; and the common end of life to all is felt. And 
 it is on this same inequality of souls that Christianity, as 
 a religion of love and mutual aid, builds all its work. On 
 the one hand, the strong must bend to the weak ; and on 
 the other, the weak look up to the strong. In both cases 
 there is self-denial, self-renunciation from pity, in the 
 former, from obedience, in the other. In both there is 
 reverence for what is divine ; with the one, for a godlike 
 capacity in the low; with the other, for a godlike reality in 
 the lofty. When the differing ranks of minds read off their 
 relations in these opposite directions, the whole compass 
 of Christian service is given. Within the Church therefore 
 the eye must be trained to discern this rank, the affections 
 to own it, the will to obey it. Disguised under a like 
 exterior of life are souls divided by immeasurable intervals ; 
 and it is strange and even terrible to think what secret 
 differences lurk beneath the common gloss and gaiety of 
 the same assembled numbers. How superficial is the kin- 
 dred of the utterly earthly, who sees no reality but in the 
 means of ease, the course of material interests, and the 
 colours thrown up by the shifting game of eternal life ; with 
 the saintly sufferer, before whom these flit as unsubstantial 
 shadows, and nothing is real but the spirit-drama that is 
 enacting in the midst and the great Will that plays the 
 everlasting part. Yet we often move about where both of 
 them are found, and speak with them face to face, and 
 believe them much alike. Can we not catch from our 
 examplar, who looked with divine perception straight into 
 the heart of the widow and the Samaritan, some portion of
 
 464 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 that insight which detects the heroes and despises the im- 
 postors of the present ? Why should we leave it to history 
 to find out and glorify the good ? If they are with us, 
 they are the most precious of all God's gifts ; let us know 
 them ere they die, and feel that the earth is sacred where 
 they tread. Above all, in every Church, the only classi- 
 fication known should be of character and age : and in 
 using these as grounds of mutual service, provision should 
 be made for teaching the child, for lifting the suffering, for 
 confirming the weak, and for supplying duties propor- 
 tioned to the strength of the strong. 
 
 And while this angel of Service stands to her watch, a 
 glorious spirit is at her side and closes the train ; with an 
 undying flame from her lamp of 
 
 COMMUNION. The relations of service are far from 
 being limited to the present and its intercourses. Our 
 life is but the focus of living light into which the Past and 
 the Future condense their interests. The ranks of minds by 
 which we help each other, run up both the directions of 
 time, and cover the two worlds of mortals and immortals. 
 We are ourselves disciples of an ancient and a foreign 
 prophet; and as we pronounce the word "Christian,"' 
 we feel the spark of his transmitted inspiration uniting us 
 with a long chain of generations, and fusing Christendom 
 into one life and one Church. We are disciples also of an 
 ascended prophet : nor is it possible for any one to bow in 
 soul before the divine law of which he has made us con- 
 scious, to burn with the aspirations which it kindles, and 
 touch upon the peace of entire surrender, without feeling 
 assured that he is created on the scale of immortality, ami 
 that the risen Christ is indeed, as the Scripture saith, the 
 head of an immortal host. It is a faith which fails chiefly 
 to those, who, in looking at human life, miss its grandest 
 elements, and are little familiar with the highest and 
 characteristic features of our nature. Ask the confidants 
 of <rreat souls, the bosom-friends of the holv, and they 
 
 O ' " 
 
 will tell YOU that life eternal is the only lot at all natural u>
 
 THE IV A TC PI-NIGHT LAMPS. 465 
 
 the children of the Highest. And the more you grow 
 faithful to your own most solemn experience, and learn 
 to trust your noblest love, the more will that amazing 
 prospect assume proportion to the terms of your daily 
 thought. The happy instinct of purified affections is ever 
 one of hope and ready faith. And when I simply remember 
 what faculties, what conception, what insight, are implied 
 in a being to whom a Church is possible at all ; when I 
 think what a scene in the universe must be opened to a 
 mind ere it can pray : when I reflect how the Infinite God 
 must estimate one whom He thinks it worth while to put 
 on trial amid the theatre of free souls ; all sense of difficulty 
 recedes from the Christian doctrine of an hereafter ; all rules 
 drawn from other races of creatures sink absolutely away ; 
 and man appears no less ennobled above them than if, 
 like the Angel of the '' Revelation," he was standing in the 
 sun. Under the influence of this truth the natural kindred 
 of souls is infinitely extended and deepened ; exalted into 
 independence of change ; and glorified by the hope of 
 sympathy and connexions ever fresh. The family of God 
 colonizes, not only the banks of the time-stream that passes 
 by, but the Alpine heights from which it flows, and the 
 blessed isles of the ocean to which it tends. 
 
 This sense of Communion between all ages and both 
 worlds, it is the business of a Church to cherish. Within 
 its walls, and by its ways, must the mind be surrounded by 
 the atmosphere in which this faith may thrive and grow, 
 /.his family tradition of noble souls be guarded and handed 
 down. For this end, neither the mediation of argument 
 nor the directness of authority will avail so much as the 
 just and holy discipline of the conscience and affections. To 
 nurture the love of greatness and goodness in the past ; to 
 awaken confidence in the intuitive estimates of the pure 
 and pious heart ; to glorify the dark places of the world 
 with some light of thought and love ; to vindicate the 
 sanctity of death against the pretensions of its physical 
 features, and penetrate its awful spaces with the glow of 
 
 VOL. iv. i; ii
 
 466 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 prayer and hope ; is the true method of clearing away the 
 mists from holy expectation, and realizing the communion 
 of Saints. 
 
 See then in complete array, the five wise Spirits of the 
 soul that must stand through the night of the Bridegroom's 
 tarrying, with their ever-constant lights of Endeavour, 
 Humiliation, Trust, Sen-ice, and Communion. To main- 
 tain them at their vigils is the proper end of every Church 
 that would maintain the Christian attitude of life. Am I 
 asked, by some theologic wanderer, what then is special to 
 this Church ? I say, chiefly this, that these five lamps, and 
 these alone, we believe to be held in angel hands, and fed 
 with the eternal aliment of truth ; nor will they ever give of 
 their oil to nurture the emptied lamps, which many foolish 
 servitors of the bridegroom have brought, and which now 
 are flickering with their last flame, and expiring in the smoke 
 of error. A pretty late hour in the watches of this world 
 has struck : many of the interests and controversies that 
 once dazzled with their flame have been self-consumed ; 
 and when, to find how the night rolls, we look up to heaven 
 and observe the altered place and half-inverted form of the 
 eternal constellations, we know that a morning hour is 
 drawing on. It behoves every Christian Church to be 
 awake and set itself in order for a coming age, in which, as 
 I believe, the strife will be something very different from 
 that whence existing churches obtain their several names. 
 It is not without some view to that Future of the Church 
 that I have called the five spirits, spirits of the son!, and 
 have shown then: to you as they rise from our nature 
 itself. I might with equal truth have called them charac- 
 teristics of Christianity, and have evoked them by appeal to 
 Scripture, and the analysis of Christian history. But 
 we are on the verge of a time, when the mere use of an 
 external authority, however just and moderate i : .s applica- 
 tion, will cease to be of much hearty avail : and only those 
 elements either of Scripture or of Christian history will have 
 any chance of reverent preservation, which find interpreta-
 
 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 467 
 
 tion and response in the deeper experience of Man. Who- 
 ever keeps fearlessly true to these may feel secure ; but none 
 can say what else will survive the perils of the present and 
 the coming time. What mean the strange movements of 
 Catholicism on the one side, and a pantheistic Socialism on 
 the other, between which every form of mere Protestantism 
 is growing weaker, day by day ? Are they not a reaction 
 against the extreme individuality, the disintegrating tendency 
 of modern Christianity ; whose unions, born in the transient 
 enthusiasm of reformation, cannot maintain themselves 
 against the habits of freedom they have created, or live upon 
 the dogmas they refuse to change ? Are they not both an 
 attempt, only prosecuted in opposite directions, to recover 
 some centre of human cohesion, more powerful than in- 
 terest or judgment, around which the scattered sympathies 
 and dissipated energies of society may be collected ? In 
 this common quest, the one reproduces an authority dear 
 to the Memory of Christendom, the other pours out pro- 
 phecies dazzling to the Hopes of all men ; the one adorns 
 the old earth, the other paints a new. The field seems 
 clearing fast to make room for these great rivals ; and in 
 their mutual position the signs are not few, that they por- 
 tend a mightier contest than Europe has seen for many an 
 age. The hosts are already visibly mustering. On the 
 one hand the venerable Genius of a Divine Past goes 
 round with cowl and crazier ; and from the Halls of Oxford 
 and the Cathedrals of Europe gathers, by the aspect of 
 ancient sanctity and the music of a sweet eloquence and 
 the praises of consecrated Art, a vast multitude of devoted 
 crusaders to fight with him for the ashes of the Fathers and 
 the sepulchres of the first centuries. On the other, the 
 young Genius of a Godless Future, with the serene intensity 
 of metaphysic enthusiasm on his brow, and the burning 
 songs of liberty upon his lips, wanders through the great 
 cities of our world, and in toiling workshops and restless col- 
 leges preaches the promise of a golden age, when priests 
 and kings shall be hurled from their oppressive seat, and 
 
 n H 2
 
 468 THE WATCH-NIGHT LAMPS. 
 
 reed humanity, relieved from the incubus of worship, shall 
 start itself to the proportions of a God. Who shall abide 
 in peace the crash and conflict of this war ? He only, I 
 believe, whose allegiance is neither to the antiquated Past, 
 nor to the speculative Future ; but to the imperishable, the 
 ever-present Soul of man as it is ; who keeps close, amid 
 every change, to the reality of human nature which changes 
 not ; and who, following chiefly the revelations of the 
 Divine Will to the open and conscious mind, and reading 
 Scripture, history, and life, by their interpreting light, feels 
 the serenity and rests on the stability of God.
 
 THE GOD OF REVELATION HIS OWN 
 INTERPRETER.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IN the British Quarterly Review for August 1851, appears a 
 critique on Mr. Greg's " Creed of Christendom." In the course 
 of his remarks the reviewer introduces the following sketch of 
 a modern Unitarian sermon : 
 
 "We wish our readers to imagine for a moment that they 
 see a man robed as a minister of religion, in the pulpit of an 
 elegant ecclesiastical structure. The preacher begins by 
 assuring a limited but well-dressed and fashionable auditory 
 that it is one of the great mistakes of the modern church to 
 suppose that, by placing ourselves in the age of the apostles, 
 we place ourselves in connection with Christianity in its purity. 
 It is not so. On the contrary, it is hard to conceive of men 
 more filled with prejudices, and with prejudices more hostile to 
 the religion of Jesus, than were the men who are known to us 
 as his earliest disciples. Such, in fact, was the ceaseless 
 blundering of those parties, both as to the letter and spirit of 
 the system of which they professed themselves the special 
 teachers, that we should no more think of looking to them, 
 though bearing the name of Apostles, for a true presentation of 
 the religion of Jesus, than to the towerings of a Hildebrand, or 
 the visions of a Swedenborg. The preacher assures you, 
 accordingly, that, in his judgment, Christianity has been pre- 
 served in the world, not so much by means of apostolic wisdom, 
 as in defiance of apostolic weakness, in spite of the attempts 
 of these misguided men to give to it everywhere a Jewish cast 
 and spirit, in spite of their favourite notion about the end of 
 the world as to come in the time of that generation, and of their 
 narrowness, intolerance, selfishness, asceticism and much 
 beside. Instead of learning implicitly from them, it behoves 
 us to subject all their teaching to a suspicious and rigid 
 scrutiny. In place of our being judged by their word, their
 
 PREFACE. 471 
 
 word is to be judged by us. In place of sitting passively at 
 their feet, our first duty is to separate between the fragments 
 of truth they have transmitted to us, and the accumulations of 
 error and absurdity of their own which they have mixed up 
 with it. In such a task we are much more competent than 
 they. The mists of Jewish misconception which rested so 
 thickly about them have no place with us. We can see as they 
 could not see. Even towards Jesus, our position differs widely 
 from theirs. They boasted of being his servants, i.e. in the 
 language of that time, his slaves. As a consequence, it was a 
 part of their weakness to call him Lord, a term which denotes 
 the holder of the slave. We take no such ground. \Ve have 
 chosen Jesus ; he does not choose us. He is the leader, it is 
 our will to follow, and we follow him willingly." .... 
 
 When this passage was pointed out to me, two circumstances 
 enabled me to identify the sermon described in it with one 
 which I had preached on the i$th of June last. ist. The con- 
 junction of the names of Hildebrand and Swedenborg gave a 
 specific mark which could scarcely be misconstrued. 2nd. It 
 had been stated to me that Dr. Vaughan, the editor of the 
 British Quarterly, was among my hearers on the i$th of June. 
 He may therefore be presumed to be my reporter on the ist of 
 August. He assures his readers that his sketch is "no picture 
 of the imagination." Whether it conforms to the conditions of 
 scrupulous and faithful representation may be decided by any 
 one whom curiosity or a sense of justice may impel to consult 
 the following pages. The sermon is here presented precisely 
 as it was preached, without even the correction of those verbal 
 incuricc which, however venial in speech, ought not, as a 
 general rule, to be transferred to type. My readers are thus 
 placed in the very same position which Dr. Yaughan occupied 
 as a hearer ; only I would hope that, with less of the excite- 
 ment of injured prepossessions, they may better apprehend the 
 scope and spirit of the discourse. 
 
 It will be admitted that an author has a fair right to choose 
 his own mode and time for presenting to the world what he 
 desires to say. It is hard to have this right snatched out of 
 one's hands by the angry impatience of polemical rumour. I 
 must remind the reader that this is a compulsory publication ; 
 issued simply by way of testimony, to rectify a mis-statement 
 of fact, not as an argument or exposition, adequate to the
 
 472 PREFACE. 
 
 maintenance of opinion. Addressed to those who hear me 
 week by week, it formed but an element in the teaching of 
 several years, and would be interpreted by many antecedent 
 thoughts not present to the mind of a casual visitor. The 
 qualifications and additions which would be proper in order to 
 secure truth of impression to an external and unprepared 
 audience, I am now precluded from introducing. It is perhaps 
 too much to expect from theological eagerness that it should 
 make allowance for this disadvantage. Be this as it may, I 
 have no desire to shrink from my responsibilities as an 
 expounder of divine truth : but, hiding nothing and pretending 
 nothing, shall simply endeavour, through good or ill report, 
 to have the answer of a clear conscience towards God.
 
 THE GOD OF REVELATION HIS OWN IN- 
 TERPRETER. * 
 
 ' ' But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of 
 the power may be of God, and not of us." 2 CORINTHIANS iv. 7. 
 
 THE old adage that " Man proposes, but God disposes," 
 receives its proper illustration, not from individual life, but 
 from the long courses of history. If men do but limit 
 their aims to that which is proportioned to their power and 
 opportunity, their "proposals" will receive little contradic- 
 tion from God's "disposal " ; and the expectation of success, 
 however qualified by the quiet sense of dependence, is 
 little less than a faith in the divine constancy. We can 
 perhaps conceive of a world, where every one should form 
 his plans so wisely and so modestly, as to encounter no 
 disappointment, and where the all-ruling hand should 
 endorse all his drafts upon the morrow. But even in such 
 a world, it would soon become apparent that the human 
 will, though always acting and never failing, was not the 
 only Power. If not against it, yet without it and beyond it, 
 ends would be accomplished which it never contemplated ; 
 which take it altogether by surprise ; which eclipse all its 
 personal intentions ; and before which it stands and says, 
 ' This is no thought of mine.' The first party of painted 
 savages that raised a few huts upon the Thames, did not 
 dream of the London they were creating, or know that in 
 
 * Hope Street Church, Liverpool, Sunday, Tune 15, 1851.
 
 474 THE GOD OF REVELATION 
 
 lighting the fire on their hearth they were kindling one of 
 the great foci of Time. When the Athenians refused earth 
 and water to the Persian king, they were intent only on 
 repelling the insolence of foreign ambition ; and did not 
 foresee that they were opening for the genius of their 
 nation a channel of perpetual influence that should ever 
 widen as the ages advance. The Puritans who could not 
 tolerate a surplice, or bend their necks to bow at the 
 bidding of a rubric or a priest, spent their zeal upon the 
 merits of a gesture or a form ; and were little aware that 
 they were educating a national character and creating a 
 practical liberty which should be the pride and hope of two 
 worlds. All the grand agencies which the progress of man- 
 kind evolves are formed in the same unconscious way. 
 They are the aggregate results of countless single wills, 
 each of which, thinking merely of its own end and perhaps 
 fully gaining it, is at the same time enlisted by Providence 
 in the secret service of the world. Thus it is, that out of 
 separate acts, directed, it may be, on something quite dis- 
 tinct, Polities, Literatures, Religions, arise ; the very in- 
 fluences which acquire in the end an ascendency over all 
 individual life, and become the school of nations. Nothing 
 is more startling than to see, as we compare the biography 
 of persons with these great powers of history, how the 
 latter absorb and appropriate the former ; how private 
 purpose often drops into insignificance and vanishes in 
 higher ends that use it up ; how gigantic schemes of action, 
 making perhaps the turmoil and the torture of an age, die 
 away like thunder on the summer air ; while a silent 
 thought or aimless deed emerges from obscurity, and 
 speaks with royal voice through many a century. 
 
 To lose sight of this principle in estimating Christianity, 
 and to insist on judging it, not by its matured character in 
 Christendom, not by the unconscious spirit of its founders, 
 but by their personal views and purposes, is to overlook 
 the divine in it in order to fasten on the human ; to seek 
 the winged creature of the air in the throbbing chrysalis ;
 
 HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 475 
 
 and is like judging the place of the Hebrews in history by 
 the court and the proverbs of Solomon, or the value of 
 Puritanism by the sermon of a hill-preacher before the civil 
 war. The primitive Christianity was certainly different 
 from that of other ages ; but there is no reason for 
 believing that it was better. The representation often made 
 of the early church as having only truth, and feeling only 
 love, and living in simple sanctity, is contradicted by every 
 page of the Christian records. The Epistles are entirely 
 occupied in driving back guilt and passion, or in correcting 
 errors of belief ; nor is it always possible to approve of the 
 temper in which they perform the one task, or to assent to 
 the methods by which they attempt the other. Principles 
 and affections were indeed secreted in the heart of the first 
 disciples which were to have a great future, and to become 
 the highest truth of the world. But it was precisely of 
 these that they rarely thought at all. The Apostles them- 
 selves speak slightingly of them, as baby's food ; and the 
 great faith in God, the need of repentant purity of heart, 
 with the trust in immortality, the very doctrines which we 
 should name as the permanent essence of Christian faith, 
 are expressly declared by them to be the childish rudi- 
 ments of belief, on which the attention of the grown 
 Christian will disdain to dwell* And what did they 
 prefer to these sublime truths as the nutriment of their life 
 and the pride of their wisdom ? Allegories about Isaac 
 
 * "Wherefore leaving the first principles of the doctrine of Christ, 
 let us go on unto perfection ; not laying again the foundation of re- 
 pentance from dead works, and of faith in God, of the doctrine of 
 baptisms and of laying on of hands, and of the resurrection of the dead, 
 and of the everlasting judgment. " Heb. vi. I, 2. Comp. v. 11-14. 
 Sec also iCor. iii. I, 2. " And I, brethren, was not able to speak to you 
 as to spiritual, but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ : I fed you with 
 milk, not with meat : for ye were not then able to bear it." On which 
 De Wette remarks : " yuAa, Mile!;, die Anfangsgriinde, Ileb. vi. I. : 
 TOV TTJS (ipx'js T v XpioroG Xo'-yoi/. wozu gehort fjifrdvoia, IFUFTIS fir 
 $eo'f, dvdcrracris vfKpcov, Kfjipa alutviov, i\ic.'' Kurze Erklarung tier 
 Briefe an die Corinther : in loc.
 
 476 THE GOD OF REVELATION 
 
 and Ishmael, parallels between Christ and Melchisedec, 
 new readings of history and prophecy to suit the events in 
 Palestine, and a constant outlook for the end of all things.* 
 These were the grand topics on which their minds eagerly 
 worked, and on which they laboured to construct a con- 
 sistent theory. These give the form to their doctrine, the 
 matter to their spirit. These are what you will get, if you 
 go indiscriminately to their writings for a creed : and these 
 are no more Christianity than the pretensions of Hilde- 
 brand or the visions of Swedenborg. The true religion 
 lies elsewhere, just in the things that were ever present with 
 them but never esteemed. Just as your friend may spend his 
 anxiety on his station, his usefulness, his appearance and 
 repute, and fear lest he should show nothing deserving your 
 regard, while all the time you love him for the pure graces, 
 the native wild flowers of his heart : so do the choicest 
 servants of God ever think one thing of themselves, while 
 they are dear to him and revered by us for quite another. 
 "The weak things" in the Church not less than in " the 
 World, hath he chosen to confound the mighty ; the 
 simple, to strike dumb the wise ; and things that are not, 
 to supersede the things that are." 
 
 The life of Christ in Palestine was a brief phenomenon, 
 justly regarded by every disciple as the point of divinest 
 brilliancy in the course of Providential affairs. At the time, 
 and when it was in recent remembrance, little notice was 
 taken of its intrinsic character and real peculiarities ; its 
 moral perfectness and spiritual beauty is handed down 
 to us by those who perceived it very imperfectly ; and had 
 he perceived it himself, the reality would have vanished in 
 the perception. From that gracious life itself all eyes were 
 turned away, in order to join it on to the Past which it 
 finished, and to the Future which it began. " How did it 
 come out of the ages which it closed ? What did it augur 
 
 * Comp. Gal. iii. 15-20. iv. 21-31. ; llcb. v. 4-14. vii. ; Matt. xvi. 
 28 ; Luke ix. 27 ; I Thess. iv. 15. v. 23 ; 2 Thess. iii. 5 ; Phil. i. 6, 1 1., 
 iv. 5 ; i Cor. i. 7 ; iv. 5 ; James v. 7, 8 ; I Peter iv. 7.
 
 HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 477 
 
 in those which it led on?" These were the two questions 
 with which the first disciples, with the power of his soul 
 sleeping silently at heart, consciously and exclusively con- 
 cerned themselves : and neither of these, as time has 
 shown, were they able to answer right. They connected 
 him with the Past, by regarding him as the foretold of 
 Prophets and the descendant of Kings, as the crowning 
 gift for which alone the ages had prepared the way, and 
 whose step of approach pressed its visible trace on the soil 
 of ancient history. Yet is it now confessed that, when he- 
 came, he was not such an one as Isaiah saw or Daniel ever 
 dreamt ; that no prediction had spoken of him, no type 
 suggested him : and that it is only his shadow, cast by the 
 fond light of retrospective love, that lies upon the old 
 Hebrew centuries. They connected him with the Future, 
 by carrying forward to his account in years to come the 
 visions which his stay, as they supposed, was too short to 
 realize ; by assigning to him a quick return, to finish what 
 yet was unfulfilled. The suffering, the scorn, the rejection 
 of men, the crown of thorns, were over and gone : the 
 diadem, the clarion, the flash of glory, the troop of Angels, 
 were ready to burst upon the world, and might be looked 
 for at midnight or at noon. Yet, though a sentinel gazed 
 wherever a Christian prayed, all the watchmen died without 
 the sight : the storm swept down the horizon of time, and 
 for many a century the sky has now been clear. The whole 
 Messianic doctrine, by which the Apostles found their 
 Master's Providential place, was in its very essence the 
 fabric of a dream ; a landscape traced upon the clouds by 
 the creative eye of faith and disappointment. To discuss 
 whether Jesus was the Messiah, is even more unmeaning 
 than the question whether John the Baptist were Elijah ; 
 for Elijah was at least a person, but Messiah was only a 
 conception. It was from trying Jesus by this conception, 
 and endeavouring to force him into its realization, that 
 Judas was tempted to betray him. And it is by perversely 
 applying the same test, and coercing his spirit into the
 
 4?8 THE GOD OF REVELATION 
 
 Hebrew framework, by compelling him to belong to a 
 system, instead of permitting him to be what he is in him- 
 self, that divines, with kiss of reverence scarcely less fatal, 
 have delivered him bound to be defaced by priests and 
 compared with rulers. Seeking Christianity in the creed of 
 the first age, we have necessarily fallen in with this notion, 
 that 'Jesus is the Messiah ;' and have thus set up the chief 
 Judaic error as the chief Christian verity. Among his 
 countrymen this conception was natural and inevitable : it 
 was the human condition on which alone they could recog- 
 nize in him what was divine : it was the only key with which 
 their culture supplied them for interpreting the mysterious 
 impression which he made upon their hearts : it was their 
 ideal formula for perfect life : and when he was before them, 
 the real and the ideal presence could not but coalesce. It 
 must be obvious however to every thoughtful reader, how 
 much the story and portraiture of Christ have been 
 deformed by the tyranny of this haunting idea. It is plain 
 that he himself dwelt little, if at all, upon his official claims .- 
 it was to be kept a secret what he was ; a precaution which 
 could never be reported of him, if he had notoriously held 
 and proclaimed himself to be the Messiah, and framed his 
 course in conformity with that conception. The deficiency 
 seems to have been felt by the Evangelists, and it is over- 
 compensated by their zeal. Their principle of selection, in 
 the biographical fragments they have left, appears to have 
 been to take what would best identify Jesus with the 
 Messiah : and so, his inward struggles of soul are turned 
 into an official victory over Satan ; demons are brought 
 upon the stage to give preternatural witness to his dignity ; 
 miracles of blessed healing are spoiled by thoughts and 
 arguments of exorcism ; and counterfeit meanings are put 
 on the old Poets and Prophets to fit the unexpected shape 
 of new events. A Messianic goal is evidently set up in the 
 disciples' mind, and Jesus is exhibited to us as //?'///*,' 
 fmi'nrds if. and ever nearing it. Yet beneath this artificial 
 disguise, quite a different life gleams through : a life rather
 
 77/5 OWN INTERPRETER. 479 
 
 of shrinking and recoil from the very end he is set to reach ; 
 a life, not upon system at all ; shaping itself forth by the 
 efflorescence of an inward beauty rather than the solicitations 
 of an outward aim ; a life of the Spirit that bloweth where 
 it listeth, wandering with the breath of sweet affections over 
 the verdure of good hearts, and carrying the South-wind of 
 Pity to soften the fallow and bring blossoms from the clod. 
 That divine life without a plan, that free movement from 
 the determination of love and thought within, that inspired 
 soliloquy in action, is the real soul of the entire religion : 
 and it reaches us, alas ! only in refracted lights, or through 
 unintended openings in the crust of Messianic doctrine. 
 Observe, too, the effect of this Judaic medium upon the 
 titles of honour which disciples apply to Christ : a matter 
 of no small moment, for as the relation is described, such 
 will the relative affection tend to be. We are taught, with 
 a tenacity forbidding alteration now, to call Jesus " our 
 Lord ; " and the Apostles expressly call themselves his 
 slaves (SoOXoi). To them these words were natural ; exactly 
 describing the relation present to their minds. Their faith 
 was as much political as religious. As God himself was 
 chiefly conceived of under the image of absolute Sovereignty, 
 so was Messiah to them the appointed Satrap of this world. 
 When he came, he would come to reign, bearing with 
 him the united powers of Administrator, Judge, and King. 
 And according to the Oriental type, whatever he ruled, that 
 would he possess ; and all that his subjects had would be 
 received as favours from his hand, and held as fiefs by his 
 investiture. Under the solemn expectation of the world's 
 immediate end, the kingdom of Christ was to take the place 
 of the kingdoms of the earth; and the disciples, in looking 
 for this revelation, felt themselves citizens of a supernatural 
 State, and subjects of a resistless Lord. In rude ages and 
 mnid feudal customs it has perhaps been no unhappy thing 
 that this image of servitude has been transmitted into the 
 conceptions of faith : it may have touched with some 
 sanctity an inevitable submission, and mingled a sentiment
 
 480 THE GOD OF REVELATION 
 
 of loyalty with religion. But the external relation of serf 
 and lord is no type of the internal relation of spirit to 
 spirit, which alone constitutes religion to us. To God him- 
 self, with all his infinitude, we are not slaves ; we are not 
 his property, but his children ; he regards us, not as things 
 but as persons ; he does not so much command us, as 
 appeal to us ; and in our obedience it is not his bidding 
 that we serve, but that divine Law of Right of which he 
 makes us conscious as the rule of His nature only more 
 perfectly than of ours. To obey him as slaves, in fear, and 
 with an eye upon his power, is, with all our punctuality 
 and anxiety, simply and entirely to disobey him : nor is 
 anything precious in his sight, except the free consent of 
 heart with which we seize what is holy to his thought 
 and embrace what is in harmony with his perfection. 
 Still less can we be slaves to Christ, who is no Auto- 
 crat to us, but our freely followed leader towards God; 
 the guide of our pilgrim troop in quest of a Holy land ; 
 who gives us no law from the mandates of his Will, but 
 only interprets for us, and makes burn within us in 
 characters of fire, the law of our own hearts ; who has no 
 power over us, except through the affections he awakens 
 and the aspirations he sets upon the watch. We have 
 emerged from the Religion of Law, whose only sentiment 
 is that of obedience to Sovereignty ; we have passed from the 
 religion of Salvation, whose life consists in gratitude to a 
 Deliverer ; and we are capable only of a religion of 
 Reverence, which bows before the authority of Goodness. 
 And in the infinite ranks of excellence, from the highest to 
 the lowest, there are no lords and slaves ; the dependence 
 is ever that of internal charm, not of external bond ; 
 the authority represented and impersonated in another 
 and a better soul has its living seat within our own : and 
 in this true and elevating worship, the more we are dis- 
 posed of by another, the more do we feel that we are our 
 own. This is a relation which the political terms of the 
 expected theocracy are ill adapted to express : and if we
 
 HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 481 
 
 have required many centuries to grope our way to this clearest 
 glory of religion, to disengage it from the impure admixture 
 of servile fear and revolting presumption ; if it has taken 
 long for us to melt away in our imagination the images of 
 thrones and tribunals, of prize-givings and prisons, of a 
 police and assizes of the universe ; if only at the eleventh 
 hour of our faith, the cloud has passed away, and shown us 
 the true angel-ladder that springs from earth to heaven, the 
 pure climax of souls whereon each below looks up and rises, 
 yet each above bends down and helps ; the discovery which 
 brings such peace and freedom to the heart, has been 
 delayed by the mistaken identification of the entire creed 
 of the first age with the essence of Christianity. Now that 
 God has shown us so much more, has tried the divine seed 
 of the gospel on so various a soil of history, and enabled 
 us to distinguish its fairest blossoms and its choicest fruits, 
 a much larger meaning than was possible at first must be 
 given to the purpose of his revelation. Even to Paul, 
 Christ was mainly the great representative of a theocratic 
 idea ; and was in no other sense an object of spiritual 
 belief than that he was not on earth and mortal, but in 
 heaven and immortal. That faith in Christ, which then 
 prominently denoted belief in his appointed return and 
 allegiance to him as God's viceroy in this world, is now 
 transformed into quite a different thing. It is altogether a 
 moral and affectionate sentiment ; an acknowledgment of 
 him as the highest impersonation of divine excellence and 
 inspired insight yet given to the world ; a trust in him as 
 the only realized type of perfection that can mediate for us 
 between ourselves and God; a faithfulness to him, as 
 making us conscious of what we are and what God and 
 our conscience would have us to be. It is vain to pretend 
 that revelation is a fixed and stereotyped gift. It was 
 born, as the divinest things must be, among human con- 
 ditions ; and into it ever since human conditions have 
 perpetually flowed. The elements of Hebrew thought 
 surrounded the sacred centre at first, and have been 
 
 VOL. IV. II
 
 482 COD HIS OIVN INTERPRETER. 
 
 erroneously identified with it by all Unitarian Churches 
 in every age. The Hellenic intellect afterwards streamed 
 towards the fresh point of life and faith, and gathered 
 around it the Metaphysical system of Trinitarian dogma, 
 in which orthodox communions of all times have, with 
 parallel error, sought the essence of the Gospel. The true 
 principle of the religion has been secreted in both, and con- 
 sisted in neither : it has lain unnoticed in the midst, in the 
 silent chamber of the heart, around which the clamour of 
 the disputatious intellect whirls without entrance. The 
 agency of Christ's mind as the expression of God's moral 
 nature and providence, and as the realized ideal of beauty 
 and excellence, this is the power of God and the wisdom 
 of God, which has made vain the counsels of the world, 
 and baffled the foolishness of the Church. This is the 
 Gospel's centre of stability, "Jesus Christ, the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever."
 
 LIFE ACCORDING TO THE PATTERN IN 
 THE HEAVENS. 
 
 I I 2
 
 LIFE ACCORDING TO THE PATTERN IN 
 THE HEAVENS.* 
 
 " Who serve under the image and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses 
 was admonished of God, when he was about to make the taber- 
 nacle : for See, saith he, that thou make all things according to 
 the pattern showed thee on the Mount. HEBREWS viii. 5. 
 
 A PETTY rigour of belief insists, and a no less petty 
 unbelief superfluously denies, that it was suitable for God 
 to give mechanical orders to the Jewish prophet about the 
 fabric of the sacred tent; to enumerate the stakes and rods, 
 to measure the curtains, to count the loops and rings, to 
 choose the quality of the linen and the dyes of the fleece ; 
 and even to set up a miraculous model to preclude mistake 
 of the colours or the form. Estimate as we may the details 
 of the history, the fact, I suppose, remains, of which my 
 text seizes the essence, vi/., that the Tabernacle was a 
 place of Worship, an enclosure whence unholy things were 
 banished and where God alone was sought ; that in dealing 
 with such a design Moses was conscious of preparing a 
 shrine, not for his own tastes and fancies, but for a Divine 
 Real Presence ; whose living glory had, in the invisible world, 
 better media and purer recognition than our poor copies 
 could at all approach. He was not a first-hand architect, 
 contriving for human use, but a reproducer, by symbol 
 only, of a meaning elsewhere far surpassed : and the idea 
 \vhich he embodied had no regard, like the project of an or- 
 dinary house, to transient wants of shelter and sleep, relative 
 
 * Opening of a new Chapel, Iluddersfield, December 29, 1854.
 
 486 LIFE ACCORDING TO 
 
 only to the life of man, but coincided with superhuman and 
 eternal truth, and found expression, for those who could 
 rise into it, in the highest representations of the universe. 
 The Jewish record places the pattern which he followed 
 ''on the Mount ;" at the royal summit of this world, the 
 lonely peaks that, while rooted in the human earth, spring 
 into its purest air and look furthest over its habitable plains. 
 Christian, and even Rabbinic, tradition removed the model 
 into " Heaven " ; the region which is quite beyond the 
 human and merges the earth in a wider scheme ; the 
 storehouse of the perfect and eternal ; the infinite realm, 
 cut off from the touch of cloud and the interception of 
 light. In any case, the House of Prayer is with us no 
 original device, no local creation ; and though planted on 
 the feverish desert and the parching plain of life, is no 
 mere product of misery and illusion, but is a transcript 
 from a sublimer realm and reflects the usages of the blest 
 A man upon his knees, bent low upon the ground, or look- 
 ing up with clasped hands and streaming tears ! strange 
 spectacle to those who approach him from below ! a tiling 
 unique among the animals ! but. if you will only come the 
 other way. turning out to be a borrowed attitude well- 
 known in higher regions and caught by sympathy with 
 greater natures. This deep faith it is that constitutes the 
 pith of that old tradition about that Heavenly Tabernacle : 
 that human worship is the lowly representation, the 
 image refracted through our atmosphere and its sad rain, 
 of Divine Realities ; and that the copy, as it moves from 
 station to station of history and is never absent from the 
 track and wanderings of humanity, is not a mere asylum of 
 the moment, but a "Tabernacle of Witness'' 1 to the 
 eternal archetype. 
 
 So long as there remains a place " where Prayer is wont 
 to be made/' life cannot wholly lose its uplifted look, or 
 quit the conscious presence of invisible relations brooding 
 round it. Just as a Dwelling-house proclaims, 'Here arc- 
 creatures that stand in need of shelter' 1 : as the Market
 
 THE PATTERN IN THE HEAVENS. 487 
 
 attests the habit of exchange ; as the Court is the footprint 
 of justice on the earth ; so does the Church betoken a 
 being to whom time and nature are not all ; before whose 
 face are realities other than meet the eye ; who knows that 
 he does not belong unto himself; and who sighs to 
 resemble a standard adored in an unseen world. In 
 Devotion there is this great peculiarity ; that it is neither 
 the work nor the play of our nature, but is something 
 higher than either, more ideal than the one, more real than 
 the other. All human activities besides are one of these 
 two things ; either the mere aim at an external end, or the 
 mere outcome of an inner feeling. On the one hand, we 
 plough and sow, we build and navigate, that we may win 
 the adornments and securities of life : on the other hand, 
 we sing and dance, we carve and paint, that we may put 
 forth the pressure of harmony and joy and beauty breaking 
 from within. Mechanical Toil terminates in a solid pro- 
 duct ; graceful Art is content with simple expression ; but 
 Religion is degraded when it is reduced to either character. 
 It is not a labour of utility ; and he who looks to it as a 
 means of safety, to ingratiate himself with an awful God, 
 and bespeak an interest in a hidden future, is an utter 
 stranger to its essence : his habits and words may be cast 
 in its mould, but the spark of its life is not kindled in his 
 heart. When fed by the fuel of prudence, the fire is all 
 spent in fusing it into form ; and the finished product is a 
 cold and metal mimicry that neither moves nor glows. Nor 
 is Religion a simple gesture of passion : and to class it with 
 mere natural language, to treat it as the rhythmical 
 delirium of the soul working off an irrepressible enthusiasm, 
 is to empty it of its real meaning and contents, and sink it 
 from a divine attraction to a human excitement. The pos- 
 tures and movements and tones which simply manifest the 
 impassioned mind are content to go off into space and pass 
 away : they direct themselves nowhither : they have no 
 more ol'jccf than a convulsion : they ask only leave to be 
 the last shape of a feeling that must have way : and be the
 
 488 LIFE ACCORDING TO 
 
 inspiration what it may, they close and consummate its 
 history. But he who prays is at the beginning of aspiration, 
 not at the evaporating end of impulse : he is drawn, not 
 driven : he is not painting himself upon vacancy, but is 
 surrendering himself to a Presence real and everlasting. If 
 he flings out his arms, it is not in blind paroxysm, but that 
 he may embrace and be embraced : if he cries aloud, it is 
 that he may be heard : if he makes melody of the silent 
 heart, it is no soliloquy flung into emptiness, but the low- 
 breathing love of spirit to Spirit. Devotion is not the play 
 even of the highest faculties, but their deep earnest. It is 
 no doubt the culminating point of reverence; but reverence 
 is impossible without an object, and could never culminate 
 at all or pass into the Infinite, unless its object did so too. 
 In every case we find that the faculties and susceptibilities 
 of a being tell true, and are the exact measure of the outer 
 life it has to live : and just as many and as large pro- 
 portions as it has, to just so many and so great objects 
 does it stand related ; so that from the axes of its nature 
 you may always draw the curve of its existence. Human 
 worship, therefore, turning to the living God as the infant's 
 eye to light, is itself a witness to Him whom it feels after 
 and adores : it is " the image and shadow of Heavenly 
 things " ; the parallel chamber in our nature with that Holy 
 of Holies whither its incense ever ascends. 
 
 Whoever truly worships, pouring out the prayer, not of 
 interest and fear, nor chiefly of personal gratitude, but of 
 aspiration, reverence and trust, feels irresistibly assured 
 that he is yielding to no weakness, but is falling into the 
 attitude congenial to higher natures. The fervour whose 
 flush is on him he knows to be nobler than his common 
 mood, and so tending upwards that, as he rises, it will glow 
 the more : and minds, if such there be, that occupy that 
 upper station now, and are less far from the clear face of 
 God, must be not of paler and colder devotion but of 
 richer and intenser hues. And though he cannot see into any 
 nppcr world and point to the sanction of its adoring ranks,
 
 THE PATTERN IN THE HEAVENS. 489 
 
 yet is there not enough even here to make this feeling 
 no vain presumption? Can it be denied that the deep 
 sense of God is a haunting accompaniment of the deepest 
 and grandest men ? that, however it may co-exist with 
 weakness, and absent itself without forfeiture of a certain 
 stormy force, it is ever inseparable from the large and 
 balanced soul, the spring at once of tenderness and 
 strength ? Whatever is wise or strong or loving enough in 
 this world to outlast the changes of human admiration will 
 be found to have the tincture of intense Faith. The nation 
 which has most affected the fates of mankind has done so 
 by giving them a Christ. And in each nation, the highest 
 men, whether in thought or action, Socrates, Scipio, Dante, 
 Luther, Pascal, Cromwell, Newton, have not attained their 
 great dimensions without bearing a divine secret in their 
 souls : they have been men of trust and prayer and, 
 familiar with an Infinite Presence, have attained the stature 
 which throws so grand a shadow over history. Take away 
 from these minds their religion ; reduce the philosophers 
 among them to their dialectics and mathematics, the 
 generals to their strategy, the poet to his skill in epic 
 fiction ; suppose them to think, to act, to sing, for secular 
 profit and entertainment, and not for truth and justice dear 
 eternally to God ; and do you not cut out the very pith 
 of their genius and character ? Be assured, all visible 
 greatness of mind grows in looking at an invisible that is 
 greater. And since it is inconceivable that what is most 
 sublime in humanity should spring from vision of a 
 thing that is not, that what is most real and com- 
 manding with us should come of stretching the sou! 
 into the unreal and empty, that historic durability should 
 be the gift of spectral fancies, we must hold these devout 
 natures to be at One with everlasting Fact, to feel truly 
 that the august forms of Justice and Holiness are at 
 home in Heaven, the object there of clearer insight and 
 more perfect veneration. There are those who please 
 themselves with the idea that the world will outgrow its
 
 490 LIFE ACCORDING TO 
 
 habits of worship ; that the newspaper will supersede the 
 preacher and prophet ; that the apprehension of scientific 
 laws will replace the fervour of moral inspirations ; that 
 this sphere of being will then be perfectly administered 
 when no reference to another distracts attention. But for 
 my own part I am persuaded, that life would soon become 
 intolerable on earth, were it copied from nothing in the 
 Heavens; that its deeper affections would pine away and 
 its lights of purest thought grow pale, if it lay shrouded 
 n no Holy Spirit, but only in the wilderness of space- 
 The most sagacious secular voice leaves after all a chord 
 untouched in the human heart : listening too long to its 
 didactic monotone, we begin to sigh for the rich music of 
 hope and faith. The dry glare of noon-day knowledge 
 hurts the eye by plying it for use and denying it beauty : 
 and we long to be screened behind a cloud or two of 
 moisture and of mystery, that shall mellow the glory and 
 cool the air. Never can the world be less to us, than when 
 we make it all in all. 
 
 Direct worship is then a conscious conformity to a pattern 
 in the Heavens. But all life, so far as it is good and holy. 
 is still an approximation of the mind, even though it be- 
 by unconscious instinct, to a Divine image. There are 
 men of whom you cannot speak as being conspicuous!} 
 religious ; who even present a nature hard and unim- 
 pressible to the appeals of devout sentiment and doctrine : 
 whom a sluggish imagination and a genius too much 
 entangled in practical affairs may embarrass with doubts 
 and perplexities in positive religion : but whose cheek 
 burns at a tale of injustice ; who turn away with loathing 
 from meanness and cruelty ; whose word is a rock, rooted 
 in the very substance of the world : who are stirred to their 
 inmost depths by the spectacle of heroic honour and incor- 
 ruptible fidelity : and who themselves win from others, 
 if not noisy admiration, yet the silent trust and stead}' 
 dependence which are yielded only to moral strength and 
 wisdom. Are these men then without religion ? Is there
 
 THE PATTERN IN THE HEAVENS. 491 
 
 nothing which prevails over them with truly godlike power ? 
 Deficient as their creed may be, and little as they may 
 kindle at the name of God, they too are not without their 
 worship, though you may deny it the name and they them- 
 selves would be the last to call it so. They follow through 
 life an unspeakable image of justice and veracity, which 
 shines upon them as entirely divine ; which subdues them 
 with silent admiration ; commands the current of their 
 blood and the fountain of their tears ; and makes their 
 firm-knit manhood pliant and tender as a child before the 
 appeal of injured right or generous sacrifice. They may 
 say nothing of the viewless ideal that draws them hither 
 and thither by the beckoning finger of the Right and Good : 
 they may not even put it before them, so as to know that 
 it is there : they may seem to be engaged only with worldly 
 transactions, to have no taste or capacity for spiritual 
 concerns, and spend themselves wholly on their home, 
 their business, or the council-chamber of affairs : but all 
 the while there is a secret worship of their heart, that 
 directs the labour of their hands and the very courses of 
 their thought ; and which shows itself in the order of their 
 house, the stability of their concerns, the rectitude of their 
 administration, and their willingness, notwithstanding an 
 economic taste, to sacrifice in the State material to moral 
 ends. There may be in such men ever so much natural 
 dumbness, a turbid flow of tumbled thoughts, an appar- 
 ent want of colour and clearness in all their words : but it 
 is only that all their high devout art is spent upon their 
 life itself, in cutting out its adamant into a shape that may 
 stand without shame beneath the sky, and represent the 
 naked truth and goodness of the universe. They are 
 haunted with a genuine though unconfessed reverence 
 
 o O 
 
 which is really master of the soul, and whose suggestions 
 their Will, as the skilled labourer, is ever trying to express. 
 Theirs is Religion in a secondary and less conscious state : 
 more akin to instinct and less evolved into definite belief 
 and rational thought ; less elevated therefore and nobly
 
 492 LIFE ACCORDING TO 
 
 human than the religion of clear and open eye, that knows 
 what it worships, yet worships with enthusiasm none the 
 less. But religion it still is ; an actual faith in the just, 
 and true, and good, as the Divine eternal Law and base of 
 God's universe, more solid than men can stir, more real 
 than all appearance. And in constructing their life upon 
 this model, they frame it by an Image on the Mount, whose 
 severe beauty is secure above human reach. 
 
 The same rule, of struggling into conformity with a 
 pattern in the heavens, seems to hold even in the realm 
 beneath our human life. Unconscious nature itself appears 
 in every province to be aiming at a type which is never 
 fully realized. Of no Kind of being can you produce a 
 perfect sample : in the nearest to finished beauty, some 
 little fleck of disappointment is sure to dash the bound- 
 lessness of joy. The splendour of the tropic tree is hurt 
 by its leaves torn to ribbons with the wind ; in the glory 
 of a Southern clime you miss the rich and tender green ; 
 the birds of brightest plumage have no song ; and where 
 the waters of the sea are greenest, and the forests of the 
 earth are grandest, terrors and monsters most abound. 
 Yet is there ever a pressure of tendency towards more 
 faultless forms : and no sooner are favouring conditions 
 adjusted, than nature vindicates her design, and enters 
 upon her divine heritage of beauty. Thus do all things 
 obtain their upward look, and show how the thoughts of 
 God push themselves through the refractory conditions of 
 the finite into nearer and riper expression ; so that the 
 whole visible creation is an imitation of the invisible, a 
 copy from a higher pattern in the heavens, a drifting of the 
 material and earthly towards the spiritual and divine. 
 Only, this takes place with entire unconsciousness, and 
 so partakes in no degree of the character of religion ; it 
 constitutes the third and lowest stage of attractive relation 
 between the perfectness of God and the imperfection of 
 his creatures. Piety and aspiration are the full, purposed, 
 open-eyed declaration of faith in the divine love and
 
 THE PATTERN IN THE HEAVENS. 493 
 
 holiness as the living power which rules the universe and 
 humanity. Justice and rectitude are the half-conscious 
 and instinctive confession of reliance on Divine goodness 
 and truth as the eternal foundation of all things. And 
 the silent beauty of outward nature, ever pressing on the 
 first opportunity into higher and more perfect forms, is the 
 blind homage of creation to the spirit of thought and love- 
 liness which penetrates and moulds it. So that throughout 
 all its scope, from its highest to its lowest department, this 
 universe shapes all things according to a divine pattern on 
 the Mount, and is the image and shadow of more heavenly 
 things. 
 
 You, fellow Christians, in the very act of raising this 
 structure, proclaim your deliberate purpose to conform 
 yourselves, your life, your love, your will, to a pattern in the 
 Heavens ; to look beyond the mixed elements and poor 
 counterfeits of the world as it is ; to conquer and cast out 
 its evil and imperfection ; and propose as your aim nothing- 
 less than the divine and spotless model that is hid with God. 
 In different ages, a different pattern is shown to his prophets 
 on the Mount ; always what is fairer and more august than 
 can be seen in the restless plain of life below ; but not 
 always greater than prophets yet to come may see when the 
 eye of the soul is strengthened for more resplendent things. 
 The Jewish Tabernacle was perhaps not, in itself and for 
 ever, the most beautiful of objects ; nay, for aught I know, 
 may be surpassed every day by the achievements of the 
 upholsterer and cabinet-maker ; but it was at any rate- 
 fairer and richer than aught else around, and was unique 
 among the tents of Israel. And their later Zion, as her 
 own minstrel sung, was still "the perfection of beauty." 
 Yet God has reserved still better things for us ; and another 
 object draws our perception than the smoke of altars and 
 the vestments of priests. The Soul of Christ, the sinless, 
 risen, and immortal, is the pattern shown to us ; shown first 
 upon the field of history, and on the paths of this living 
 world, and then taken to the heavens, to look down thence
 
 494 THE PATTERN IN THE HEAVENS. 
 
 on the uplifted eye of faith and love through successive 
 generations. Towards that likeness it is that you aspire ; 
 not forgetting that even this is not the ultimate of good, but 
 itself a Tabernacle of the Holy of holies, an expression of 
 the Highest of all, the "Image of the invisible God." 
 Here then may the blessed resemblance shape itself more 
 and more purely in your souls ! Here may the Word of 
 God become clothed again with human reality, and be made 
 flesh and dwell among the living, full of grace and truth, 
 and know the pulsations of a divine humanity, and work 
 the works of mercy, and speak with the lips of power !
 
 COMMERCIAL MORALS.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE questions discussed in these pages are usually supposed 
 to be less proper to the Pulpit than to the Exchange. Yet 
 the Minister of a congregation drawn chiefly from the mercan- 
 tile classes of a modern Tyre, cannot be indifferent to the 
 special ditties and temptations of the daily life around him ; 
 and may now and then feel oppressed by a " burden " of warn- 
 ing convictions, of which it would be unfaithful not to deliver 
 his conscience. Moved by such impulse, the preacher pre- 
 pared the following Sermon in the course of his ordinary 
 ministrations. It is published by the desire of many of its 
 hearers, whose judgment, on matters of commercial morality, 
 is formed from large experience as well as conscientious 
 reflection. In the printed text are a few passages which they 
 will not recognize, and which would have extended the Sermon 
 beyond the limits usually conceded to the preacher. 
 
 I'ARK NOOK, PRINCE'S PAKK. LIVERPOOL, 
 December 10, 1856.
 
 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING.* 
 
 " O\ve no man anything, but to love one another." ROMANS xiii. S. 
 
 THIS is a very simple-minded precept to proceed from 
 the native of a mercantile city, himself engaged in trade, 
 and member of a race not unconnected with the credit 
 system of the world. It is not precisely the counsel which 
 the Jew is in the habit of addressing to the Gentile ; and 
 shows in the converted Apostle a temper strangely in- 
 different to the agitations of the Synagogue and the money 
 market. Could he have prevailed on all Rome (whose 
 Christian community he was addressing) to act on his in- 
 junction, what would have become of the Hebrew banker 
 and broker, when no noble wanted a mortgage on his lands 
 or a loan on his cargo of slaves, and no patrician spend- 
 thrift any longer executed a post-obit, and greedy officials 
 ceased to dabble in time-bargains ? If in our own day the 
 precept were to acquire a sudden force, and all operations 
 to be closed which violated it, what Encumbered Estates 
 Act, nay, what political Revolution could be compared with 
 the result ? Were the Apostle to carry his point, and 
 bring about a general settling-day to-morrow, how main- 
 shops a;id offices would be open next morning? How 
 many acres, and houses, and ships would stain! in the same 
 names ? If. by a universal winding-tip, everv property was 
 to go home to its owner, every engagement to be pressed 
 into reali/.ation, and all fictitious footing to be destroyed, 
 how iTumv that are now first would be last. when the 
 
 K K.
 
 498 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 
 
 balance was struck and the new leaf turned, and the last 
 first ? So utterly at variance with the whole social system 
 appears the Apostle's precept, that it is no wonder if 
 next in his mind to the conception of a World out 
 of debt, stood the belief of the World at its end. If it 
 be wrong to owe, it is not right to borrow ; and if no man 
 may borrow, neither may any lend ; and if no lending 
 be allowed, the fertilizing flow of capital from its head-waters 
 to the thirsty spots of society is at an end ; the world is 
 gorged at one place and starved at another, with no health 
 at either : unknown resources of the earth and ocean, of 
 the quarry and the mine, of the forest and the field, sleep 
 unused, for want of a magic power,' which is there all the 
 while if we will but let it move. Were it left to the actual 
 possessors of wealth alone to propel it on its course, and 
 work it through its applications, who can say how slow 
 would be the productiveness of industry, and how scanty 
 the exchanges of nations ? 
 
 Yet, when we turn from this outside action on the World 
 to the inner effects on Individual Character, we can 
 scarcely miss a certain truthful charm in the precept, " Owe 
 no man anything, but to love one another." To have no 
 debt but the eternal debt of love, to pay freely to affection 
 without arrest from the preference-claims of justice undis- 
 charged, to disengage the problems of a pure heart from 
 oppressive and limiting conditions, to live among men 
 with no other accounts than we have with our children and 
 our God, this surely is to escape from a thousand fears 
 and temptations, and win the very liberty of faith. This 
 freedom from entanglement is the goal which most men 
 hope to reach : and in struggling towards it, the con- 
 scientious carry the fetters of many a scruple, and the heed- 
 less slip the foot on dangerous ground. This clear state is, 
 by general consent, the position appropriate to those who 
 are devoted to the higher concerns of our humanity, t he- 
 servants of Truth, the interpreters of Beauty, the guides ot 
 Nations, the prophets of Religion. It is the preparation,
 
 Oll'E NO MAN ANYTHING. 4^9 
 
 without which few would wish to face the greater crises of 
 experience, the prostration of sorrow, the call to heroic 
 duty, the visible approach of death ! If then you would 
 feel it well to be free of care, when you step into the 
 shadow of sacred hours or go home to the embrace of God ; 
 if the nobler and more ideal functions of life revolt from 
 money complications ; if an embarrassed philosopher, an 
 indebted bishop, a bailiff in the scientific observatory or 
 the prophet's chamber, affords an image of humiliating in- 
 congruity : there must be a region of human character, 
 and that the highest, in which the Apostle's precept 
 emerges from an economic absurdity into a native and con- 
 genial wisdom. We might treat it therefore as a " Counsel 
 of Perfection " ; as a rule not perhaps unconditionally 
 binding on all of us as we are, but still indicating the limit 
 towards which all are to press, and which " as many as 
 would be perfect " will seize at once. There are apparently 
 cases in human life in which our rules describe and dis- 
 tinguish not so much the absolutely right and wrong, as the 
 better and the worse ; and we may recommend and revere 
 the greater, without warrant altogether to condemn the less. 
 Within the individual conscience indeed, in the private 
 account between the soul and her God, this sliding scale 
 of duty has no place : there, the better intimation is the sole 
 escape from guilt ; and whatever is short of our best 
 possibility must incur the remorse of absolute wrong. But 
 the bystander knows not the range and register of each 
 private soul ; he cannot tell how far up the ascent of good- 
 ness her conscious insight goes ; and though he may 
 exhibit and dispose in their rightful glory all the steps, from 
 their base on earth to their landing in heaven, he may con- 
 demn those persons only who either fail to reach what all 
 men see, or tall from a rank they had already seized : and 
 he must not presume to demand from every chance neigh- 
 bour to-day a height of excellence that may not be discerned 
 until to-morrow. God only knows the wise, deep hearts 
 to which he has revealed high missions with the clearness 
 
 K K 2
 
 5oo OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 
 
 of a heavenly call ; and when his summons draws forth the 
 Saints and Heroines of humanity, it is for us to own 
 indeed and revere the voice, but not to repeat it in the 
 market-place and at the corners of the streets, requiring 
 every earnest man to become a St. Francis, and every gifted 
 lady a Florence Nightingale. 
 
 Even a " Counsel of Perfection, " however, must be 
 reconcileable with the conditions of human life through 
 which we are to rise into harmony with it. The same Holy 
 Will is Lawgiver for the private conscience and for the social 
 world ; and there can be no real variance between the 
 highest obligations of the one and the imperious exigencies 
 of the other. Grant that the injunction " Owe no man 
 anything, but to love one another" may have had some 
 reference to an expected close of human things, and may 
 belong to the same class with the inference, " The time is 
 short," " I would have you without anxiety." Still, the 
 temper which is alone suitable to the sublimest moment 
 Cannot be out of place in any other : the last act of the 
 piece is but the development of all the rest ; when the soul 
 achieves the catastrophe to which every incident and 
 experience has converged. To the moral attitude and 
 position most fit for a world drifting towards its account 
 there must be something analogous in the world while yet 
 continuous : nor can there be one rule of good for its pro- 
 bation, and another for its judgment. I venture therefore 
 to believe that the spirit, the mood of mind, the conscious 
 security against injuring others, the exemption from disabling 
 cares, the openness to genial affection, implied in the Apostle's 
 \vords, are for ever and for all men inherent elements of the 
 Christian character : and if we sacredly guard these, whilst 
 \ve translate his precept into terms of continuous duration 
 and nn abiding world, it will prove to have still for us its 
 moral and its rebuke. 
 
 It would no doubt be pedantic to interpret the words 
 Owe no man anything " into a universal obligation to the 
 readv-monev svstem. In a world whose transactions take
 
 Oll'E NO MAN ANYTHING. 501 
 
 time, and where the circle of exchange is of wide circumfer- 
 ence, an interval, often considerable, must interpose between 
 the commencement and the completion of an engagement ; 
 and it were absurd to make a sin out of this necessary 
 incident of commerce, and to regard as an offender every 
 man who has a pending compact. Nay, it is possibly this 
 period of suspense, when men part with their own in 
 reliance on another, and sleep soundly not amid guarded 
 possessions but with their treasures scattered to the four 
 quarters of the earth, and look as proudly on a few names 
 in their books, as they would on broad acres of park or 
 field, that gives scope to the moral qualities exercised in 
 mercantile affairs ; the cautious vigilance at first, the 
 honourable trust at last, the scrupulous pause before the 
 promise, the sacred firmness afterwards. The merchant 
 who has a credit at the bank, or insured goods afloat, in 
 clear excess of his existing obligations can, with only formal 
 correctness, be said to " owe anything."' How long, under 
 such conditions, the actual settlement may remain in sus- 
 pense, is indeed an important problem of moral prudence. 
 The term of credit must vary in different affairs. Its sweep 
 of duration should follow as closely as possible that of the 
 reciprocal dealings themselves ; a week's account being as 
 long for retail purchases in the next street, as a year for 
 exchanges across half the world. Whoever requires more- 
 time than this rule would give him, and has become depen- 
 dent on further delay, has clear warning that his footing- 
 is unsound. Credit is essentially a reliance upon character 
 during the currency of a transaction ; and with the 
 cycle of the transaction it should ever be susceptible 
 of close. Restrained within these limits, the mere exist- 
 ence of incomplete and unrealized transactions consti- 
 tutes no offence against the Apostle's precept, provided the 
 balance-sheet which records them be at every moment unambi- 
 guously right, and be reviewed at intervals too short for 
 danger to creep in. This is the one point on which the 
 question of integrity surely turns. And here it is that, to the
 
 502 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 
 
 eye of the mere outward observer, the modern notions of 
 honour seem to be in danger of deplorable decline. There 
 ought to be no difference on these questions between the 
 invariable sentiment of the Christian Moralist and the feeling 
 of the man of business. But in the rapid expansion of rela- 
 tions and the haste of human affairs practices slide insensibly 
 into existence and get a footing as usages, before any con- 
 science has time to estimate them ; and when they have won 
 the sanction of prescription, they soon shape consciences to 
 suit them, and laugh at the moral critic as a simpleton, 
 and hurry on to the crash of social retribution. 
 
 Thus, one thing, I must confess, has ever remained a 
 mystery to me, and seems unmistakably to violate the 
 Apostle's precept " Owe no man anything ; ' r that a man 
 who has nothing should feel easy in borrowing something ; 
 or a man that has haff, in borrowing double. If indeed 
 the loan be virtually or contingently a gift, from persons able 
 and anxious to serve him at such cost, there may be nothing 
 to condemn. And only thus, you will perhaps assure me, 
 can the case really occur ; for in the open market such a 
 resourceless borrower could gain no attention. But there- 
 are countless intermediate instances, constituting probably 
 nine-tenths of the whole, in which by appeal to the good- 
 nature of friends, or the trustingness of sisters and other 
 relatives, a trader whom no one purposes to endow and 
 whose bond no money broker would take up, comes into 
 command of funds for which he cannot give security. In 
 such case he undertakes a trust which he is not in a condi- 
 tion to assume. It is not enough that he is conscious of 
 the ii.n/1, he is bound to know his poiver, to discharge 
 it. Failing this, he does but hand over to another the risks 
 which are nominally his own, a thing from which surely 
 it needs 110 generosity, and but little nicety of justice, to 
 shrink. I know it is said, that superfluous capital is glad 
 to meet with empty-handed capacity and character to turn 
 it to account. As a rule, however, if those hands have 
 always been empty, I should doubt their fitness to become
 
 OIVE NO MAN ANYTHING. 503 
 
 suddenly full : and if they eagerly take what is offered and 
 betray no inner suspicion of danger, I doubt the fineness 
 and solidity of character, which are assumed as the ground 
 of trust. The abundance of capital will be a moral curse, 
 if it tempts us to invert the healthy order of nature and 
 old usage, . . . that a man must earn for himself ere he has 
 a right to borrow from another, and must mortgage what he 
 has for the use of what he has not. The scruple is not less 
 wise than it is conscientious which forbids us to take on 
 trust more than we can give in pledge : and whoever is in 
 haste to break through its restraints is anxious to trade 
 upon a high character which he has not resolution to attain. 
 It is the prior discipline of care and patience, the Spartan 
 bread of toil and self-denial, the slow command of wages 
 saved, the cautious use of that incipient store, that lay the 
 true foundation for the merchant's thrift and faithfulness : 
 and in proportion as this schooling is dispensed with, and 
 great resources are flung into the hands of mere adminis- 
 trative agents, who touch what is others' ere they have 
 handled their own, we must expect the spread of looseness 
 and dishonour. 
 
 The same principle which condemns hollowness at the 
 beginning forbids fictitious inflation in the continuance of a 
 business, and requires of every honest man a strict and 
 well-ascertained limit to the transactions which he bases on 
 a given capital. I am not so presumptuous as to pronounce 
 the ratio of that limit. I know well that it will be 
 differently stated by judges of equal uprightness and 
 experience, and that it cannot be constant for every kind 
 of mercantile concern. But a right limit for each there 
 assuredly is ; and whoever has not a clear conception 
 where it lies in his own affairs, and does not keep so far 
 within it as to forego advantage to himself rather than 
 bring hazard upon others, is chargeable, if not with fraudu- 
 lent intent, at least with unprincipled incompetency. 
 Every engagement taken beyond that line he has a 
 decreasing chance of fulfilling ; every new creditor is more
 
 504 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING, 
 
 likely to become his victim ; every fresh stock-taking to 
 show less manageable figures. The appetite for extension, 
 once having passed the healthy bounds, grows voracious as 
 an atrophy ; the business consumes whatever it can lay 
 hands upon, and dies itself mere skin and bone. The 
 reckless practice of incurring immense liabilities with no 
 reserved base at all, or only enough to support a small 
 speculative average of differences, occupies in reality, be 
 the suffrages in its favour ever so many, no higher moral 
 level than the turf or the gaming-table. And if this is true 
 of bond fide trade, overhanging too far and towering too 
 high for its area of support, what shall we say of that 
 spurious traffic in the mere vicissitudes of price, which is 
 conducted without any real exchange by men who have 
 simply the hardihood to bet beyond their means, and in 
 which none can gain but by another's loss ? What is it 
 thst makes commerce an honourable and humanizing thing ? 
 that mutual advantage is inseparable from it. What is 
 it that makes gambling detestable ? that mutual advantage 
 is impossible in it. And by this certain mark, with the 
 attendant contrast of temper and habits it implies, may any 
 eye distinguish the sphere of creditable business from that 
 of illicit cupidity. The observer of human life cannot fail 
 to remark that the dispositions of men are largely influenced 
 by the kind of property which is their immediate concern. 
 In landed estate there is a fiduciary element which forbids 
 the idea of Duty entirely to escape. The organism of 
 manufacturing industry calls out the faculties for administer- 
 ing capital and governing men, and disciplines the mind to 
 concentration and force. Legitimate commerce, living 
 nearer to the fluctuating margin of affairs and directly 
 entangled in a world-wide net-work of relations, encourages 
 flexibility and breadth more than sustained energy, inclines 
 to the quick venture rather than the sure toil, and creates 
 a taste for the generous more than for the just. The temp- 
 tations deepen as the wealth that is handled exchanges a 
 fixed for a speculative character. And there is something
 
 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 505 
 
 intrinsically perilous and demoralizing in habitual dealings 
 with values highly precarious and sensitive to the breath of 
 mere opinion ; and unless they are restrained about a solid 
 nucleus of real transactions with material wealth they pro- 
 duce a fever of imagination and dizziness of head, to be 
 feared by all who have an eye of reverence for the ends 
 of life, and mean to keep their seat till the true goal is 
 reached. 
 
 On similar grounds it strikes the mere observing moralist 
 as strange that the question can ever be raised ; how long 
 an insolvent, after discovering the posture of his affairs, 
 may continue his business in hope of a favourable turn. The 
 answer of unsophisticated honesty would assuredly be, 
 Not for one hour on his own responsibility. If counsellors, 
 whose interest gives them a title to advise, after knowing 
 the whole, recommend him to go on, I do not say that the 
 scruple may not be fairly overcome ; or if his deficiency 
 is simply due to an unwarrantable style of living, and its 
 conquest is clearly within the reach of practicable retrench- 
 ment, he may fairly work through his secret by resolute 
 self-denial. But otherwise, he is no longer master of his 
 own affairs, and is at once usurper and deceiver every hour 
 that he wields them. He can have no right to stake the 
 interests of his creditors still deeper on the new trans- 
 actions, based upon a lying credit, carried on with the face 
 of a hypocrite, and contingent on successful dissimulation. 
 He is reduced to the condition in which, having nothing of 
 his own, he uses the resources of others, not only without 
 security but without their leave ; treacherously availing 
 himself of the position of power in which their past con- 
 fidence has misplaced him. It is no sufficient excuse that 
 he has sanguine expectations of benefiting them ; the 
 time has come when their voice, not his, must pronounce 
 upon this hope. In him it coincides too nearly with the 
 procrastination of cowardice and the dread of shame, to 
 avoid the suspicion of self-deception. And the cases, it 
 will be admitted, are actually rare, in which the avowal of
 
 506 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 
 
 failure has been escaped or alleviated by postponement ; 
 while the usual story of delay tells us of an ever-deepening 
 plunge into entanglement, from which little is extricated at 
 last but the stripped and lacerated personality of the 
 bankrupt himself. It is indeed notorious that the plea of 
 concern for "the estate" is for the most part a vain pre- 
 tence, and that concealment is continued from desire to 
 stave off the evil day ; from that skulking fear to confess a 
 wrong which attends the mere feeble and flaccid purpose to 
 do the right. From no temper is so little to be hoped in a 
 world of ceaseless conflict between good and ill. A man 
 vigorously just, conscious of double guilt under evasion 
 and delay, will never rest till he has brought his penalty 
 upon his head, and has his hand set free for the work of 
 reparation ; he will be eager for the pain which first arrests 
 the injury he has done. And whoever is otherwise minded 
 betrays that he shrinks from suffering, but in comparison 
 cares not for the sin. Far be it from any Christian heart 
 to refuse gentle and considerate treatment to each erring 
 man : only let it not be on guilty terms ; let it be, not for his 
 continuance but for his return ; not a human easiness, but 
 a divine recall. The defences frequently put forth for the 
 questionable usages on which I have touched, seem to 
 shed a painful light upon the inner ethics of modern trade. 
 Indicating as they do a wide-spread confusion of senti- 
 ment, a drifting judgment without moral compass to 
 steer by in newly-opening latitudes of human affairs, they 
 are more startling to the thoughtful observer than the 
 exceptional cases of individual fraud which less corrupt 
 the popular fancy, because they speak more plainly for 
 themselves. 
 
 I am profoundly conscious of the intricacy of many of 
 the problems which lie within the topic I have touched, 
 and possibly the simple aspect which they present to a 
 spectator from without may be qualified by other relations 
 more removed from sight. But there is also a fresh source 
 of moral danger in this very complexity of modern business,
 
 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 507 
 
 and the abstract mode in which it is carried on. In simple 
 times, the process of buying and selling is a living, con- 
 crete affair, between visible persons ; in which man meets 
 man, looks him in the face, crosses his threshold, can 
 picture to himself his family, and has felt the grasp of his 
 hand. Thus, the human affections, the natural feelings 
 that kindle beneath the light of another's eye, come in 
 aid of mercantile integrity and truth. Who would not be 
 more ashamed of a slipperiness towards one whose respect- 
 able image is in his mind, than towards a mere name upon 
 his books ? In proportion as men's mutual affairs become 
 complicated, the personal element is superseded by files of 
 paper forms ; the vast majority of the people with whom 
 you deal are out of sight, and business almost ceases to be 
 human, and works itself by a kind of mechanical fate. It 
 becomes apparently a dealing, less with men than with 
 things. It requires in this state an intenser and more 
 spontaneous conscience to keep it right. The moral sig- 
 nificance of acts has to be traced through technical 
 instruments and mystifying symbols, which, even to the 
 most practised interpreter, keep the concrete facts at a dis- 
 tance from the imagination. Could all the papers of an 
 insolvent house be suddenly translated into the actual life 
 they represent, could the sorrows they contain look out 
 from their midst, the broken promises speak, the bitter 
 injuries complain, the scattered families protest, the 
 blindest would see the truth, and the hardest be pierced 
 with compunction. But, as it is, the real story is never read : 
 it is vain to expect a just appreciation of its incidents, one 
 by one ; as well might you appeal to repentance through 
 an algebraic formula, or ask a personal affection for the 
 lay-figures of a lawyer's argument. And as the moral sense- 
 is less helped by the natural affections, so is the under- 
 standing more apt to be bewildered by the tangle of 
 intricate relations, and to lose its directness and accuracy 
 of vision. Hence again a further risk of unsteady upright- 
 ness : for nothing so favours the chances of evil as a hazy
 
 5oS OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 
 
 and puzzled mind, that cannot see its way, and knows not 
 precisely whereabouts it is. It is in this winking twilight 
 that the tempter ever comes, and makes his stealthy 
 approaches to the groping, stumbling will. It was the 
 proverbial complaint of garrulous Greece, that " the tongue 
 is apt to outrun the mind"; and it might be the confession 
 of practical England, that action blunders on in front of 
 thought, and therefore at the mercy of many a poor decoy. 
 The haste of our business is too much for the slowness of 
 our genius ; and we find ourselves in the midst of action 
 ere we well know what we ought to do. The telegraph 
 asks a question and must be charged with a reply. The 
 foreign post is off to-night and will not wait till we have 
 slept. The broker is in the office with the transfer in his 
 hand. The message flies, half reason and half risk. The 
 letter is despatched with orders to-day, and the calculation 
 how to meet them will be gone-into to-morrow. The 
 signature flows from the rapid pen, and the ravelled threads 
 of the problem in the mind are cut at a stroke. Who can 
 deny the fortuitous settlement every day of a thousand 
 questions involving right and wrong, on which a prior 
 clearness of judgment is alone qualified to pronounce ? 
 And meanwhile the imagination, with less and less precise 
 conception of the parts and human details, is more and 
 more dazzled by the vast sweep of the whole ; and is borne 
 further away from the simple integrities by dreams of 
 immeasurable enterprise. It is not wonderful that in the 
 double giddiness of indistinctness within and magnitude 
 without, the moral equilibrium is lost, and instances are 
 frequent of humiliating fall. 
 
 Whether, in the ethics of commerce, " the former times 
 were better than these," I would not venture to pronounce. 
 If any one wishes to show from the annals of fraud, that 
 in England every article of traffic Avas always adulterated, 
 and an equal percentage of merchants and bankers, directors 
 and clerks, were ahvays knaves, I care not to answer him. 
 The duty of the Christian preacher is to compare the
 
 OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 509 
 
 morals of his day, not with those of another age, but with 
 the standard, at once rational and revealed, of eternal 
 rectitude. From the appeal to that standard, the con- 
 sciousness of it, nay, the belief in it, I fear indeed we are 
 receding. Of any higher rule of obligation than the 
 expectations and mutual understandings of men, of any 
 possible guilt in usages notoriously current, and against 
 which everyone may be on his guard, it is rare to find even 
 a suspicion in the world. Every question is run up into 
 some human custom and convention, and there stops and 
 is laid to rest : as if many voices and much time could 
 make and unmake right and wrong, and it were ours to in- 
 vent our own laws instead of interpreting and applying 
 God's. This is the root of all our ill. So long as Honour 
 stands with us for no more than a social compact, a level 
 veracity between man and man, it will sway and waver 
 with the fitful winds of opinion, having no rule but t he- 
 average expectation, no clue through the snares of new 
 problems, no inspiration beyond the ambition of decent 
 repute. It is in the power of this mere secular temper, as 
 by a corrupting touch, soon to turn the gold of our 
 ancient truth into dross ; till we are startled by fright- 
 ful exposures, and amid the false repose of civilization 
 we hear again the Everlasting Voice, il Shall I call them 
 pure that have the wicked balances, and the bag of deceit- 
 ful weights ? " Honour among men is never safe till it 
 passes out beyond them and becomes an understanding 
 and sympathy with God, an embodiment in us of his ever 
 living righteousness. Once restored to its true devoutness. 
 lifted from a human promise to a Divine allegiance, it 
 escapes the region of fluctuation, and acquires an instinct 
 of resistance to the sophistries of selfishness and the hurry 
 of passion. He who is possessed by its spirit is alone 
 likely to thread a faithful way through the dangers of a 
 complex system. Eor he has an inner hatred of confusion, 
 as the very nest of all potential wrong. He thirsts for per- 
 fect clearness in his moral liuht : and while anv dimness
 
 5io OWE NO MAN ANYTHING. 
 
 lingers in his conscience, he reverently fears to stir a foot. 
 First, he must sweep every seeming ambush out and see 
 whether guilt be there, and then he can advance with firm- 
 ness and with joy. Only to the upright, whose heart is 
 lifted thus, does the promised "Light arise in darkness." 
 May the reproach not fall upon this age, that such " Faith- 
 ful are failing from among men " : but still may the words 
 be true, that, whether our merchants are princes or not, 
 our " traffickers are the honourable of the earth ! "
 
 PARTING WORDS.
 
 PARTING WORDS.* 
 
 " Neither is lie that planteth anything, nor he that watereth ; but God 
 that giveth the increase."! CORINTHIANS, iii. 7. 
 
 SINKING deep into these words, I touch the only ground 
 of firm anchorage in this agitating hour. ' I am nothing ; 
 God is all : let me pass into his will ; let me hold on to 
 Him, the Rock ; and let the passionate tide of grief, and 
 fear, and love sweep by ! ' In that thought alone is there 
 any settled calm. When the floods rise high, we are 
 driven from every earthly rest, and forced upon the wing 
 into the upper air. There are times when we must set our 
 fluctuating life at a distance beneath us, and float in the 
 great heaven, if we would not be lost ; when we are glad to 
 merge ourselves away into a speck of insignificance, and 
 lessen the si/e of all things mutable and sorrowful by the 
 vastness of the Divine light and space. Eternal things, 
 and they alone, spread a blessed quiet behind the changes 
 of our humanity, an expanse of mountain verdure over 
 which the sunshine and the shadows play ; and there we 
 must lay to rest the sadness of an evanescent life. So let 
 it be with us this hour. Let me escape from myself into 
 Him, of whose husbandry I have been the transient 
 instrument ; who gave the seed to plant his field, and the 
 showers to water it, and will never cease to provide the in- 
 crease. And even from you, clear friends, whose parting 
 
 * Close of Ministry in Hope Street Church, Liverpool, Sunday, 
 August 2, 1857. 
 
 VOL. IV. L L
 
 514 PARTING WORDS. 
 
 looks, if seen alone, would too much move me, let me half 
 escape into the presence of an auguster band, and steady 
 my uncertain eye by fixing it on those who once were with 
 us, but have passed to the service of a higher world. Yes ! 
 those close-filled seats are far from including all I see ; 
 behind the visible congregation to which I speak there 
 stands an invisible, the comrades who once mingled their 
 voices with our hymn, elders that have laid their burden 
 down, children snatched at once from the threshold to 
 the crown of life, all that death has promoted from our 
 poor company ; and from their shadowy ranks many a 
 sacred image seems to look at me, and many a familiar 
 tone to speak. Yet alas ! I know it is but the echo of my 
 own memory ; and that " cloud of witnesses " sits silent in 
 the back-ground of the scene. Else, it would shed the 
 truest light upon the past we have spent together, could we 
 know whether they yet think any thought or cherish any 
 love born amid our worship here ; whether any snatches of 
 our earthly strains still blend with their saintlier praise ; 
 whether they live without change of gospel under change 
 of worlds. They may not tell us. Yet amid the silence of 
 things, I would fain take courage and believe that, when we 
 join to-day in our parting hymn, " The dead and living 
 swell the sound." 
 
 The twenty-five years of service which now reach their 
 close, are much to the individual life, and crowded with the 
 spoils of a retiring generation. For each of us, taken one 
 by one, they have doubtless written a long epic story ; and 
 in the cabinet of our memory set many a tragedy, and 
 wrung from our hearts lyrics without end. But in the life 
 of a Church, still more in the history of humanity, such a 
 period is but a little segment ; barely enabling us to trace 
 the course of movement ; and forbidding even the pre- 
 sumptuous to take its measure. Change, however, percep- 
 tible change, there must be during an interval so consider- 
 able. No quarter-century can pass over a society and a 
 religious connection so open as ours, without altering the
 
 PARTING WORDS. 515 
 
 proportions, if not shifting the centre, of development. 
 And whoever has lived with us through that period, and 
 can transport himself back in memory to its commence- 
 ment, must be aware that the season has somewhat altered 
 for our faith ; that the light and shadows of our religious 
 love fall not precisely as they did ; that the words and 
 thoughts which stir us to our depths are not the same ; 
 that the tone of belief and unbelief, the pressure of tempta- 
 tion, the tendencies of reverence and admiration, are all 
 different ; that our relations to the great Christendom of 
 the Past and Present are more genial and domestic, and 
 are passing from outer courtesy to inner sympathy : so that, 
 on the whole, were it possible to reproduce exactly the 
 administration of religion which adequately served the 
 exigencies of the last generation, it would scarcely assuage 
 our living thirst, or find the present secret of our souls. 
 Leave it to narrow-hearted men to treat this change as a 
 reproach to this age or a pride to that, and to dispute 
 whether the morning twilight is fairer than the evening, 
 and spring in the northern hemisphere better than in the 
 southern. Let us rather recognize the seasonal order of 
 God, who adjusts the whole, and sees that it is good. His 
 truth is infinite and is never rounded off; his light an ever- 
 lasting stream that cannot cease to flow ; and so long as 
 faithful men shall humble themselves to be his organs, He 
 will not want for new interpreters. In the very reaction 
 of each period from the spirit of its predecessor, we may 
 see a blessed law of providential oscillation, ever com- 
 pleting the beat of each movement of progress, and sweep- 
 ing past every resting-point of human vanity. It is the 
 wants of to-day that invite and awaken the strength of to- 
 morrow. Into the spaces of thought and love left cold and 
 vacant in one age rush the enthusiasms of the next : if 
 perhaps by leaving dry and standing some deserted truth, 
 the reflux of a third age will yet correct it. We are all of 
 us children of our time ; its temperature reaches to the 
 very pulses of our heart ; and when we speak forth what it 
 
 L L 2
 
 5i6 PARTING WORDS. 
 
 gives us to say, we must indeed be different from our fathers, 
 but are no wiser, unless we disclaim everything but 
 simplicity and faithfulness. With genuine honour then for 
 my predecessors, with no higher ambition than to be 
 deemed worthy to stand in their succession and be some- 
 times named with Enfield, Houghton, Yates and Grundy, 
 I would yet, in surveying my ministry, lay open to you 
 its characteristic conviction, and unreservedly confess its 
 animating spirit. Against any truth committed to others I 
 do not presume to measure it : each one must speak 
 according as he discerns : whether it be little, or whether it 
 be much, I know not ; I simply tell the trust which has 
 possessed me from the beginning, and which, I believe, will 
 hold me till I see better than " as through a glass darkly." 
 
 The one deep faith, then, which has determined my 
 whole word and work among you, is in The Living Union 
 of God with our Humanity. Long did this faith pine 
 obscurely within me, ere it could find its way to any clear 
 joy. It was not enough for me that God should, as they 
 say, "exist;" it was needful to have assurance that he 
 lives. It was a poor thought that he was the beginning of 
 all, if he stood aloof from it in its constancy. It withered 
 the inmost heart to believe that he dwelt and never stirred 
 in the universal space, and delegated all to inexorable 
 "Laws"; laws that could never hear the most piercing 
 shriek, and looked with stony eyes on the upturned face of 
 agony. It seemed to stain the very heaven to charge him 
 with the origin of human guilt, and represents him as first 
 moulding men into sin, and then punishing them out of it. 
 A mere constructing and legislating God, satisfied to 
 adjust " co-existencies " and establish " successions " ; 
 who filled the cold sky, and brooded over the waste sea, 
 and watched upon the mountain-head, and embraced the 
 waxing and waning moon, and suffered the tide of history 
 to sweep through him without heeding its most passionate 
 and surging waves ; a God who wrung from us a thousand 
 sighs that never touched him, who broke us in remorse for
 
 PARTING WORDS. 517 
 
 ills that arc not ours, who drew to him, day and night 
 without ceasing, moans of prayer he never answered ; such 
 a One it was a vain attempt really to trust and love. At 
 times the faith in him appeared but to turn the darkness 
 of atheism into flame ; and, in its light, the face of this 
 blessed life and universe lost its fostering look, and seemed 
 twisted into an Almighty sarcasm. Nor could I ever feel 
 that the permanent stillness and personal inaccessibility of 
 God was at all compensated by exceptional miracle. An 
 occasional " message " rather serves to render more sensible 
 and undeniable the usual absence and silence; nor can the 
 "sender" well say to his servant, "You go there" with- 
 out implying, "I stay here." Merely to fling-in to the 
 Deist's " God of nature" an historical fragment of miracle 
 does little to meet the exigencies of human piety. It is 
 not " once upon a time," it is not " now and then," nor 
 is it on the theatre of another's life to the exclusion of our 
 own, that we sigh to escape from the bound movements 
 of nature into the free heart of God. We pine as 
 prisoners, till we burst into the air of that supernatural life 
 which He lives eternally : we are parched with a holy thirst, 
 till we find contact with the running waters of his 
 quick affection. Him immediately; Him in person ; Him 
 in whispers of the day, and eye to eye by night ; Him for 
 a close refuge in temptation, not as a large thought of ours 
 but as an Almightiness in himself; Him ready with his 
 moistening dews for the dry heart, and his breathings of 
 hope for the sorrowing ; Him always and everywhere living 
 for our holy trust, do we absolutely need for our repose, 
 and wildly wander till we find. 
 
 We have no need to go far for this centre of rest ; nay, 
 we have only to return home, and believe what is simplest 
 in our own hearts and greatest in the words of Christ. 
 Does the incubus of Nature oppress you? Enter into 
 the life of the Spirit, and you shall throw it off. Are 
 you haunted by the Constancy of Law? Balance it by 
 the perpetuity of Inspiration : and the solid fabric of the
 
 5i8 PARTING WORDS. 
 
 world will melt into a transparent mantle of incarnation. 
 Whatever be the relation of God to the physical universe, 
 -for us, who bear his image and receive his Christ, he is 
 the Spirit "that bloweth where it listeth," "the Com- 
 forter " " that dwelleth in us and never ceaseth to be in 
 us ; " the Holy Guest abiding with the soul that " hath 
 the Father and the Son." I know not how others may con- 
 ceive the eternal life of God to pass, in what field they 
 would most readily seek his manifestation, in what 
 stirrings of power, his distinctive agency. But to me, I do 
 confess, his presence in every lower realm would be a cold 
 unreality, a Pagan dream, did I not trace him in the 
 highest of all, the conscious and knowing spirits of his 
 children : for surely the empty sky, the dead of night, the 
 Arctic frosts, could better spare him, than the overcharged 
 heart and fevered life of our humanity. There it is that he 
 has set what is likest to himself; and there that we must 
 look for his favourite abode. Those simple faiths that come 
 we know not whence, those dim suspicions of conscience 
 that creep upon us with authoritative awe, that mysterious 
 sense of an over-arching infinitude pierced with bursts of 
 light when the clouds of our lower mind clear off, nay, the 
 common promptings of disinterested love, the call to self- 
 sacrifice, the reverence for nobleness and beauty, what are 
 they but the awakening touch of God's indwelling life, the 
 movement of his Spirit among the trembling strings ? To 
 the private soul, he thus reveals himself in its highest 
 spontaneous affections, ever adding another grace and 
 further insight to those who will be faithful with the first. 
 To our collective humanity he comes in that great consent 
 of spirits which arises in the presence of true heroism or 
 sanctity, and constitutes the tendency of an age and the 
 ultimate forces of history. Through all our natural life. 
 individual and social, is the supernatural interfused : and 
 the ideal colours of heaven are spread through the sub- 
 stance of our experience, to transfigure it. In us, however, 
 there is ever a strife between the two. In Christ alone is the
 
 PARTING WORDS. 519 
 
 reconciliation perfect between the human and the divine ; 
 and of the blended natures, the lower yields as a captive, 
 and is, in him, wholly taken up by the higher. This once, 
 was God's idea purely realized. But the same two natures 
 meet in us all : and he is but the exemplar of a perpetual 
 incarnation, of a living and constant union of God with 
 our humanity. 
 
 Such is the faith which has possessed me, not simply as 
 a topic of teaching, but as a principle of life. How far I 
 may have been able to awaken it in you, and by its power 
 to stir in your hearts the waters of healing and consecra- 
 tion, none but the Discerner of spirits knows. But for me 
 it has relieved many problems, and unspeakably enriched the 
 colours and deepened the whole perspective of experience. 
 It has seemed an escape into the Gospel from the Law ; 
 and has justified affections that else were beyond their 
 measure or without a plea. It has necessarily affected my 
 teachings and ministry throughout ; imparting to them, 
 perhaps, a character of more intensity than breadth ; but 
 giving them the only tone in which the Heavenly Word 
 ever passed across my spirit. 
 
 Hence, for instance, the urgency with which I have aspired 
 to rise with you out of a religion of Obedience into a 
 religion of Communion : not only to leave behind the 
 calculations of spiritual prudence and self-interest, but to 
 emerge even from the anxieties of moral self-dependence, 
 and trustfully pass into the hand of God. Service is for 
 the distant ; Sympathy, for the near. And when the Son of 
 God himself speaks to our fellowship " I call you not 
 servants, I call you friends," who shall blame those that 
 cannot shape themselves to orders, but are freely moulded 
 by the gentlest pressures of reverence and love ? In 
 spiritual things Resolution is weak, and soon drops the 
 labouring oar ; but Faith, spreading her sheet, catches a 
 viewless power, and flies before the winds of heaven. Bare 
 Ethical work under the Moral Law gives a certain Jewish 
 hardness to our individuality : while of Religion, and
 
 520 PARTING WORDS. 
 
 emphatically of the Gospel, it is the function to dissolve 
 the self-reliance utterly away, to lose the personal will in the 
 tides of a Divine perfection, and let ourselves be reconciled 
 by becoming one with the living Spirit of holiness. We 
 have surely enough in this rough world, enough in the 
 battle of affairs, enough in our inherited discipline and tone 
 of thought, to secure the firmness of our self-respect; and to 
 be well able to bear that mellowing of reverence and sweet- 
 ening of temper, and modest elevation of trust, which flow 
 from the conscious presence of God's life in our humanity. 
 Hence, too, it has lain very near to me, to foster among 
 us all the lesser religions of our inner life, the genuine 
 admirations which flow into pure and genial hearts from 
 objects short of the highest. The huge chasm which 
 Protestantism usually sinks between " the creature and the 
 Creator," between human loves and divine affection, has 
 ever affrighted me with horror : and I have clung to the 
 Catholic truth, that our veneration for the saints is a minor 
 form of piety, akin in type to the devotion that passes finite 
 bounds. Nature, Art, Character, present to the sincere 
 eye a thousand resting-places for the upward look ; aspects 
 of things which, so far from detaining us below, constitute 
 a hierarchy of Divine manifestation, and carry the vision 
 in the ascending direction to the Light of lights. Let us 
 open a kindly heart and take the daily graces, the most 
 transitory beauty, hospitably in. They are just the pro- 
 vision for lifting us over the saddest reproach and most 
 constant sorrow of our experience. Unaided by them, we 
 are apt to carry on at once two different lives that never 
 mingle, the ideal and the actual, the devout and the secular, 
 and to clip in and out by force of influence or season, con- 
 scious of mechanical mixture without inner blending and 
 identity. Now upon the grass of meditation, now on the 
 dusty track of work, we are as if we stepped across the bar 
 of sleep, and we know not which is waking and which is 
 dreaming. The violence of this transition is softened by 
 the ministration of the lesser pieties, the wonder at wisdom,
 
 PARTING WORDS. 521 
 
 the veneration for goodness, the sense of truth and harmony, 
 and the openness to all the expressiveness of things. 
 These affections, clearing out irreverence from the simplest 
 duty, rudeness from the commonest speech, and deformity 
 and negligence from everything, are blessed mediators 
 between the absolutely Divine and the merely Human in 
 our life, and bathe it in the baptismal waters of its first re- 
 generation. I have thought it therefore not altogether 
 foreign to the spirit of this place, to express and foster, as I 
 could, every admiration that can carry the heart to what is 
 purer and higher than itself, and bear it a little way to- 
 wards the Highest of all. Tell me not that these lesser 
 loves are dangerous as idols, and seduce the soul. As well 
 might you put out the ranks of angels, to secure our 
 allegiance to God. 
 
 Again, it is the same sense, of God's living union with 
 our humanity, which has ever relieved me of all fear and 
 anxiety respecting the issues of enlarging knowledge, 
 scientific or historical. Here is the dear and mighty 
 God at home : why dread any discoveries we may meet 
 abroad ? Day by day, from morn to night, under our roof- 
 tree and out upon our fields, in the mind that thinks, in the 
 heart that aspires, in the nation that strives for the right, 
 in the world that moves on its course, He lives with us, 
 and manifests himself through us, with every variety of 
 good : and what old facts can we have to fear ? Why 
 petrify the past, when a present divineness is flowing by ? 
 Now that Raffaelle is dead and can give us nothing more, it 
 is certainly a loss to find that a picture is not his ; but if his 
 genius and pencil were immortal, if, hour by hour, we saw 
 the figures grow and the pure colours spread beneath his 
 touch, why should we wish to fasten on him a doubtful 
 thing ? One only care would then be ours, simply, to let him 
 have his own. And where there is a genuine repose of 
 faith, where we are not shut up in the idea of a transitory 
 Revelation, once for all, whose title-deed is gone if a little 
 ink should fade, where we realize the breadth and con-
 
 522 PARTING WORDS. 
 
 tinuity of Divine manifestation, we shall be of quiet eye to 
 look for light, and of free joy to welcome it. The vanity 
 of " progress " and the shrinking of " conservatism " are 
 egotisms, both unworthy of disciples who should lose them- 
 selves, their fancies and their fears in trust of God's 
 infinite realities. If an eagerness to learn and an openness 
 to teach have exceeded in me the measure of your con- 
 scious wants, ascribe it, I entreat you, not to any dis- 
 paragement of simple, contented, restful piety, but to 
 irrepressible interest in all the lines of thought that con- 
 verge upon the Holy of holies, and a jealous desire to 
 preserve the accord between the fervours of Christian faith 
 and the freshest lights of knowledge. 
 
 Moved by the same persuasion, of God's living union 
 with our humanity, I was early led, not only into abhor- 
 rence of the priestly character, but into an estimate perhaps 
 too low of all disciplinarian methods for the administration 
 of Churches, for the propagation of personal influence, and 
 the voluntary management of Christian men. Unless it 
 were possible to go right down to the seats of inmost faith, 
 and waken the conditions of God's spirit there, a certain 
 shame has ever haunted me at resorting to subsidiary 
 agencies, in the wielding of which I could find no support 
 from inward conviction. Without appeal to deep affections, 
 no real thing seemed to be done ; and with it, the fruit 
 would secretly ripen by night and day. ' Water the roots 
 then, and let them grow.' Such has been my thought, 
 perhaps also my infirmity. I am far from recommending it 
 to others, though alone possible to me. If I have erred in 
 this, it has been from too much trust in others, too little in 
 myself, from belief in the spirit alive in their hearts, and 
 misgivings of its force in my own. How it is, I know not : 
 but in private, to this one and to that, I could never 
 talk of what is holiest, without an advance of sympathy 
 that makes the talk all needless. Is it perhaps a sign of 
 our organic union as social men, that true reverence can 
 never speak above a whisper, unless it be to multitudes ;
 
 PARTING WORDS. 523 
 
 but then, can breathe its full tones, be they sorrowful or 
 jubilant, and never doubt that they go home ? O brothers 
 all ! what are we but of stammering lips and dumb, when 
 taken one by one ; but, in communion, a chorus of solemn 
 voices answering to the simplest sign ; now mellowed to the 
 music of humanity, now appealing to the glory of the Most 
 High. 
 
 In the very nature of Religion, indeed, there is something 
 which makes it difficult to reduce to the economy of Pro- 
 fessional administration : and almost in proportion as the 
 difficulty seems conquered, the essence is fled. Its inspira- 
 tions, like those of Poetry and Art, lie among the free 
 affections which, even in the most faithful mind, assert their 
 spontaneity and evade the methods and seasons of the will. 
 It is the perfection of the Saints and of the Saviour to be 
 always One with God, sincere in every sanctity, and to know 
 not what it is to be faint and blind of heart. It is the guilt 
 of trained routine to pretend and imitate all this, and seem 
 to have the draught of life ready for every thirsting tongue. 
 It is the sorrowful strife of imperfect men,- men that will 
 not be actors and cannot be angels, to miss no Divine 
 occasion when God's light and truth are real, and simulate 
 none that shall turn them into unreality. That problem I 
 do not profess to have solved, except only on the negative 
 side, to the avoidance of insincerity and pretence. My 
 shortcomings on the other side are too close to me for 
 fitting speech, except in humbleness before "the Great Task- 
 master." This only will I say. No forbearance, human or 
 Divine, no patient friendship of yours, no sparing tender- 
 ness of God, is lost upon a heart that lives on mercy and 
 answers every trusting look. 
 
 But these lingering words must have an end. With sad 
 affection I once more count and store the fruits of nve-and- 
 twcr.ty years ; then turn upon them the key of sacred 
 memory, and depart. In person and in home, a life enriched 
 with precious friendships, chastened with some holy sorrows, 
 but darkened by no shadows of estrangement : in public
 
 524 PARTING WORDS. 
 
 work, no associate but of like mind and genial heart, one 
 loved and honoured beyond most living men, and another 
 to whom it is a pure joy to leave my charge: in the Church, 
 this fair and stately house of God, whence indeed many 
 faithful have been called to a statelier above, but where still 
 assembles a generation of no declining spirit ; schools 
 created for the Sunday, and vastly increased for every day, 
 and wholesome throughout with vigorous and well-ordered 
 work ; classes for the young whose ranks were never better 
 filled ; the festival of Christian Communion warmed up by 
 far ampler sympathies ; a provision and stir of books for 
 the studious eye, and of discussion for the inquiring mind : 
 the traces everywhere of a people that accepts the brother- 
 hood of Christian labour : these are the blessings from 
 which it might well seem to need an importunate summons 
 of duty to call me away. Yet no outward elements of 
 enlargement, were they ever so great, would at all answer 
 my prayer for some vestige of benediction on these years. 
 And far more than all beside would it be, if in that time 
 but a few souls, one here and one there, were reborn into 
 diviner faith and love and peace ; if, above all, I could 
 think that any who have exchanged our communion for a 
 better, and taken thither their ripe wisdom or their motherly 
 self-sacrifice, or their maidenly docility, or their youthful 
 fire, may still feel the tones they caught with us not out of 
 tune with the higher harmonies. 
 
 And now, dear Friends, the last word must come. It is 
 human to wish not to be forgot. Yet, believe me, to be lost 
 from your memory and die away by the dawn of what is 
 higher is my inmost desire. Could I fear indeed that, 
 hereafter, heedless change and fading reverence might 
 betray you into lower mood ; that instead of taking up the 
 beauty of this place and the affluence of your opportunities 
 as the simple organ of expression for your own piety, you 
 might degrade them into a mechanism for "attraction," the 
 rhetoric of a sect canvassing the world ; that not real inner 
 worship for yourselves, but side persuasion to others, might
 
 PARTING WORDS. 525 
 
 here give the tone to the hours, then it would indeed be- 
 bitter to be thus forgot. But for the rest, the sooner and 
 further a greater and holier spirit snatches you away, and 
 leaves these years enshadowed and traceless in the past, the 
 intenserwill be my joy that my work has reached its end, 
 that I am poured out and lost on the offering of your faith, 
 and that the sacrifice is accepted and complete. And so 
 may the Lord perfect in you his Grace and Glory !
 
 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT.
 
 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT.* 
 
 MY CHRISTIAN FRIENDS, 
 
 Xo\v that the first blessing on this place of prayer 
 has been sought by the voice most fit to ask it, I may 
 descend from the height of Divine benediction to the word 
 of human sympathy; and offer you heartfelt congratula- 
 tions on the arrival of this longed-for hour. Rightly have 
 you set apart a special day to look round devoutly on your 
 finished work, to silence the hammer and the saw, to 
 make the temple-stones listen to the voice of prayer, and to 
 seek upon this pavement the first meeting between man and 
 God. To dedicate an offering like this ; to register your 
 vow that it shall accomplish its design, and its walls be kept 
 pure from all unfaithfulness; to trim anew the flame of 
 faith, with lamp now set upon a fairer altar ; to invite afresh 
 the Christian graces, amid forms that remind you of the 
 'beauty of holiness;" this is no light thing, and may 
 well claim an hour of its own. As you bring your families 
 hither this clay, and still wait the exhortation of your 
 affectionate and faithful pastor, you and he must doubtless 
 feel, that Iu.ro you reach a point of natural pause. Amid 
 the memories that crowd into such a moment, not without 
 a dash of human sorrow, there is one thought that puts a 
 kind of triumph into the soul. That which draws us hither, 
 the common feeling of this hour, is a tiling for ever. 
 While the birthdays of private life remind us chiefly of 
 what fades away, the nativity of Churches bears witness to 
 
 * Opcr.ir, ; uf Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, Thursday, Tune 5, 
 1862. 
 
 VOL. IV. M M
 
 530 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 
 
 that which shall never pass. The Anniversaries of nature, 
 the more they recur, are received the more with the secret 
 sigh : but the new seasons of the Church sing themselves 
 out in hymns of glory. The generations may perish : but 
 between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God the rela- 
 tion is steady and eternal, an asking from below, a 
 benediction from above, a dialogue of the secret eye 
 between the child's lowly sorrow and the Father's infinite 
 pity. We renew our houses of prayer. We, no more than 
 our fathers, can be content to spend all our time in the 
 field, in the street, or even by the hearth at home. There 
 is something deeper that brings us here. It ever has been : 
 it ever will be : and in raising a structure fit for your 
 children's children you declare your faith, that neither the 
 springs of salvation will ever run dry, nor will the thirst of 
 the human soul ever cease. This continuous succession 
 of divine want and aspiration is recognized by Christ him- 
 self in the words of John xvii. 20, 21. 
 
 " I pray not for these alone, but for them also which shall believe in 
 me through their word ; that they all may be one ; as thou, Father, 
 art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us." 
 
 The Gospel of John, it has been said, presents the 
 distinctive genius of Christianity in a less mixed form,- 
 more completely disengaged from its Jewish antecedents., 
 than any other of the sacred writings. And of that gospel 
 itself the essence seems to be concentrated in the words 
 just cited : which we may take accordingly as a condensed 
 expression of the substance and aim of the Christian 
 Revelation. When it is no other than the Redeemer him- 
 self who speaks; nor only speaks, but prays; nor only 
 prays, but breathes the parting prayer; when in the inner- 
 most circle and on the utmost verge of his mortal life lie 
 unbosoms himself of the last secrets of his spirit : 
 when he is closing his account with the sorrows of the past 
 and hinting his aspirations for the opening future of the 
 world he leaves ; that which floats to us from such a
 
 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 531 
 
 moment must surely be the deepest pulses of his thought, 
 and may well be received with a reverent strictness. 
 What then is the sum of all his prayers, " not for these 
 alone " who " had been with him in his temptations," but 
 for disciples further on "who should believe through 
 their word," for ulterior generations of his followers, 
 for us also whom Time and Providence have brought 
 into his fold? It is Unity: not merely social and level 
 unity, of one self-subsisting being with another ; but 
 dependent and.uplooking, of all together with the Father 
 and the Son : a life lifted out of difference and conflict 
 into the harmony of God. And as if to leave no doubt 
 respecting the source and nature of this Unity, he iden- 
 tifies it with the Oneness between himself and God ; a 
 relation which he is so far from appropriating as special to 
 himself, that he feels he has come in vain unless it be 
 henceforth universal among his followers. Such as had 
 been the mutual Indwelling of the Father and the Son, 
 such was to be the abiding experience of the faithful in 
 every age. The union of the Divine and the Human in 
 Christ, while unique in its perfection, is no lonely prero- 
 gative of his individual person, but belongs to him as the 
 ideal and representative of our humanity : and, were it not 
 a possibility and law for all our souls, its manifestation in 
 him would be a barren wonder without significance. He 
 is a Revelation^ because the mists of nature, as they cleared 
 off and set him face to face with his Inspirer, also took the 
 veil from all our hearts, and made us aware that we are not 
 all human, through and through, but bear the traces of 
 " Emmanuel, God with us." His personal closeness to 
 the Father within him, his filial intercourse, his utter self- 
 surrender, his holy transfiguration of the natural life, would 
 have no meaning or power for us, did it not speak to 
 sympathetic possibilities in ourselves, and give the divine 
 interpretation of our existence. 
 
 In this view then the blending of the Divine and 
 Human in Christ reveals a similar blending of the two in 
 
 M M 2
 
 5j2 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 
 
 the constitution of our humanity. In the consciousness 
 of this consists discipleship to him. And the life of Com- 
 munion with the Divine Guide abiding in us ; of per- 
 sonal affection towards himself and trust in the leadings of 
 his thought ; of recognition, eye to eye ; of surrender 
 Will to Will : this first, this last, this throughout all, is the 
 characteristic of the Christian mind. Nowhere but in 
 Christendom is Religion the immediate communion be- 
 tween the Divine and the human spirit, the descent of 
 God, the ascent of man, into the region of a common 
 sympathy with the pure, the true, the good. Other faiths 
 and philosophies have acknowledged a sacredness in the 
 Moral Law, and claimed the sanction of Divine authority 
 for the rules of Justice and Beneficence ; but have regarded 
 these as intimations from a distance, a legislation put into 
 the frame of things ; -or else, a higher action of our own 
 constitution, still leaving us in our personal isolation. It 
 was reserved for Christ to dissipate this dim dream of God 
 at second-hand ; to rend away the interposing veil from 
 Conscience and holy love, and let them come to us as the 
 glance of his living eye, the real pleading of his nature 
 with ours. Thus disclosing the permanent Incarnation of 
 God in our humanity, he quickened ethical relations into 
 personal, carried us out of ourselves, turned painful 
 struggles into loving surrender, and made perfect our 
 natural weakness in supernatural strength. The dreadful 
 loneliness of our nature, the silence of the heart with its 
 own bitterness, is gone. The prayer of every suffering 
 and tempted soul is answered, " O my God, send me not 
 out, leave me not here, to fight a sad fight, to faint and fail, 
 alone ! " The whole distinctive power of Christianity lies 
 in this ; that it annihilates the interval between the 
 Father of spirits and ourselves, and brings him in person 
 into the midst of our own life ; no longer putting us off 
 with past and future belongings to him, suspended mean- 
 while for a period of independent experience in which we 
 are let alone ; but establishing immediate relations with
 
 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 533 
 
 him, perpetuated through all the hours, and felt through all 
 our secret life. Without this, Religion would never have 
 known how to transcend Morals except by leaving them 
 behind : nor would character ever have moulded itself into 
 the special Christian types ; the stern strength tempered 
 with sweet affections ; the heroism so generous and 
 undefiant, because the expression of personal allegiance ; 
 the inward piety, patient to pick up the crumbs of outward 
 work ; the saintly modesty, borne by a divine pity into 
 saddest sceneSj and by her presence clearing a space of 
 purity all round. All these may be said, in a certain sense, 
 to do violence to nature ; and they are possible only to a 
 religion which, so to speak, takes no notice of nature, but 
 passes straight into supernatural relation ; which sets the 
 soul into direct dealings with her God, just as if there were 
 no universe by, and commences the drama of eternity with- 
 out admitting any time between. 
 
 To bring out more strongly this essence of our faith, we 
 may contrast it on this side with the religions whose place 
 it took. Paganism, in all its forms, was and ever will be 
 Nature-worship ; Christianity, on the other hand, is Spirit- 
 worship. To the Greek, it was the outward cosmos visible 
 around which manifested and embodied the divine eternal 
 powers : if he were a believing Poet, the glens and streams, 
 the rocky shores or mountain peaks of his own or his fathers' 
 land, or the seas that rolled between, or the isles that com- 
 plicated the waters, were the scenes of sacred legend, whic 
 lifted them beyond common history and gave them a glory 
 more than physical : if he were a Philosopher, the universal 
 order of the heavens and the earth, the seasonal vicissitudes, 
 the alternate pace of night and day, and all the movements 
 of this mighty organism, showed how Eternal Mind could 
 persuade Matter into form and beauty, and make it the seat 
 of life. Man, in this view, had no place of his own ; he 
 was but the most eminent of natural objects, conscious of 
 himself and of the rest ; an organ of this world, seeing as 
 well as seen : and were he not here at all, the great scheme
 
 534 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 
 
 would scarcely miss him, but would still be all summed up 
 in the evolution of nature and the eternity of God. To the 
 Christian, on the other hand, the centre is entirely changed ; 
 for him, it is nature that might be taken away, if man alone 
 were left : it is when he most forgets the world, sinks back 
 from the colours and the images of sense, and retires into 
 the deeps within, that he is nearest to his God : and if he 
 would picture to himself the conditions of the most piercing 
 consciousness of heavenly things, he launches out beyond 
 the margin of death, into the awful spaces where nature and 
 her warm light are left behind ; and there first, where only 
 spirits can be, feels there is no escape from divine realities. 
 Let there be but the spirit of man in presence of the Spirit 
 of God, and all the requisites of intercommunion are there : 
 the world may help ; the world may hinder ; but in any case 
 it is superfluous. It is direct through the higher breathings 
 of our souls, the meek self-sacrifice, the pure aspiring, the 
 holy trustfulness, the unswerving faith, that the Divine Guide 
 comes to us and brings his sympathy : and this path would 
 remain, though the moon were to grow capricious, and the 
 sun forget to rise. 
 
 As it is the Pagan characteristic to identify God with 
 Nature, and the Christian to identify him with Spirit : so is 
 it the tendency of our secular life and lower faculty to keep 
 us in the former ; of the Christian Church and its higher 
 appeals to raise us to the latter. There is doubtless truth 
 and good in both : and it is our weakness, not our wisdom, 
 that pushes them into contradiction with each other. I 
 would put no slight on the study of the Physical World, or 
 on the cultivated sense of Form and Colour, or on the 
 native joy of a life in sympathy with the elements around. 
 Let Science remind us that we live in a universe of Law. 
 Let Art open it with another key, and show it as a universe 
 of Beauty. Let ingenuity and affluence adorn our human 
 place in it with the refinements and resources of civilized 
 existence. Let the healthfulness of temperance, the 
 economy of justice, the reasonableness of all the virtues and
 
 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 535 
 
 their accordance with our social condition be shown. This 
 is all well. But it is the Pagan side of life. And it is pre- 
 cisely to carry us beyond this, to bring us home from the 
 works and ways of God to communion with himself; to 
 make time and place and lot, and life and death, and all 
 things, no longer able to separate us from him, that the 
 training and worship of the Christian Church exist. Her 
 one witness to us is, that we live where the Holy Spirit 
 breathes and the Comforter is always near. And if ever she 
 forgets this word, and letting divine things slip into distant 
 times and places, talks only of secondary laws, and drops us 
 on the mere ground of nature, she betrays her Lord. For 
 what else did he live and die but to destroy that mid-wall of 
 partition which keeps us at one remove from God; to inter- 
 fuse the human with the divine ; to lift the veil from those 
 highest impulses and suggestions which had been taken for 
 mere natural nobleness, and present them as God in person 
 setting us in conscious sympathy with supernatural good ? 
 And what is the main difference between his disciple and 
 the heroic faithful Heathen, but this; that, while both have 
 the same Guidance showing them the better and the worse, 
 the latter mistakes it for a Self-wisdom, the former owns it 
 as the Spirit-light of the Holiest of all ? 
 
 In truth, my friends, we spend a double life through all 
 our years. Two worlds there are, ever spread around us ; 
 two worlds also set within. Out in the universal Space is 
 that visible system which we call Nature, where all things 
 are born and die, each evanescent, but the whole enduring ; 
 the realm of an Order silent and insensible, whose cycles 
 are inexorable as Necessity. But Nature does not live alone, 
 or, with all her vastness, choke up the universe of Being. 
 Along with her reality is another that transcends it, that 
 is more than Nature, that is Supernatural ; a Mind, whose 
 thoughts, whose Will, whose love, are free : a Spirit that 
 vnoveth where he listeth, and never without the fostering 
 sympathies of eternal holiness. These two, the natural and 
 the supernatural realms, ever co-present yet ever distinct,
 
 536 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 
 
 make up the Whole around us. But within us also, in the 
 personal experience of each they re-appear. Down in 
 nature do we all live, in our physical appetencies, our 
 instinctive energies, our sensitive desires : so far as we wish 
 to be well lodged and fed, to be rich, to be strong, to be 
 safe, to be admired. Yet this surely is not all. Hovering 
 over these natural desires, there hangs an august Authority 
 which we cannot disown ; a brooding cloud divinely 
 watching us, and hiding either the lightnings of retribution 
 or the gentle thunders that salute a " beloved son." That 
 there are two wills within us, our own and another's ; the 
 first sinking us to the lower, the second drawing us to the 
 higher ; the lesser and louder comforting the self, the 
 greater and fainter sacrificing it ; the one tending to shut 
 up, the other to warm and open all pure aspirings and 
 reverential affections who that has ever known temptation 
 can really doubt ? And if this be not, as Scripture says, 
 God's Spirit striving with us, I know not where else his life 
 is to be found in us, or is at all to be distinguished from his 
 absence or his death. 
 
 Now there may be souls so disciplined and balanced as 
 ever to remain in the mingled presence of these two worlds. 
 But, for the most part, even those who are most faithful to 
 the higher guidance do not, at the moment, remember 
 whose it is, and own that they are stepping upon holy ground. 
 Great crises, indeed, there are in our experience, which, 
 bringing us to the end of all human resource, throw us 
 upon a Divine dependence ; which conduct us to the very 
 edge of Nature, and compel us to look over ; nay, thrust 
 us from the brink into the Infinite where the forces of the 
 Spirit are the sole realities, and only the angels can bear us 
 up. The desolating sweep of mortal sickness through the 
 house, leaving its rooms to hollow echoes, in place of the 
 tangle of merry voices ; the sudden danger, in the trackless 
 forest or on the midnight sea, flinging the winds and spray 
 of Eternity in our very face ; the lonely anguish of calumny 
 and unmerited disgrace ; the surprise of betrayed affections
 
 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 537 
 
 and disappointed trusts ; the breaking of life-long ties ; 
 the fading of some last treasure from our arms ; these art- 
 things which crumble the footing of nature beneath us, and 
 open to us glimpses into the resources of a higher and less 
 precarious world around us. These crises could, for the 
 moment, give even to the Pagan some touch and colouring 
 of the Christian heart. Our Christian communion has no 
 other end than to prevent the perishing of this occasional 
 spiritual life ; to rescue its snatches of Divine light from the 
 enveloping darkness of nature, and diffuse them as a steady 
 and permanent consecration over our whole conscious being; 
 to find the meaning of its indications ; to interpenetrate the 
 matter of our natural existence with the sense of super- 
 natural relations. Christian worship perpetuates the wisdom 
 of life's deepest crises ; recognizing the solemn realities of 
 a sphere above us, yet within us and around ; owning the 
 common affections which look up to them, the common 
 engagement to place ourselves under their shadow or their 
 light. If its end is to be attained, if it is to make us one 
 with Christ and God, we must not bring to it all the mood 
 and temper of the outer world ; but, on crossing its thresh- 
 old and entering here, must lay the Pagan half of us to 
 sleep. Is it too much to ask that the spirit, so dim and 
 drowsy in the noise and dazzle of life, should sit for a little 
 while awake, and behold another glory ? and is the reproach 
 never to cease, "Could ye not watch with me one hour?'' 
 Enough is surely given to the play of nature in the six days' 
 haste and heat ; enough of indulgence, of competition, of 
 spurious admirations, of stifling routine, to make atheists of 
 us all, had we no restorative retreat. At least in the scanty 
 hours of Christian communion, let us take the dusty sandals 
 off, and drop the folds of blinding habit. Some little 
 season let us give to the thirsting and reverential mind ; not 
 spreading beneath the heavens the critic's hard impervious 
 surface, but looking up with pores open to the gracious dews 
 and ready to burst into some verdure. I sometimes fear 
 that the men of this generation have lost the mental attitude
 
 538 WORSHIP IN THE SPIRIT. 
 
 of simple piety, and do not personally mingle in the strains 
 of prayer and lose themselves in the reality of God ; that 
 their energies are so accustomed to command and conquer 
 what is beneath them, as not readily to lie low and suscep- 
 tible under what is above them ; that to their free and easy 
 complacency, master of everything, docile to nothing, there 
 will be little that is solemn, deep and holy, till they come to 
 die into it. Oh ! friends, be it not so with you. Lay not 
 on your faithful preacher's soul the intolerable suspicion, 
 that his purest fervours come to nothing and burn out in 
 the cold fuel of unanswering natures. Force him not to 
 distrust his best enthusiasms. Never add yourselves on to 
 that dead weight of natural temptation which bears down 
 on the prophetic spirit, aud stifles the exit of God's light. 
 Here let another spirit prevail. Let us bring into our com- 
 munion, not the exacting and excepting intellect, but the 
 waiting and kindling heart, quick to mingle its flame with 
 the ascending fires of sacrifice. Let the prison-walls of 
 deadening custom fall from us at the tones of prayer, and 
 the light flow round, and the winds pass by, from the open 
 Infinite. Once humble and genial to a spirit higher than 
 our own, we shall find ourselves in an invisible communion, 
 drawing us with sweet and mystic ties away from anger, 
 care and sorrow, and making us one with each other, with 
 Christ, with God. Of such blending worship be this the 
 scene : and so may the place be indeed the very House of 
 God, and none other than the Gate of Heaven !
 
 INDUCTION CHARGE.
 
 CHARGE TO MINISTER & CONGREGATION.* 
 
 DEAR FRIEND AND BROTHER, 
 
 Among those who have heard the solemn prayer in 
 which, through the lips of our friend, we speak this day to 
 God, and who shall yet hear the voice in which we speak 
 to one another, there may be some to charge us with 
 " magnifying our office," and spending on it a measure of 
 affection out of keeping with its feeble action on the world. 
 And there are times, in the experience of every long-tried 
 minister, when, with a sigh, he too would yield to such 
 impression, and pathetically say in heart to his young 
 successor, " Aye, dream while you can the glorious dream : 
 soon enough you must wake to the dull light and the 
 dripping rain." Were such a mood as this ever and any- 
 where possible to me, assuredly it would not be now and 
 here. Not that, by the measures of size, there is in the 
 history of this Church any great thing to show ; but that, 
 by the measures of depth, there are things beyond show, 
 so real, so sacred, reaching so far towards Infinitude, as to 
 absorb every cynic doubt that may be thrown into them. 
 The place where I stand is perhaps the spot of all the 
 world where I have most lived, most hoped, most loved, 
 most suffered ; have looked with truest pity on the burden 
 of others, and best forgot my own : and how should I, with 
 any light estimate, how but with a blessing and a prayer, 
 introduce you, my brother, to the succession of this 
 unutterable life ? The scene around me, if nothing else, 
 
 * Rev. A. Gordon's settlement as a Pastor of Hope Street Church, 
 Liverpool, Thursday, December 31, 1863.
 
 542 INDUCTION CHARGE. 
 
 must dissipate the false wisdom of age, and bring back the 
 fervours and the trusts of better years. Around the curves 
 of those arches a breadth of whispering wonder seems to 
 play. The slant sunshine through the windows has painted 
 over these walls with tender memories ; and the tones of 
 that organ re-awaken the inner music of many a thanks- 
 giving and many a grief. The faces before me, those 
 that are seen in the light, those others that peer through the 
 shadows, ask and tell so many things with their sad and 
 speaking eyes, that it is assuredly no trivial thing to stand 
 here and answer and interpret. Here, then, where the very 
 pavement is written over with the graces and sorrows of the 
 Past ; where images hover in the air, of life made beautiful 
 and consecrate for young and old, I cannot pretend to chill 
 any glow of hope, or lighten the solemn weight of your 
 responsibility ; and did I yield to the counsels of a cold 
 prudence, a cloud of noble witnesses would rise from the 
 past and contradict me. 
 
 Is it dangerous for me to speak to you of your vocation 
 as something great and holy ? Shall I foster, thus, the 
 temper of self-exaggeration, and induce on you the airs of 
 priestly dignity ? Never, on the contrary, can we personally 
 lie so low, as when we look up to the full height of the 
 trust committed to us. Had we to invent for ourselves the 
 Divine wisdom we stand here to publish, to pledge our own 
 faculty to strike out the true light of life, to strain and 
 stretch our natural will to the measure of a supernatural 
 work, we should groan under a burden impossible to bear. 
 A task the reverse of this is ours. " We preach, not our- 
 selves, but Christ Jesus the Lord." We are not creators, 
 but organs, of sacred truth ; we have not to originate the 
 new, but to interpret what eternally is there ; not to provide 
 the heavenly light, but to lay the blind eye under the 
 finger of Christ, that the scales of earthly delusion may 
 i'all ; in short, to tell to the human soul what secretly it 
 knows but faithlessly it hides away. For, if the Gospel is 
 really of spiritual and umvasting significance, wherein, must
 
 INDUCTION CHARGE. 543 
 
 we say, consists our " preaching of Christ ? " Is it enough 
 that we present him in his historic individuality, and repro- 
 duce his biography for our own time ? that we make men 
 at home in the villages of Galilee and the streets of 
 Jerusalem, and set them to watch the domestic interior at 
 Bethany, and lurk and listen beneath the olives of 
 Gethsemane ? that we plant them by the Cross to see how 
 the drama was " finished " upon earth ; and then under 
 Stephen's kindling features to hear how it was re-opened 
 from heaven ? Is it to this prophet of the Past, seen 
 ideally across the gulf of ages, the phenomenon of an era, 
 acting upon us by retrospective sympathy and reverence, 
 that we look for a new birth of our humanity ? Alas ! if 
 we have no other power to wield against the sins and 
 sorrows of the world but that of a past fact, however solemn 
 and sublime, I fear the fatal slumber will not be broken, 
 and the bitter tears not cease to flow. Shall we then 
 change his personality from human to divine, from historical 
 to pre-existent, and present him as Son of God before all 
 worlds, descending for a season into the shadows of 
 humanity, and then emerging into eternal light again ? 
 These incidents of his being, were they ever so real, would 
 still be past events, lying afar in history, and finding no 
 divineness for the present hour : call it inspired manhood, 
 or call it incarnate Godhead, it is no living fact to us, no 
 gospel of to-day, if it belong only to one exceptional being, 
 and was all over eighteen centuries ago. The human 
 conscience deals with immediate problems, feels for im- 
 mediate supports : human love spends itself upon the 
 claims and sufferings that are nearest to it ; and God him- 
 self cannot reach them at arm's length, or sanctify them 
 with a look across the ages. Christ first becomes a 
 Revelation to us, " the power of God and the wisdom of 
 God," when he is preached, not in his solitary individuality, 
 but as standing for our humanity for ever ; taking the veil 
 away that hid the Holy Presence there, interpreting for us 
 the double nature of the Self that is ours and the Spirit
 
 544 INDUCTION CHARGE. 
 
 that is His, and finding the way of reconciliation by 
 surrender of will and utter sacrifice. We all of us have 
 that two-fold filiation which has been falsely fixed on him 
 alone. Born of nature, born of God, we too must traverse 
 the desert and meet the fiends of temptation : we have a 
 baptism to be baptized with ; and how are we straitened 
 until it be accomplished ! We have the path of self-denial 
 to tread, and the midnight watch to meet, and the heavy 
 cross to bear upon the dolorous way ; only never alone, for 
 the Father is with us : and passing freely into his hand to 
 seek our own will no more, we shall not be without our 
 moments of transfiguration and saintly communion ; or the 
 joy that deep things, hid from the wise and prudent, are 
 revealed to the little child ; or the angel of peace that 
 strengthens for the last sacrifice. It is not the story of 
 Jesus, not his picture, not his doctrine, that redeems us ; 
 not anything set off at a distance and taken at second- 
 hand : all this first becomes a spiritual power when it 
 carries us past itself into that intimate union with God 
 which it exhibits as our true life. And so, to " preach 
 Christ " is to take the veil from what is divine in man's 
 experience, and bring him to the consciousness of real and 
 living relations with the holiest of all. 
 
 Is it your desire, my brother, to find for your people this 
 holy secret of life ? You have only to find it, to believe in it, 
 to cling to it, yourself. Would you thus "preach Christ?" 
 The prime condition is, that you preach " not yourself "; 
 that you lay down every personal aim, stand clear of the 
 fetters of vanity and ambition, and, in quiet self-abandon- 
 ment to the purest, truest, best that dawns upon you and 
 claims you, rise above anxiety and fear. Remembering 
 that self-seeking is human, self-forgetfulness divine, we know 
 at once where the strength and the victory lie. The will 
 that asserts itself may be potent ; the will that resigns itself 
 is omnipotent. Even the soul that is small and weak, in 
 the child, the suffering woman, the untaught poor, becomes 
 a marvellous power and clears an unexpected way, when
 
 INDUCTION CHARGE. 545 
 
 possessed with some inspiring affection, and drawn forward 
 unconscious of wounds and weariness. And when God's 
 spirit wields without resistance the faculties of a ripe and 
 balanced mind, and finds in it only a loyal alacrity for every 
 service, and freely disposes for holy ends its thought, its 
 love, its speech, its force, so mighty is the gospel it pro- 
 claims, that the natural organ seems glorified into the 
 supernatural. The true, deep word, drawn from the 
 living wells of the spirit, will go home to the human hecrt ; 
 and often, I believe, we meet with no response, because we 
 dare not utter the tenderest and highest that is given us to 
 say, and miss the ultimate simplicity. The prophet who 
 would speak for God must not shrink, except from the 
 impure mixtures of his own self-love; or make excuse, 
 " Ah, Lord ! I cannot speak, for I am a child." If indeed 
 he is a child, he is the nearer heaven ; and he will put his 
 hand into the higher guidance and be led, and let his falter- 
 ing lips be touched with the finger of eternal sanctity, and 
 give forth their artless utterance. 
 
 Must you then, my brother, in order to keep near the 
 springs of pure devotion, live the life of a recluse ? Must 
 you fear the resorts of men, lest you lose the communion 
 of God ? On the contrary, there is no place so barren cs 
 the solitary heart ; and however it may stretch its dry 
 expanse and stare up at heaven, no dew shall fall upon it, 
 and no green thing shall appear : it is as an ashy desert, 
 with only the show of living waters painted in its air. No, 
 it is the law of the spiritual world that like alone can know 
 like ; and as the Father worketh everlastingly, so we must 
 work if we are to be at one with him. The Infinite Pity 
 looks in at our eyes, when they look out in tenderness upon 
 another's sorrow ; and the eternal beauty of holiness steals 
 upon us when we purify the space around us by faithful 
 service, and never rest from sacrifice while a grievance or a 
 sin is there. The approach to God is not the lonely path 
 of untrodden thought, but the well-worn way of love : and 
 the more you take the yoke of burdens not your own, and 
 
 VOL. IV. X X
 
 546 INDUCTION CHARGE. 
 
 freely pledge both toil and sympathy to the sicknesses that 
 lie near you in the great infirmary of human ills ; the 
 more patient care you bestow in opening the faith and con- 
 science of the young, in sustaining the simple trusts of the 
 poor, in brightening with a flush of hope and prayer the 
 fading hours of the dying ; the fresher and the fuller will 
 be your store of wisdom from above, and the truer your 
 vision of Him whom the pure heart shall see. 
 
 Nor will your only sphere of disinterested labour be the 
 special world^of the church and the school. Around this 
 inner spiritual circle lies the great natural life of man, 
 which must not be driven, by our want of sympathy, to set 
 up for itself and break away from the restraints of reverence 
 and the order of pure integrity. The soul of worship 
 here will pass off as an ineffectual ghost, unless it seize and 
 animate the organism of daily work, relieve the common 
 duties of their secular look, and consecrate diligence, 
 exactitude, veracity and honour. Truly to represent a 
 Christian society in a great community like this, is to have 
 eye and heart for all its moral relations, industrial, 
 municipal, and national ; and bring the ready hand and 
 thoughtful counsel and high-toned word in enforcement of 
 social trusts and maintenance of public righteousness. 
 Such service will readily escape the suspicion of being 
 "professional," if rendered in the simple spirit of equal 
 sympathy and manly duty ; and kept irreproachable by the 
 gracious temper, the modest tact, the punctual habit and 
 precise performance, which mark a pure, unselfish and 
 faithful mind. 
 
 In all the practical activities of your calling you will be 
 stimulated by the expectations, and supported by the 
 approval, of the society you serve ; and the difficulties will 
 come rather from within than from without. There is 
 another, in one sense an opposite, phase of your proper 
 functions, in which you must expect to feel yourself alone, 
 and which you must sacredly guard from the importunity 
 of external affairs. Though the Christian religion is not a
 
 INDUCTION CHARGE. 547 
 
 philosophy but a life, yet life also has its intellectual side, 
 and ferments with the movement of thought, as well as the 
 stir of work ; and meditative minds that can feel their way 
 to its confines find it embosomed in the infinite every way, 
 and running out into wonder in all its radii. Is Faith to 
 be outstripped and left behind in those silent and solemn 
 fields of speculation ? Must all sanctity and tenderness and 
 trust stop short, and lie down in faintness on the last dust 
 of the noisy present ? No ! wherever thought can go, 
 panting and struggling for another step, religion can draw a 
 quiet breath, and spread a light of safety and sweetness on 
 the way. God is there, as well as here ; and those who 
 speak for him must neither be struck dumb as in a foreign 
 world, nor utter rash and inconsiderate things. There may 
 have been times when the fervent spirit alone, without 
 much culture of mind, was adequate to every need of 
 the Church ; but in our age the prophet of power must be 
 the theologian too. For the hour, no doubt, a station here 
 and a station there may be well served by men of devoted 
 heart, of energetic will, and narrow mental horizon. But if 
 we indulge in intellectual unfaithfulness and permit sacred 
 learning to become a tradition ; if even for a single genera- 
 tion there shall be none among us in easy command of the 
 highest problems that agitate men's minds, none to sustain 
 the living links of historic reverence that join the present 
 with the past, none competent to clear the imperishable 
 spirit from the transitory forms of holy writ ; if we leave all 
 rich intellect and scholarly accomplishment outside, and 
 then try to speak to them from our lower level; who does 
 not see the inevitable issue ? The affections themselves 
 cannot long co-exist with stagnant intelligence ; and cold as 
 may seem the winds that stir the waters of thought, they 
 are needed to quicken the pulses of the heart, flush the 
 cheek with love, and brace the will to act. And then how 
 much of the best inward life of all Christians depends 
 upon books. Drain away the sources of a permanent and 
 satisfying literature, cut off from the future its Locke and 
 
 X N 2
 
 548 INDUCTION CHARGE. 
 
 Lardner, its Taylor and Wellbeloved, its Priestley and 
 Channing, and do you think that, for a religion so starved 
 there would be any history at all ? Take the volumes from 
 its shelves, blot out the dear and venerable names that are 
 the symbols of its wisdom and piety; and what Church 
 could live ? They are the silent preachers that reach the 
 furthest onward, and find the deepest in all time. You, my 
 brother, have prepared yourself by conscientious culture to 
 keep watch over the intellectual conditions, as well as the 
 practical manifestations, of faith and piety, and to help the 
 efforts of the lame and halt in thought. Reverence your 
 gift as a sacred trust : preserve it from waste ; and, by a 
 scrupulous economy of time, never cease to enlarge it. 
 Even for your highest spiritual life, often severely tried by 
 the feverish sorrows and humbling sins of the immediate 
 world, the aliment of thought supplied by the genius and 
 wisdom of the past is little less than indispensable. Keep 
 then in close communion with the mighty spirits who, in 
 reason, in sanctity, in love, stand nearer to God than we : 
 rise habitually to the scope of their horizon : breathe, and 
 bring down to us, their higher air : and prepare yourself 
 your people, and your generation, to migrate to their living 
 presence, when the veil shall be withdrawn which separates 
 them from time and us from eternity. 
 
 And just in this connexion stands the only word of coun- 
 sel, which I would venture to address to you, my friends, 
 who have committed a share of so sacred a charge to these 
 young hands. You ask him to draw for you from the springs 
 of salvation. Encourage him then to seek, in pious and 
 tranquil solitude, their fountain head ; to retire for a few 
 hours, day by day, from the turmoil of practical affairs and 
 scattering engagements, to those studious and contemplative 
 heights where the soul renews her power, and the life of God 
 mingles again with the wasted and wearied heart of man. 
 Reverence in him the needs of that spirit, the claims of 
 that mind, whither your own is to resort for refreshment ; 
 and beware of bringing the sweet-flowing waters of the young
 
 INDUCTION CHARGE. 549 
 
 soul to stagnation, by turning them all to the uses of 
 practical life and the working of even the best enterprises. 
 Without a due mingling of the inner and the outer life, the 
 wasting of the one cannot fail to lower the energies of the 
 other. 
 
 By a happy balance, almost too rich in opportunity, you 
 have placed beside your Paul, the tried and well-beloved, a 
 Timothy, whose own inheritance of excellent gifts and 
 " faith unfeigned," has been improved by faithful culture. 
 There will be room for them both in your hearts : and the 
 more absolute your trust in the apostolic wisdom and 
 affection of the elder, the freer will you be to love without 
 timid reserves whatever is pure and noble in the inspirations 
 of the younger. Let none, then, no, not even the most 
 sagacious and strong, "despise his youth." It is inevitable, 
 and it is right, that you should have the advantage over him 
 in one world, the world of natural experience : but it may 
 well be that in the other (and surely you will say, the higher), 
 he may be more deeply versed than you. In the apprehen- 
 sion of divine things, years are not always gain ; nor are 
 the skilled adepts in the outward life necessarily the best 
 interpreters of the deeper mysteries of human experience. 
 When God needed a seat for his highest inspiration, he 
 chose the soul of One not thirty years of age. And, of all 
 that were with Jesus in his temptations, they say it was the 
 youngest that he loved the most. Be not then slow to 
 believe that heaven may send a word of wisdom without 
 length of days. From the very freshness of an unworn 
 spirit expect rather a re-juvenescence of your own piety, a 
 re-kindling of noble enthusiasms that have faded from you 
 in the world. Or, should this hope be dismissed with a 
 sigh, at least permit your children to catch the congenial 
 fire, and be purer and devouter than their fathers. 
 
 Above all, my friends, if you would have the best mind 
 and heart of your ministers, and would live out of what is 
 deepest in your own, fling yourselves freely into the true 
 spirit of this place, the ancient spirit of Christian worship.
 
 550 INDUCTION CHARGE. 
 
 Crossing this threshold, quit the hard lines and cutting 
 shadows of too critical a thought : break away from the 
 dry egotistic light that withers everything and illuminates 
 nothing : pass into the " bright cloud " that overshadows all 
 divine communion, and melts the souls of multitudes into 
 one, with a transfiguring glory. The Church is the appointed 
 check on that divisive individuality which keeps heart from 
 heart, and shuts up each in his own separate cell : and here, 
 in face of the beauty, the sorrow, the mystery of life, we 
 are all one, looking up into the pure eyes of the Infinite, 
 and stretching forth the hand to touch but the hem of the 
 all-healing robe. But of that heavenly glance and thrill we 
 can see nothing, feel nothing, unless we step down from 
 our lonely pedestals of personality, and stand on the broad 
 platform of our common trusts and simplest affections ; 
 and be content to abide there and be at peace. The 
 Christian Church has dared to become the organ of the 
 universal secrets of the human soul ; to say aloud with the 
 'Amen' of multitudes, what private natures were afraid to 
 breathe ; to say for ever, in immemorial words, what else 
 no hour would confess in its common speech. Her method 
 may seem strange to the ever-hasting genius of our age, 
 She calls us together to crowd her pavement, and then 
 delivers to us, and bids us take up, not the new and dazzling, 
 but the oldest utterances of our nature. And is there not 
 wisdom in this simplicity ? Thought and ingenuity, the 
 vivid play of intellectual life, may sustain themselves by 
 movement, and ever fly the Past. But the love and faith, 
 the unwearied pity and sorrowful reverence of the human 
 heart, grow by their patient restfulness, and return with a 
 pathetic thirst to their own most ancient thoughts and words. 
 The passionate lament of Hebrew prophets, the glorious 
 joy of a Christian apostle, the penitential sigh, the solemn 
 prayer, the sweet submission, once the private breathing of 
 an Augustine, a Gregory, a Fenelon, wake the echoes of a 
 thousand souls, and so swell and deepen from age to age, as 
 to become at last the church-music of our humanity. This
 
 INDUCTION CHARGE. 551 
 
 it is that gives their power to the simplest words of holy writ, 
 and to those old elements of worship which come to us 
 charged with devotion saintlier than ours : this it is that 
 makes their quiet tones so dignified and humane. They 
 lift us from the feverish present, and throw around us the 
 solemn shadow of a now silent time. They link us with an 
 earlier communion on earth and a higher in heaven ; and 
 bid us rise to the sympathy of that high kindred. Give 
 your glad answer to this glorious call. Entering here, 
 genially take your human place. Leave it not doubtful 
 whether you are touched with the pity, and bend beneath 
 the burden which others own. Burst the bonds of your 
 critical or passive mood : give free wing to affections that 
 have had, perchance, too long repose ; and join the chorus 
 of humility and aspiration. Reaching the very soul of 
 union in these deepest seats, and chastening individual 
 varieties by the recurring touch of an absorbing devotion, 
 ministers and people will be fresh and strong for every work 
 of righteousness, and be found in the field of moral con- 
 flict wherever truth and goodness need a rescue, and 
 cowards fly, and heroes fall. Go forth then, armed with 
 this spirit, and fear no hosts of evil : and, under leaders 
 combining a rare wisdom of experience with the forces of 
 unexhausted youth, claim your share in the victories of 
 Right and the Kingdom of our God.
 
 THE GOD OF THE LIVING.
 
 TO THE REVERENDS 
 
 M. MARTIN PASCHOUD, 
 
 WHOSE PRESENCE HONOURED THE OCCASION OF ITS DELIVERY, 
 
 AND 
 
 M. ATHANASE COQUEREL, FILS, 
 
 WHOSE ABSENCE ALONE EXCUSED ITS DELIVERY, 
 
 THE ENLIGHTENED REPRESENTATIVES OF A FREE AND SPIRITUAL 
 CHRISTIANITY IN THE REFORMED CHURCH OF FRANCE, 
 
 THIS DISCOURSE IS DEDICATED, 
 
 IN PROFOUND SYMPATHY WITH THEIR AIMS, 
 AND ADMIRATION OF THEIR SPIRIT.
 
 THE GOD OF THE LIVING.* 
 
 " God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." MATT. xxii. 32. 
 
 THESE words, as they come from the lips of Christ, are 
 made to bear a mighty burthen. They are used to show 
 that, for those who once stand in conscious relation to God, 
 there is no death ; that whom he owns, he owns for ever ; 
 that the contact of his name is immortality. Whether 
 from a premiss which looks so slight so glorious a con- 
 clusion can legitimately emerge, I do not mean at present 
 to inquire. The rule certainly implies that, while all 
 creatures die who have no faculty for God, the mind which 
 can know and worship him transcends the mortal limits, 
 and is drawn into the kindred of eternal life ; a rule not 
 less compatible, I venture to believe, with the deepest 
 philosophy than with the purest piety. Be that however as 
 it may, I turn the rule to-day to different account. I use 
 it as a witness to the innermost thought of Christ ; that 
 Divine relations are living relations ; that they are not 
 among things historical that have been and are not, but 
 pertain to souls now upon the stage ; that wherever the 
 struggle of moral life is fresh and strong, and a new 
 generation joins the fight, there is the field and fervour of 
 God's spirit ; that if there be anything dead, he quits it for 
 the throbbing griefs and rising aspirations of to-day. His 
 presence with our human world is not like the universal 
 space that folds it round, but as the passing wind that, 
 
 * Opening of Oakfield Road Church, Clifton, November IO, 1864.
 
 55<5 THE COD OF THE LIVING. 
 
 season by season, unbinds the streams and starts the ver- 
 dure. Not that the old memorials of him are other than 
 sacred too. In the Past also he dwelt, when it was Present : 
 but of that only secondary vestiges remain, while the first- 
 hand Reality is here. Nor do the elder voices of the Spirit 
 speak articulately save to the ear which is open to the new: 
 and one who is utterly incredulous of Divine communion 
 with humanity now, who would be as much astonished at a 
 manifestation of God's will to-day as if Socrates were to 
 appear in our streets, for whom the heavenly word stands 
 only on the shelf of ancient literature, can never interpret 
 the holy records of the past. In this great saying, " God 
 is the God of the living," Jesus seems to be thinking 
 aloud, and we overhear the very essence of his religion : 
 and a Church that is to speak for him and bear his name 
 must dedicate its pavement as a place of immediate meeting, 
 without even himself between, of the human spirit with the 
 Divine. When he himself came just for this very end, to 
 leave us alone with God, and retired to make the audience 
 more solemn, it were a poor thing for us to call him back in 
 frustration of his own work, instead of yielding to his faith, 
 living his life, and praying his prayer. He framed himself, 
 and so must we, on the one grand truth which he found 
 in the oldest Scripture and in the newest sorrow of the hour, 
 viz., that God is the " living God " ; whom we mock if we 
 think him absent " on a journey, or peradventure sleeping 
 and not at present to be awakened " ; that his abode is with 
 men, whose spirits are the tabernacle of his, and whose 
 history beats with the pulses of his thought ; that he is for 
 ever here with whispered counsel, for ever acting with holy 
 will beneath our wildest force. His life with us is the one 
 perpetual reality to which the entire series of sacred oracles, 
 law and annals, psalm and prophecy, gospel and epistle, 
 nay, the insight of wise heathens and the consciousness of 
 good Christians, are a protracted witness. Variously 
 mingled, at times almost quenched, in the shadows of our 
 lower humanity, his light has never, it may be, save in one
 
 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 557 
 
 Son of Man, cleared itself of every mist, and transfigured 
 our nature to its proper glory : but still, this Headship of 
 Christ is Membership to us, and makes us one with him as 
 partakers of the same Spirit. Floodtide or neap, it is the 
 same deep that flows : and whether you open to it the 
 winding recesses of private life, or the broad gulf that 
 separates the continents and determines the curvature of 
 history, the awful wave sweeps in. 
 
 This life of God in the soul of man and in the courses of 
 the world cannot be deeply realized, without ennobling our 
 whole conception of Revelation, and importing a prophetic 
 sanctity into the experiences of to-day. The great apostacy 
 of modern Christendom is that it believes the witness 
 instead of Him that is witnessed, and while settling abstract 
 truth ceases to lean on the only True. We think of him as 
 we do of the departed spirits of our race, rather than as of 
 the very friend whose hand is in ours and whose eye gleams 
 into the chamber of our heart. We half fancy that he shut 
 himself up when the canon of Scripture was closed, and 
 remained quiescent for ages not yet spent. And, strange 
 to say, the higher our theological pretensions, the more is 
 our belief apt to consist of negations and exclusions of 
 God, blind to his Spirit in every realm save one. To 
 magnify his old inspirations, we deny the new : to narrow 
 him to the preternatural, we empty the natural Cosmos of 
 his will : to seek him in the superhuman, we forget his life 
 in our humanity, and cease to meet and trust him in our 
 love and faith and truth : to vindicate his presence with 
 the Hebrew race, we treat the Greek as simply undivine. 
 Once surrender yourself to the sense of God's infinite and 
 eternal life, and these limitations must fall away. You will 
 find it impossible to make for him any enclosure of time or 
 space or history that shall be exceptionally his. You will 
 divide between the holy and the unholy, not by date or by 
 geography, but by the boundary that is nowhere absent and 
 that never fades, between good and evil, love and hate-, 
 true and false, sacrifice and selfishness. You will hold,
 
 558 THE GOD OF THE LIVING, 
 
 with the Catholic, that his inspiration is not gone, but has 
 its shrines of perpetuity in this world. You will feel, with 
 the Puritan, that his hand is in the event, his call in the 
 duty, his counsel in the high spirit, of the hour. You will 
 see the very matter and substance of your experience glow 
 with an inner light beyond its own, and draw to it a bright 
 cloud of transfiguration. You will keep, in short, the 
 ancient reverences, but without the modern scorns ; and 
 lie open, with humble and docile mind, to the leadings of a 
 Holy Spirit that still abides to teach and comfort us. 
 
 Are we thus betrayed into any disparagement of " his- 
 torical revelation ? " What is " historical revelation ? " It 
 is not a revelation of which we have a finished history ; but 
 a revelation of God through human history ; therefore with 
 foci, it may be, of intensest light, but with curve wide as 
 the sweep and continuous as the lines of our humanity. 
 And the reason why its aspect and configuration must ever 
 change is this ; that two factors go to shape it, of which 
 one is constant, the other variable. A living religion is the 
 passing of God over the heart of man, to touch the secrets 
 ready to awake there, and let in such dawn as will not blind 
 the tender eye. He and his truth are, no doubt, eternally 
 the same : but our nature, on which they breathe, is ever 
 spreading a different climate beneath them. And just as the 
 nourishing wind and dews may bring upon the rocks of one 
 latitude nothing but the lichen and the moss, yet cover the 
 soil of another with the balsam and the palm ; so will the 
 same Divine Spirit ever ripen the seeds within us whose 
 conditions are ready ; educing here the scanty verdure of 
 barbarous life that yet redeems it from sterility, and there 
 the fruits of richest culture and forests of deepest root. 
 But in every region he has hid within the soul some possibili- 
 ties of good ; and in every age he is there to cherish and 
 quicken them into realization. And wherever we find an 
 incipient reverence for right, or a free sacrifice of love, or 
 a sigh after unseen beauty, be it in Jew or Gentile, bar- 
 barian or Greek, there we are on the traces of his work,
 
 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 559 
 
 and the skirts of his Shekinah are floating by. Good 
 everywhere and in all its forms is not only loved and 
 welcomed by him, when it contrives to appear ; but is 
 helped by him in its inextinguishable struggle to appear, and 
 pushes itself forward by the inner tension of his Spirit. 
 They that simply feel within them the pressure of the good, 
 and do not know it to be His. that are borne along by a 
 secret sense of honour, or passion for justice, or surrendered 
 to disinterested love, are his unconscious organs, and 
 serve One who remains behind the veil. And just the 
 taking away of this veil is what we mean by " Revelation : " 
 which consists therefore in discovering the Personal ground 
 of whatever we revere ; in seeing, through the duty that 
 awes us, and the good that haunts us, the very look of God ; 
 in changing our worship from a blind service of we know 
 not what, into an unsealed affection, eye to eye, therefore 
 from poetry to prayer, from moral resolve to holy trust, 
 from weary labour to a joyous sacrament. 
 
 If this be the essence of Revelation, this unfolding of 
 God's living personality where it was undiscerned before, 
 this recognition of him in the disguises of our highest 
 experience, it is not only conceivable, it is inevitable, that 
 revelation should be progressive and indefinitely open. He 
 must be rediscovered in every new good and every grander 
 truth that dawns : and fast as the just admirations and 
 private reverences of men change into fresh forms, and the 
 tastes and truths of a lower age enrich themselves into those 
 of a higher, is the vesture glorified through which he gleams. 
 The Divine life to-day is ever in the best spirit of the young 
 and growing time ; and thither will a living piety that loves 
 his past resort to own his present work, and find what new 
 chord may be flung in to swell the ancient hymn. Wonder, 
 love and faith, haunted with the perpetuity of God, cannot 
 linger on the trodden road, and stay their quest among the 
 fresh fields where he leads our immediate feet, any more 
 than the lips of thirst can be moistened with remembrance 
 of the draught of yesterday. The spring of salvation has an
 
 560 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 
 
 everlasting flow : and it were a weary thing to sit through 
 the noonday heats at the fathers' well, were not the running 
 waters heard beneath. From God's elder inspirations let 
 nothing be detracted : the more we know of them, the 
 deeper and sublimer will they seem. But, be assured, they 
 have never gone to sleep, and left us to a lull of hopeless 
 desertion. Quote them not against the breathing of his 
 Spirit, passing where it listeth now. Open a genial heart 
 to them ; and the more they possess you, the less will you 
 dream that they have ever ceased, and the more susceptible 
 will you be to their prolonged pulsation. The word of God 
 peals through the whole life of our humanity ; once only, 
 in holy sorrow, pouring out a melody entirely divine : but 
 never without its notes of sacredness, as if its anthem were 
 shut up ; and from age to age opening, as it were, new 
 organ-stops within our nature, not simply to repeat, but to 
 vary, to redouble, to refresh the strain. 
 
 Not only is God's immediate and personal mingling with 
 the currents of our being inconsistent with a mere stationary 
 and traditional apprehension of divine things ; but even his 
 revelation through a Mediator involves in itself a principle 
 and process of growth. Christ is a real person, his life on 
 earth and even in heaven historical ; his spirit and charac- 
 teristic words are known facts, not shifting fictions. But 
 what and how much men are able to see of a reality, even 
 when closest to them, depends not more upon its nature 
 than upon their eye. They perceive what their faculty is 
 open to take in, and miss the rest ; just as of two Artists 
 gazing on a gleamy sea, one will interpret the water, the 
 other the air and light. And the greater and richer the 
 reality is, the less will our apprehension be equal to it, and 
 the more broken our view of it. God alone can compre- 
 hend God ; and it would take a second Christ to know the 
 first. But that which is unattainable at once by a single eye 
 may be accomplished in succession by many ; and as, one 
 by one, the many-souled disciples come up with reverent 
 gaze, feature after feature, expression after expression, is
 
 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 561 
 
 brought out, till the harmony of perfection is completed. 
 Nor is this all. The partial vision which each one carries 
 away is precisely that which stirs him most ; it is as a seed 
 dropped in the furrows of a congenial soil ; and when it has 
 done its reproductive work that single grace has grown a 
 harvest, visibly waving over the field of the world : and 
 thenceforth that type of God's spiritual husbandry is 
 secured from perishing. Thus from the person of Christ, 
 distributing its meanings among the sympathetic aptitudes 
 of men, do whole histories arise, lines of thought running 
 into new latitudes, and blossoming affections trying unex- 
 pected heights, and raising the rose upon the snow. What 
 are these successive experiments of his power on our nature 
 but a growth and development of the revelation in him ? 
 And who can deny that they aid and enrich our conception 
 even of himself? Not till we see his characteristics 
 realized on the large scale of history, does our coarse eye 
 fully dare to pronounce that they are his. But our foolish 
 doubt, whether the little mustard-seed of the heavenly 
 kingdom is perhaps a dead grain of grit or wood, cannot 
 last when the herb is grown and the branches wave. A 
 light is therefore reflected back from the experience of 
 Christendom upon the life and individuality of Christ ; and 
 the full significance of God's revelation in him is found in 
 the consciousness not of the first age, but of the last. 
 
 In short, ever since the Advent, the divine image of 
 the Son of God has been going its rounds through the 
 chambers of our sleeping humanity ; flashing on the eye- 
 lids ready to be lifted at its approach, and mingling with the 
 dreams of those whose hour was not yet come. First, he 
 woke up the three forms of mind that are represented by 
 Matthew, Paul and John, and have ever since continued 
 separate under the names of Law and Faith and Love, and 
 perhaps only in heaven will blend in one. Each of these, 
 " when it was awake, beheld his glory " ; yet to each did it 
 seem different ; and each, working out its own view, opened 
 a distinct vein of treasure in the faith, and left it other and 
 
 VOL. iv. o o
 
 562 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 
 
 richer than before. Nor is it only within the limits of the 
 first age, and in immediate contact with the historical 
 person of Christ, that this variety of spiritual expansion, 
 this deepening of the soul in particular directions, may be 
 traced. Almost every generation of the Church has borne 
 not only repeated fruits, but new ; each prior season drop- 
 ping its foliage of influence, and so changing the very soil, 
 and putting a different sap and nutriment into the burst of 
 the next Spring. And now and then the power of Christ 
 strikes upon some deeper and grander soul, and throws out 
 startling results ; schemes of thought, fairly evolved, yet 
 of which there had been but faint surmise ; musings of 
 meditation, floating on the very breath of the old 
 Christian love, yet fresh to the world as morning air ; 
 creations of Art, true to the very essence of Christian 
 worship, and only giving shape and colour to its grace and 
 majesty, yet native to quite another clime from that of 
 Apostles and Evangelists. Every great thinker, penetrated 
 with deep conversion, changes the religion that ferments 
 within him, flings it out in expanded form, and leaves it 
 other than he found it. Athanasius and Augustine and 
 Pelagius ; Anselm and Abelard ; Luther and Calvin and 
 Socinus ; have all impressed upon the Faith lineaments 
 it did not contain before. The writers of the Latin hymns ; 
 the builders of the Western minsters ; the composers of 
 the Liturgies that bore the burden of contrition and aspira- 
 tion from age to a_;e ; the authors of the anthems so 
 plaintive in sorrow or jubilant with holy joy ; the painters 
 of sacred story ; the poets of spiritual insight ; the reformers 
 of corrupted truth all have contributed their element to 
 the glory and affluence of the faith, and have freely thrown 
 their contribution of light, of thought, of music, or of fire, 
 into the sacrifice in which our worship flames to Heaven. 
 Nay, we too in our time, the humblest of us that will be- 
 come an organ for the fruitful life of God's Spirit, and say a 
 true distinctive word, or do a genuine and loving deed, 
 may add to the growing heritage of the Church. That
 
 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 563 
 
 the thought we think and the prayer we breathe is the 
 last term of Christian communion between God and our 
 humanity, we do not for a moment presume to say : 
 enough, that it is the deposit committed to us, the temple- 
 tribute which, mite though it be, is all that we have. As 
 we freely cast it into the treasury of heaven, we would in 
 no wise disparage other, be they earlier or be they later, 
 gifts. This new Church we enter on the roll and register 
 of an expanding Christendom, progressive in its thought, 
 persistent in its pieties : and under its shelter we stand 
 ready to believe whatever comes true, to pity whatever is 
 sorrowful, to revere whatever is divine. We dedicate it as 
 a Sanctuary for that immediate and conscious meeting of 
 the Living God with living men, which Christ has made a 
 reality for ever ; and which, though its speech may be in 
 many dialects, is the outpouring of a common inspiration, 
 and brings from the Infinite Compassion the answer of a 
 common blessing. If, in accepting the position which 
 Jesus has opened to us, of direct relation, face to face, 
 with the Father of Spirits, we seem to stand alone, apart 
 from those who put not only a Past but a Present Mediator 
 between, we feel assured, in spite of doctrinal decrees, that 
 the outer separation is less than the inner sympathy : the 
 one is on the human surface, the other in the hiding-place 
 of God. The confession which we bring, and the repose 
 which we find, are the same that are everywhere familiar to 
 the heart of Christendom : only with us they seem to go 
 and come straightway in primary converse with the Soul of 
 souls; while" others fear that, without interceding agency, 
 they must miss their way. Be the pathway simple or 
 circuitous, the substance of the worship is the same. It is 
 no mere private want, no fancy of ours to-day, that we 
 come here to breathe ; but the trusts of eighteen centuries 
 and the sighs and hopes of more, nay, the perpetual 
 plaint and prayer of our humanity. The communion 
 longed for by ancient wisdom, entered by Christian 
 simplicity, enriched by the sanctities and sufferings of fifty 
 
 002
 
 564 THE GOD OF THE LIVING. 
 
 generations, and charged with pathetic memories from all, 
 is that to which we dedicate this house. Every great and 
 good rnind that has lived in this communion has given it a 
 new meaning and lifted it to higher consecration ; has put 
 a fresh tone into his speech, and set on its saintly counte- 
 nance another lineament of grace. Into the worship that 
 brings us here has flowed the passion of Tertullian, the 
 severity of Ambrose, the self-denial of St. Francis, the 
 sweetness of Tauler, the nobleness of Milton, and the 
 fervours of countless holy men. Their solemn shadows lie 
 around us here: their tender and majestic voices steal into 
 the chorus of our hymn ; and may well help the song of 
 our hearts towards the height of their diviner strain, 
 " Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty ! 
 Just and true are all thy ways, O Thou King of Saints ! "
 
 THE THREE STAGES OF UNITARIAN 
 THEOLOGY.
 
 THE THREE STAGES OF UNITARIAN 
 THEOLOGY. * 
 
 " Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, 
 and Israel acknowledge us not : thou, O Lord, art our Father, 
 our Redeemer ; thy Name is from everlasting." ISAIAH Ixiii. 16. 
 
 THE true prophetic heart, may we not say, breathes 
 through these words, and gives them a music that can 
 never die away. They are the tones of a spirit tender, yet 
 clear and strong ; reverent in memory, open to love, warm 
 with the humanities, yet driven from the sunny front of 
 life, and in its retreat falling back on the sheltering lone- 
 liness of God. And do they speak for the Hebrew poet 
 alone ? Rather do they pitch the note of a perpetual 
 hymn, caught up and delivered on, age after age, by the 
 noblest voices of history. In the education of our race it 
 is inevitable that the children should outgrow the father's 
 house, and emigrate to new lands of thought ; and could 
 the men of old come back among us, and look at us with 
 their patriarchal eyes, who knows but that we might ask 
 their blessing in vain, and Abraham perchance would be 
 ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not ? To hard 
 and driving natures, content to start the world afresh with 
 each generation, this may seem a mere sentimental grief. 
 ])ut the really progressive minds, that appear to run furthest 
 from the past, are most conscious of their debt to it, most 
 tinctured by its inner life, and most love its venerable 
 
 * Anniversary of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 
 May 19, 1869. Unity Church, Islington.
 
 568 THE THREE STAGES OF 
 
 names ; and for them to be treated as outcasts from the 
 family of the faithful, and find themselves exiles from the 
 communion to which they cling, is a lot more pathetic than 
 stripes and bonds. A divine necessity, however, is laid on 
 them to bear it. They cannot linger in semblances : they 
 cannot tamper with words : they cannot look away from the 
 light, and play it off in tricks of artificial refraction : they 
 cannot breathe the air of half-truth and half-pretence which 
 maintains the sluggish pulses of the world, but must pant 
 aloft into the untainted elements of life : and as this thirst 
 for the pure reality, this sensitiveness to the poison of false- 
 hood, this inability to worship except in absolute simplicity 
 of spirit, must needs take them apart from the level of 
 human sympathy, and often leave the tenderest affections the 
 most alone, what remains but that they fling themselves from 
 the last brink of earthly reliance, and in a passion of infinite 
 trust cast themselves upon the only True, and cry, "Thou, 
 Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer ; thy Name is everlasting." 
 No Reformers have been more unconditionally thrown 
 upon this sublime trust than those whose work we celebrate 
 and prolong this day. As if to justify their own protest 
 against the Trinitarian theology, and prove for them how 
 it darkened human affections, they have been treated as 
 aliens from the sacred commonwealth; and because they 
 would not, at Athanasius's bidding, worship they knew not 
 what, but, abiding by the religion of Christ, would pray 
 only as he prayed, and own no more than his two great 
 commandments, and know no blessing but his beatitudes, 
 they have been thrust outside the walls of the "City of 
 God," and told that the Fathers of the faithful are ignorant 
 of them, and the Christian Israel acknowledges them not. 
 Be it so : these chartered believers may shut up themselves, 
 but cannot enclose our God : without, as well as within, He 
 lives ; and, as the gates close behind us, and we go into 
 the open and solitary place, where the cathedral bells are 
 lost and the litanies are heard no more, newer voices of his 
 Spirit may perhaps float to us on the silence, and we may
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 569 
 
 grow into larger apprehension by simply being alone with 
 him. That there really has been a natural expansion and 
 enrichment of Unitarian theology, favoured by the very 
 banishment into which it has been driven, will appear from 
 a mere glance at the successive stages of its modern history. 
 
 Religion, even in its most intellectual forms, can 'never 
 entirely lose its symbolical character ; and the real interest 
 of its doctrines will usually be found far behind the 
 apparent. Had the question respecting the person of 
 Christ concerned merely the composition of an historical 
 individual, human or superhuman, it could never have 
 stirred so intense a passion, and tracked its way through 
 Christendom with such a line of storm. The secret of the 
 strife lies deeper. He stands in it not for himself, but for 
 mankind ; and the doubt, whether within that meek and 
 suffering form the Divine essence is hid, truly means, to 
 those who shrink from it, whether, for us too, any divine 
 life is possible, and the Father of spirits will take up his 
 abode with us. It is not the Jesus of the biographers, but 
 the ideal of our spiritual humanity, the type and head of 
 our race in its heavenly relations, whose seamless robe has 
 been torn by the rude hands of controversy ; and were it 
 not that his problem and ours were bound up together, that 
 his divineness was the assumed measure of our communion 
 with God, and that what was asked about him was answered 
 about us, the inquiry must have tired itself out in traversing 
 the ages. But the mind returns with unexhausted wonder 
 to the questions, "What are we ? " "Where do we stand 
 in the hierarchy of being?" "Do we belong only to 
 Nature beneath us, or can we live in love with God above 
 us ? " and, under the disguise of a Chnstology, these hit/nan 
 issues have ever been upon their trial, and, to those whose 
 oars are open, have mingled with the voices of angry 
 disputants an undertone, not of softening piety alone, but 
 of unsuspected sympathy. 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity is an economy for linking 
 together the Human nature and the Divine ; for snatching
 
 570 THE THREE STAGES OF 
 
 man, as an exception, from the general physiology of the 
 world, where he would only, like the cattle, be a creature of 
 the universal Maker ; for recognizing his Sonship and 
 Divine similitude, as an eternal reality, whether known to 
 himself or unknown, whether reserved in heaven or become 
 historical on earth ; and for bringing out his implicit con- 
 sciousness of this, in the whispered pleadings of a Spirit 
 supreme above his own. God in the Universe, God in 
 History, God in the personal Soul, these three are 
 separately recognized, yet blended into one, in the formula 
 against which we protest ; and in dissolving that formula, 
 we may be thought to hazard the balance of these relations, 
 and to insulate ourselves on some hard and narrow unity. 
 Our simpler conception, it is affirmed, is visibly inadequate 
 both to the fulness of the Divine perfection and the depth 
 of human experience, and repels the richer and riper souls 
 of Christendom by the Mahomedan baldness of its piety, 
 and the Stoical evenness of its human ideal. Above all, 
 we are assured, do we fail to provide the needful mediation 
 between heaven and earth. The Christ of the creeds, being 
 both God and man, can bring the two natures into harmony. 
 The Christ of the Arians, being neither God nor man, is cut 
 off from both, and cannot blend them in accord. The 
 Christ of the Unitarians, being wholly man, carries in him- 
 self the alienated nature, and lies under the disqualification 
 he is needed to remove. He may be an example upon the 
 human level, but cannot, it is said, lift us to the Divine. 
 Without denying either all that is claimed for the Trinitarian 
 scheme or all that is charged on our own, we shall find 
 something to countervail the merits of the former, and to 
 repair the defects of the latter, in the growth of our theology 
 during the last century. 
 
 The strength of the Unitarian faith lies in the very first 
 position which it seized, and which I hold to be the impreg- 
 nable centre of all true religious and moral theory, that, 
 for all spiritual natures, Unify and Personality are One. 
 That which distinguishes you from another, and holds you
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 571 
 
 to your identity from day to day, is the permanent Self- 
 consciousness which the stream of varying thoughts touches 
 as it flows, and the continuous Will which issues or permits 
 the most opposite activities. These are the highest and 
 characteristic attributes of our being ; and by its highest 
 attributes must every nature be measured, and in them 
 must its essence be found. Suppose them to change: let 
 a fever obliterate your memory of the past, or establish 
 within you a double and alternate consciousness, unrelated 
 as your dreaming to your day ; and we could no more call 
 to account this fluctuating Self than we could punish John 
 for Peter's lie. The moral identity once broken, all other 
 continuity goes for nothing ; all other sameness is illusory. 
 What boots it that you are still as tall, as strong, as swift as 
 you were before ; that your friends recognize your photo- 
 graph and your voice ; that your pulse has not altered its 
 speed, nor your brain its size ? your being has fallen into 
 fragments which these threads are ineffectual to blend. 
 This rule of thought is our only guide when we pass to 
 things Divine ; and it compels us to say that, if God be 
 not One Person, he is not One at all : whatever else 
 remains, when you have multiplied the Personal centres of 
 thought and will, is lower than these, and any Unity it may 
 have is of no interest to us ; for whom nothing Impersonal 
 can ever be Divine. The Godhead, if by that you mean 
 the Supreme Object of our worship and our trust, subsists 
 not in any spiritual substance within whose compass 
 separate Personalities may have their presence and unfold 
 their celestial drama ; but in the living seats of Infinite 
 Mind and perfect holiness : a plurality of these is a plu- 
 rality of Gods ; and if you try to integrate them again by a 
 common relation to some impersonal essence, you do but 
 deify the lower after taking away the unity from the higher. 
 I know it will be said that the old creeds meant some- 
 thing less by the word " Person " than it suggests to us, 
 and intended only to mark three distinct parts which the 
 Divine nature plays relatively to the universe and to us.
 
 572 THE THREE STAGES OF 
 
 However true the explanation, it leaves the thing explained 
 worse than it was before ; for if the Personal attributes, as 
 we understand them, are absent from the members of the 
 triad, where are they to be found ? Who thinks the divine 
 thoughts ? who wills the divine acts ? whither am I to fly 
 for the Living Mind that answers to my own, Spirit to 
 spirit? If these characteristics are disclaimed for the 
 personal elements of the scheme, it is surely vain to seek 
 them in the w/z-personal ; and they must simply be with- 
 out determinate place in it anywhere, and float unfixed in 
 the spaces of the Divine Infinitude. And this is the simple 
 truth : the language of the creeds is born of an ancient 
 Pantheistic philosophy, which blurred all the lines between 
 Thinker and Thought, between God and the World, 
 between Spontaneity and Will, and never gained the com- 
 plete conception of Personality, human or divine. This 
 great and prolific idea, approached but not secured by 
 Judaism, is the healthy product of modern times, the chief 
 gain of our speculative intellect, and inspirer of our 
 practical life ; and a religion which does not provide for 
 it, which, instead of borrowing anything from its light and 
 power, only blinks at them and eludes them, and escapes 
 under cover of the Greek ambrosial cloud, half-radiance, 
 half-mist, confesses itself unequal to the wants of living 
 humanity. The first essential then of a restored purity of 
 worship was precisely the work to which our predecessors 
 in the last century addressed themselves : to clear the 
 Personality of God, till it is simple as the unity of the soul : 
 to sweep away the haze of ancient Pantheism, with the 
 ecclesiastical mythology it holds : to take the eternal Son 
 of God from heaven, and isolate the Father, as the One 
 Infinite Mind, the Sole Self-subsisting Life, the all-per- 
 vading Will, at whose disposal creation lies. 
 
 The first effect of this absolute loneliness of God 
 inevitably was to exhibit the universe as a stupendous 
 centralized monarchy, administered on one plan, and 
 directed by one power. The provinces of the Cosmos can
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 573 
 
 thus have, as it were, no municipal life ; the local agents 
 no real independence : the whole hierarchy of place and 
 rank is but the receptacle and organ of a force given and 
 transmitted : there can be no pause for remonstrance, no 
 idea of resistance : the single impulse from the capital 
 moves on its inexorable lines, and executes its errand at 
 every station as it flies. Priestley's Necessarian type of 
 doctrine was the natural result of his reduction of all 
 causes to One, and his intense absorption in that One. 
 When you plant yourself in thought at the Divine station, 
 and look out thence through the universal fields, and take 
 the clue now of this law, now of that, to conduct you 
 through the maze of phenomena, the whole system, 
 reduced to miniature at that height, must appear as one, 
 with man as a minor organism swept along in its current 
 of force ; its scientific program will construct itself within 
 your imagination, filling up its vacancies as the prospect 
 clears ; till the whole appears to you as a mighty machine 
 of divine invention, the vehicle of predetermined methods, 
 and the depository of predetermined ends. So long 
 as the Unity of the Divine agency was in question, and 
 was threatened with the partnership of coequal powers, 
 this Religion of Causation, which indignantly expelled all 
 " fellow-workers " and all withstanders of the Most High, 
 met the wants of the time, and fostered a sublime and 
 comprehensive piety. You pass through an experience at 
 once subduing and exalting, when you part from all realities 
 but the Supreme, and find yourself with Him alone ; when 
 the throng of secondary causes ceases to distract and to 
 conflict, and, as it sinks into semblance, drops into the 
 lines of an eternal order ; when you try to empty the run- 
 ning waters and the sweeping winds and the teeming earth 
 of any forces of their own, and bid them speak and look 
 for Him alone ; when the passions of men rise up against 
 you, and you stand still and answer not, because they sub- 
 side before your eye into a pulsation of His will ; when 
 the very thoughts you seem to think resolve themselves
 
 574 THE THREE STAGES OF 
 
 before you into phenomena of His life passing a conscious 
 point of space ; when, in short, life becomes to you a sacred 
 dream, and history a soliloquy of God, and the possibility 
 is gone of anything less than the Divine. As if to test at 
 once the sustaining efficacy of this faith, its great apostle in 
 the last century was driven, the victim of ruinous outrage, 
 from the country he had instructed and adorned ; and 
 never did it receive more impressive comment than in the 
 lofty patience, and serene trust, the unexhausted bene- 
 volence, of the exile of Pennsylvania. 
 
 In vindicating the Sovereignty of the universal Father, 
 this scheme subordinates the whole universe alike, and 
 allows nothing to approach nearer to him than the web to 
 him that weaves it : the threads may be of this colour or of 
 that, in the warp or in the woof ; but all are interwoven in 
 the same texture, and hold a homogeneous relation to the 
 Maker. Man, therefore, is not less exclusively a part of 
 nature, than the birds and the plants ; is worked up in the 
 same way into the organism of the world ; and though he 
 may have a larger consciousness, containing within itself 
 more successive links in the chain of production, is equally 
 the theatre of their predetermined order, and powerless to 
 give them an alternative direction. He too, like all else, is 
 as the clay to the potter, to be moulded by another ; and 
 be the pressure on the inside or on the out, he is shaped 
 and does not shape himself. Since he is sensitive, and can 
 be turned hither and thither by the touch of pleasure and 
 of pain, he is manageable and may be broken in ; but, 
 since he cannot help going whither the given impulses take 
 him, he is not responsible. The treatment of him may be 
 disciplinary, but cannot be moral ; you may pity him, but 
 cannot blame him ; and he may feel regret, but never com- 
 punction. If this is his aspect in the human view, still more 
 must it be in the Divine : how can God, who meant him to 
 be exactly what he is, call him to account, or look on him 
 with less complacency than if he had been different ? And 
 so, the moral sentiments which are superseded on earth
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 575 
 
 disappear from heaven : and He, whose name was once 
 " Righteous," and " Holy," merges all his perfections in 
 " benevolence." Nor does there seem room, upon this 
 scheme, for any personal relations between us and God, 
 whether of similitude or of communion. For that which 
 constitutes him a Personal Being is precisely that Free 
 originating power of which we have none, and which, 
 centred all in his nature, leaves him the only Person in the 
 universe, and us but a complicated sort of things. In the 
 only attribute which gives him character, we can never be 
 like him : and we have no independent standing-place 
 from which we may speak with him, face to face : no 
 private closet where we can enter and shut the door ; if we 
 kneel down, it is on his prompting ground : if we sigh, it is 
 his breathing : if we pray, the words move the wrong way, 
 and flow from him, not to him : He possesses us behind 
 and before : and turn, and look, and implore and weep as 
 we may, it is still his own drama under masquerade. From 
 this theory, it is plain, the " eternal decrees " have not yet 
 taken their departure ; by the touch of Benevolence, they 
 have lost indeed their cruelty, but not their absoluteness ; 
 and something else is needed, ere we meet the presence of 
 him to whom arose the night-cry of Gethsemane. 
 
 The reaction naturally came from the other end of the 
 relation between us and God. As, in the -Religion of 
 Causation, Man seemed to be crushed into a mere creature, 
 so was it on his behalf that remonstrance broke forth, and, 
 at the bidding of Charming, the Religion of Conscience 
 sprang to its feet. However fascinating the precision and 
 simplicity of the Necessarian theory in its advance through 
 the fields of physical and biological law, it meets with 
 vehement resistance in its attempt to annex human nature, 
 and put it under the same code with the tides and trees 
 and reptiles. Our personality, though frightened and 
 dwindled for a moment and hardly believing its own voice, 
 is sure to recover from the most ingenious philosophy, and 
 to re assert its power over the alternatives before it, and own
 
 576 THE THREE STAGES OF 
 
 its obligation to the authority within it ; and the second 
 period of our theology is marked by this recovered sense of 
 Moral Freedom. When the tones of the New-England 
 prophet reached us here, why did they so stir our hearts ? 
 They brought a new language ; they burst into a forgotten 
 chamber of the soul ; they recalled natural faiths which had 
 been explained away, and boldly appealed to feelings which 
 had been struck down ; they touched the springs of a 
 sleeping enthusiasm, and carried us forward from the outer 
 temple of devout science to the inner shrine of self-denying 
 Duty. The very inspiration of the new Gospel, in what 
 thought does it lie ? The greatness of human capacity, not 
 so much for intellectual training, as for voluntary righteous- 
 ness, for victory over temptation, for resemblance to God ; 
 a greatness attested, on the terrible side, by the power to 
 incur guilt, to choose ruin, to resist the Supreme Will. 
 The interval between our lowest possible sin and our 
 highest possible holiness is infinite, and can be expressed 
 by no physical contrast of hell and heaven ; and that 
 interval measures the range of our power and the solemnity 
 of our trust. Of this vast scale of possibility we have notice 
 given to us in the aspirations and the remorse of conscience; 
 whence we well know that our sins are more than mistakes 
 and our self-conquests more than prudence ; that both are 
 our own, and we are shaped into neither ; that by the one 
 we sink into mere nature, by the other we rise towards 
 God. Thus regarded, moral distinctions, no longer 
 resolved into mere sentient ones, are reinstated in their 
 independent reality, and the apprehension of them becomes 
 the supreme dignity of all minds. There is one and the 
 same righteousness for the whole hierarchy of spiritual 
 natures, and the free love of it and life in it is the bond of 
 their glorious commonwealth. Here it is that Man is truly 
 " the image of God," and not his moulded creature merely. 
 In proportion as he attains goodness, purity, disinterested 
 love, and strength to negative the wrong, does he really 
 reflect the Divine lineaments in little, and enter upon an
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 577 
 
 actual sympathy with the Holiest of all ; and the essential 
 perfection of the Parent-Mind repeats itself in the child, 
 and kindles his features with a lustre of the heavens. 
 Under the light of this faith, the history of mankind is no 
 longer a mere branch of the physical development of the 
 world, the last chapter in the natural history of species ; 
 but broadly distinguishes itself from these, and appears on 
 a different stage as a drama of real probation ; whose great 
 criminals, tyrants and impostors, we are not bound to pity 
 like the sufferers of loathsome disease in an infirmary, but 
 may abhor and denounce as enemies rather than victims of 
 God ; and whose heroes and saints we may regard as 
 something more than animated figures handsomely con- 
 stituted and finely tempered for their work, and visit with 
 our natural praise and reverence, as faithful representatives 
 in time of the Eternal justice and purity. If you gaze down 
 upon the human race from the Causal throne of the 
 universe, they are flung into insignificance and float as 
 gleaming dust upon the air-current. But if from the 
 interior of the human spirit you look up to the heaven of 
 God, you find a possible divineness in man, and an affinity 
 with the Original perfection, which dissipates the illusion of 
 his littleness. Will then this sense of moral freedom, of 
 the reality and greatness of our trust, turn us into Stoics, 
 and set us up in self-gratulation and pride ? We are told 
 that so it must be, if we, as free persons, stand face to face 
 with the Personal Unity of the Father who constitutes us 
 his children ; and that we can have no humility, unless 
 there be an eternal Son of God in heaven, to graft that 
 grace upon us as a portion of his own !* If we ask for a 
 reason for this strange dictum, we are only told that it is 
 impossible for a finite personality to be humble out of its 
 own resources and reflections : the feeling must be divinely 
 given. W T ho then is it that is said to make us partners in 
 this lowly grace? The Eternal and spotless Son of God ! 
 
 * Tracts for Priests and People, No. XIV., The Incarnation, by 
 Richard II. Hutton, M.A., pp. 27-30. 
 
 VOL. IV. P P
 
 578 THE THREE STAGES OF 
 
 Is then humility possible in an Infinite personality, in One 
 who stands only in presence of equal or of lower beings, 
 and in whom failure has never been and progress never 
 can be ; yet not possible to us in our finite strife and im- 
 perfection, who are for ever haunted by the ideal which we 
 do not reach, who see an indefinite hierarchy of excellence 
 above us, and who, in all our short-comings, have day by 
 day to spread our moral record before the Holiest of all ? 
 Surely, if there be a position and a mind in this universe, 
 shut up within the tenderest shadows of humility, it is ours; 
 and if it be true, as our critic affirms, that we, Unitarians, 
 feel not these shadows, but lift a self-righteous head, may 
 God give us better knowledge where we stand ! 
 
 If now we put together the two types of doctrine which I 
 have described, and make them into one, so far as they are 
 compatible, shall we find rest in a complete and adequate 
 theology ? Let us say, from the first, that God is Sole Cause 
 in the natural world ; and from the second, that he is Sole 
 Cause except ourselves in the moral world, where we are 
 permitted to be "fellow-workers" with him : is this a finished 
 account of his relation to us ? No. All this might be true : 
 he might pervade all nature with his Presence and his 
 Providence : he might invest our spirit with a share of his 
 Freewill : and might then withdraw from our voluntary life, 
 and leave us to work out our moral problem alone, and 
 only in the end return to take account of our fidelity. In 
 this case, each soul would be as a spiritual island planted 
 out in the natural deep of things, beaten by the tides of Law 
 that sweep around, but with autocratic power to turn their 
 destructive force aside, and make them serve its affluence 
 and beauty. We should thus sustain real responsible 
 relations to the heavenly Father, relations which he has 
 planted us out to assume, and which he will recall us to sum 
 up : but, meanwhile, we should remain personally apart, 
 and live as sons in a foreign land, executing the sacred trust 
 they have brought from home. Is then our spiritual nature 
 thus rounded off into self-sufficient isolation? and is it
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 579* 
 
 across a chasm without a bridge that we look to him, and 
 feel after him in vain to find him ? When we too are on 
 the eve of our cross-bearing, and take up the words, " I am 
 not alone, for the Father is with me," is it only of a physical 
 presence that we speak, and must we faint and struggle on 
 through the silence of our God ? Many a path of life such 
 moral desolation would turn indeed into a dolorous way ; 
 nor could there well be a more pathetic lot than to believe 
 in a Father of our spirits and to think him out of reach. 
 But what is to fasten upon us so miserable a dream ? Is it 
 the night-mare of Law that sits upon our breast, and turns 
 our cry for him into a helpless shriek ? We have but to 
 open our eyes, and the ghost is gone, and we draw breath 
 in the sweet morning light. Law reigns inflexibly through, 
 the natural life, and, if that were all, would reign inflexibly 
 everywhere. But there is in us that which is above the 
 natural life, and apprehends what lies beyond it ; and just 
 as God is not imprisoned in the universe, but transcends it, 
 and in that outlying realm is hindered by no pledge from 
 acting freely out of fresh affections, so have we a range of 
 free ideal life, whence we can look down upon the instincts 
 of nature and up to the infinite Holiness, and which we 
 know is in subjection to nothing inflexible. This is precisely 
 what we mean by Spirit, this liberty to move alternatively 
 out of the thought and love of a reasonable mind ; God is 
 a Spirit, in so far as he is not locked up in the invari- 
 able order of the world : and there is a spirit in Man, in 
 so far as he is not disposed of by his organism and his 
 dwelling-place, but rises in thought and directs himself in 
 affection to what is above them. Here then it is that there 
 is room for true communion, that Spirit may meet Spirit, 
 and that the sacred silence may itself speak the exchange 
 of love. Our moral ideals, the irrepressible sigh after 
 higher perfection, the sense of Divine authority in every 
 vision of the better, the shame at every yielding to the worse, 
 these, we are well aware, are not of our making, or dona- 
 tions of other men; they are above its; they are green to us : 
 
 p p 2
 
 58o THE THREE STAGES OP 
 
 they are what draw us to God, and commence our likeness 
 to him. In this field of spiritual affection that lies around 
 our will, the common essence of man and God, the divine 
 element that spreads its margin into us, has its home, its 
 life, its reciprocal recognition ; its bursts of human prayer, 
 its answer of Divine compassion ; its deep shadows of con- 
 trition, and returning gleams of restoration. The life with 
 God then, of which saintly men in every age have testified, 
 is no illusion of enthusiasm, but an ascent, through simple 
 surrender, to the higher region of the soul, the very watch- 
 tower whence there is the clearest and the largest view. 
 The bridge is thus complete between the Divine and the 
 human personality ; and we crown the religion of Causa- 
 tion, and the religion of Conscience, by the religion of the 
 Spirit. If we, in our poverty of thought, have had to take 
 them up successively, all of them together have the authority 
 of him " in whom all fulness dwells," and can never be 
 wanting in us except as we fail of " the full stature of Christ." 
 We know with what meaning the lily of the field looked up 
 into his eye ; and if the robe of beauty on the earth was to 
 him no dead product of the seasonal machine, but woven 
 by the living hand of God, he sanctioned the piety which 
 resolved the creative agencies back into the Creator's. We 
 know with what strong crying and tears he could expostulate 
 Avith heaven, and wrestle, as it were, will with will, in the 
 hour of temptation and of agony, yet, as a Son, learn 
 obedience through that which he suffered, and end with 
 the calm words, " Not my will, but Thine, be done ; " and, 
 alike in the strife and in the surrender, we have his witness 
 to the reality of that Moral conflict in which Sin is always 
 possible, and filial self-sacrifice is the only victory. We know 
 how he fed the secret springs of his gentle and holy life, 
 and sought upon the hills and in the night for the loneliest 
 confidences with the Hearer of Prayer, and with mingling 
 confines of personality, felt himself in the Father and the 
 Father in him and his : and we must own in him the 
 supreme witness to the spiritual union of man with God ;
 
 UNITARIAN THEOLOGY. 581 
 
 a union, which, were it constant as in him, might be 
 deemed an Incarnation ; but, where transient and inter- 
 mittent, as with our lower fidelity, appears rather as a 
 dispensation of the Spirit. 
 
 Thus then the Unitarian protest, which perhaps began 
 with too great and monarchial a separation of our world 
 from heaven, comes round at last to a re-union of the 
 human and Divine. And in the cycle which it has run 
 there is a curious recovery, as it were, of the functions of 
 Trinity without- its paradoxes, only with the drama trans- 
 ferred from the individuality of Christ to the life of humanity. 
 We have traversed, and at length united, the relations of 
 creature to the Creator, of Son to father, of weak and 
 tempted to the all-quickening Spirit ; and may we not say 
 that thus, without confusing the nature of God, we have 
 enriched and ennobled our religious comprehension of Man, 
 and provided for a more balanced justice to the claims of 
 Nature, of Conscience, and of the Soul, and a blending 
 consecration for them all ! If an expanding faith brings us, 
 as we think, an ampler peace, let it stir us also to a deeper 
 fidelity ; and if those who know us not still drive us from 
 the sacred enclosure and treat us as wanderers from the 
 Christendom we love, all the more let us fling ourselves into 
 the embrace of the Only True, and still say, " Doubtless 
 Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, 
 and Israel acknowledge us not : Thou, O Lord, art our 
 Father, our Redeemer : thy name is from everlasting."
 
 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 AND 
 
 INTUITION IN MAN.
 
 MIND IN NATURE AND INTUITION IN MAN. 
 
 A LECTURE. 
 
 " Behold, there went forth a Sower to sow." MARK iv. 3. 
 
 THAT the universe which we see around us was not 
 always there, is so little disputed, that every philosophy and 
 every faith undertakes to tell how it came to be. They all 
 assume, as the theatre of their problem, the field of space 
 where all objects lie, and the track of time where events 
 have reached the Now. But into these they carry, to aid 
 them in representing the origin of things, such interpreting 
 conceptions as may be most familiar to the knowledge or 
 fancy of their age : first, thejfiat of Almighty Will, which bade 
 the void be filled, so that the light kindled, and the water 
 swayed, and the earth stood fast beneath the vault of sky ; 
 next, when the sway of poetry and force had yielded to the 
 inventive arts, the idea of a contriving and adapting power, 
 building and balancing the worlds to go smoothly and keep 
 time together, and stocking them with self-moving and 
 sensitive machines ; and now, since physiology has got to 
 the front, the analogy of the seed or germ, in itself the least 
 of things, yet so prolific that, with history long enough, it 
 will be as spawn upon the waters, and fill every waste with 
 the creatures as they are. The prevalence of this newest 
 metaphor betrays itself in the current language of science : 
 we now "unfold" what we used to "take to pieces ;" we 
 "develop" the theory which we used to "construct;" we 
 treat the system of the world as an "organism" rather
 
 586 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 than a " mechanism ; " we search each of its members to 
 see, not what it is for, but what it v$>from; and the doctrine 
 of Evolution only applies the image of indefinite growth of 
 the greater out of the less, till from some datum invisible to 
 the miscroscope arises a teeming universe. 
 
 In dealing with these three conceptions, of Creation, 
 Construction, Evolution, there is one thing on which 
 Religion insists, viz., that Mind is first, and rules for ever ; 
 and, the process whatever it be, is its process, moving to- 
 wards congenial ends. Let this be granted, and it 
 matters not by what path of method the Divine Thought 
 advances, or how long it is upon the road. Whether it 
 flashes into realization, like lightning out of Night ; or 
 fabricates, like a Demiurge, through a producing season, 
 and then beholds the perfect work ; or is for ever thinking 
 into life the thoughts of beauty and the love of good; 
 whether it calls its materials out of nothing, or finds them 
 ready, and disposes of them from without ; or throws them 
 around as its own manifestation, and from within shapes its 
 own purpose into blossom, makes no difference that can 
 be fatal to human piety. Time counts for nothing with the 
 Eternal ; and though it should appear that the system of 
 the world and the ranks of being arose, not by a start of 
 crystallization, but, like the grass of the forest, by silent 
 and seasonal gradations, as true a worship may be paid to 
 the indwelling God who makes matter itself transparent 
 with spiritual meanings, and breathes before us in the 
 pulses of nature, and appeals to us in the sorrows of men, 
 as to the pre-existing Deity who, from an infinite loneli- 
 ness, suddenly became the Maker of all. Nay, if the poet 
 always looks upon the world through a suppliant eye, 
 craving to meet his own ideal and commune with it alive ; 
 if prayer is ever a " feeling after him to find him," the 
 fervour and the joy of both must be best sustained, if they 
 are conscious not only of the stillness of his presence, but 
 of the movement of his thought, and never quit the date 
 of his creative moments. In the idea, therefore, of a
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 587 
 
 gradual unfolding of the creative plan, and the maturing 
 of it by rules of growth, there is nothing necessarily preju- 
 dicial to piety ; and so long as the Divine Mind is left in 
 undisturbed supremacy, as the living All in all, the belief 
 may even foster a larger, calmer, tenderer devotion, than 
 the conceptions which it supersedes. But it is liable to a 
 special illusion, which the others by their coarsely separat- 
 ing lines manage to escape. Taking all the causation of 
 the world into the interior, instead of setting it to operate 
 from without, .it seems to dispense with God, and to lodge 
 the power of indefinite development in the first seeds of 
 things; and the apprehension seizes us, that as the oak 
 will raise itself when the acorn and the elements are given, 
 so from its germs might the universe emerge, though 
 nothing Div'ne were there. The seeds no doubt were on 
 the field; but who can say whether ever "a Sower went 
 forth to sow ? " So long as you plant the Supreme Cause 
 at a distance from his own effects, and assign to him a space 
 or a time where nothing else can be, the conception of 
 that separate and solitary existence, however barren, is 
 secure. But in proportion as you think of him as never in 
 an empty field, waiting for a future beginning of activity 
 as you let him mingle with the elements and blend with the 
 natural life of things, there is a seeming danger lest his 
 light should disappear behind the opaque material veil, and 
 his Spirit be quenched amid the shadows of inexorable 
 Law. This danger haunts our time. The doctrine of 
 Evolution, setting itself to show how the greatest things 
 may be brought out of the least, fills us with fear whether 
 perhaps Mind may not be last instead of first, the hatched 
 and full-fledged form of the protoplasmic egg ; whether at 
 the outset any thing was there but the raw rudiments of 
 matter and force ; whether the hierarchy of organized 
 beings is not due to progressive differentiation of structure, 
 and resolvable into splitting and agglutination of cells ; 
 whether the Intellect of man is more than blind instinct 
 grown self-conscious, and shaping its beliefs by defining its
 
 588 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 own shadows ; whether the Moral sense is not simply a 
 trained acceptance of rules worked out by human interests, 
 an inherited record of the utilities ; so that Design in 
 Nature, Security in the Intuitions of Reason, Divine 
 Obligation in the law of Conscience, may all be an 
 illusory semblance, a glory from the later and ideal days 
 thrown back upon the beginning, as a golden sunset flings 
 its light across the sky, and, as it sinks, dresses up the East 
 again with borrowed splendour. 
 
 This doubt, which besets the whole intellectual religion 
 of our time, assumes that we must measure every nature in 
 its beginnings; admit nothing to belong to its essence 
 except what is found in it then ; and deny its reports of 
 itself, so far as they depart from that original standard. It 
 takes two forms, according as the doctrine of Evolution is 
 applied to Man himself, or to the outward universe. In 
 the former case, it infuses distrust into our self-knowledge, 
 weakens our subjective religion or native faith in the 
 intuitions of thought and conscience, and tempts us to 
 imagine that the higher they are, the further are they from 
 any assured solidity of base. In the latter case, it weakens 
 our objective religion, suggests that there is no originating 
 Mind, and that the divine look of the world is but the 
 latest phase of its finished surface, instead of the incan- 
 descence of its inmost heart. Let us first glance at the 
 theory of HUMAN evolution, and the moral illusions it is apt 
 to foster. 
 
 I. Under the name of the " Experience Philosophy," 
 this theory has long been applied to the mind of the indi- 
 vidual ; and has produced not a few admirable analyses of 
 the formation of language and the tissue of thought ; nor is 
 there any legitimate objection to it, except so far as its 
 simplifications are overstrained and cannot be made good. 
 It undertakes, with a minimum of initial capacity, to 
 account for the maximum of human genius and character : 
 give it only the sensible pleasures and pains, the spon- 
 taneous muscular activity, and the law by which associated
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 589 
 
 mental phenomena cling together; and out of these 
 elements it will weave before your eyes the whole texture of 
 the perfect inner life, be it the patterned story of imagina- 
 tion, the delicate web of the affections, or the seamless robe 
 of moral purity. The outfit is that of the animal ; the 
 product but " a little lower than the angel." All the 
 higher endowments, our apprehension of truth, our con- 
 sciousness of duty, our self-sacrificing pity, our religious 
 reverence, are in this view merely transformed sensations; 
 the disinterested impulses are refinements spun out of the 
 coarse fibre of self-love ; the subtlest intellectual ideas are 
 but elaborated perceptions of sight or touch ; and the sense 
 of Right, only interest or fear under a disguise. If this be 
 so, how will the discovery affect our natural trust in the 
 intimations of our supreme faculties? Does it not dis- 
 charge as dreams their most assured revelations ? By 
 intuition of Reason we believe in the Law of Causality, in 
 the infinitude of Space, in the relations of Number, in the 
 reality of an outside world, in all the fundamental concep- 
 tions of Science ; but here are they, one and all, recalled to 
 the standard of Sense, which they seem to transcend, and 
 emptied of any meaning beyond. By vision of Imagination 
 we see an ideal beauty enfolding many a person and many 
 a scene, and appealing to us as a pathetic light gleaming 
 from within ; but here we find it all resolved into curvature 
 of lines and adjustments of colour. By inspiration of 
 Conscience we learn that our sin is the defiance of a Divine 
 authority, and, though hid from every human eye, drives us 
 into a wilderness of Exile, for " the wicked fleeth, though 
 no man pursueth ; " but here we are told that the ultimate 
 elements of good and evil are our own pleasures and pains, 
 from which the moral sanction selects as its specialty the 
 approbation and disapprobation of our fellow-men. Thus 
 all the independent values which our higher faculties had 
 claimed for their natural affections and beliefs are dissipated 
 as fallacious ; they are all based upon a sentient measure of 
 worth which lies at the bottom : they are like paper money,
 
 590 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 refined contrivances representative of the ultimate gold 
 of pleasure, but, where not interchangeable with this, 
 intrinsically worthless. And so the feeling almost inevi- 
 tably spreads, that we are dupes of our own characteristic 
 capacities ; that the loftier air into which they lift us is a 
 tinted and distorting medium, and shows us glories that are 
 not there ; that the idea of an eternal Fount of beauty, 
 truth and goodness, behind the pleasingness and concinnity 
 of phenomena, is an illusion ; and that the tendency, 
 irresistible as it is, to cling to this idea as something higher 
 than its denial, is but a part of the romance. Is this 
 scepticism imaginary ? Let any one, in studying the 
 modern writers of this school, compare the solid, manly, 
 sensible way in which they deal with every thing on the 
 physiological and sensational level, with their manner 
 towards all the convictions and sentiments usually recog- 
 nized as the supreme lights of our nature ; the tone now of 
 forbearing indulgence, now of sickly appreciation, often of 
 hardly concealed contempt, that is heard beneath the 
 interminable conjectural analyses of Moral and Religious 
 affections, and he will feel the difference between the 
 honour that is paid to truth, and the constrained patience 
 towards what other men revere. 
 
 By a recent extension, the theory of Evolution has been 
 applied to the whole natural history of our race ; and the 
 resources of Habit, already serviceable in explaining the 
 aptitudes of individuals, have been turned to account on 
 the larger scale of successive generations, transmitting by 
 inheritance the acquisitions hitherto made good. In the 
 training of a nature, the world thus becomes a permanent 
 school, the interruption of death is virtually abolished, and 
 life is laid open to continuous progress. By this immense 
 gain of power, it is supposed, all the differences which 
 separate Man from other animals may be accounted for as 
 gradual attainments ; and many an intuition of the mind, 
 too immediate and self-evident to be a product of personal 
 experience, may yield to analysis as a more protracted
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 591 
 
 growth, and stand as the compend of ages of gathering 
 feeling and condensing thought. Among creatures that 
 herd together for common safety, each one learns to read 
 the looks of anger or of good-will in its neighbours, and dis- 
 covers what it is that brings upon him the one or the other; 
 and insensibly he forms to himself a rule for avoiding the 
 displeasure and conciliating the favour in which he has so 
 large an interest. This rudimentary experience imprints 
 and records itself in the nervous organization, and descends 
 to ulterior generations as an original and instinctive recoil 
 from what offends and impulse towards what gratifies the 
 feeling of the tribe : so that the lesson need not be gone 
 over again ; but the offspring, taking up his education 
 where the parent left off, accumulates his feeling, quickens 
 his mental execution, and hands down fresh contributions 
 to what at last emerges as a Moral Sense. In this way, it 
 is contended, the Conscience is a hoarded fund of tra- 
 ditionary pressures of utility, gradually effacing the 
 primitive vestiges of fear, and dispensing itself with an 
 affluence of disinterested sympathy. And the religious 
 consciousness that visits the soul in its remorse, of an 
 invisible Witness and Judge who condemns the sin, comes, 
 we are told, from the deification of public opinion, or the 
 fancy that some dead hero's ghost still watches over the 
 conduct of his clan, 
 
 This vast enlargement of the doctrine of Evolution, 
 while increasing its power, and removing it from the reach 
 of accurate tests, alters neither its principle nor its practical 
 effect. It undertakes to exhibit the highest and the 
 greatest in our nature as ulterior phenomena of the lowest 
 and the least. And it usually treats as a superstition our 
 natural reverence for the rational, moral, and religious 
 intuitions as sources of independent insight and ultimate 
 authority ; and, in order to estimate them, translates them 
 back into short-hand expressions of sensible experience and 
 social utility. Nor can we wonder at this scepticism. If 
 the only reality at bottom of the sense of duty is fear and
 
 592 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 submission to opinion, whatever it carries in it that tran- 
 scends this ground, and persuades us of an Obligation in 
 which fear and opinion have no voice, is an ideal addition 
 got up within us by causes which produce in us all sorts of 
 psychological figments. If the only facts that lie in our 
 idea of Space are a set of feelings in the muscles and the 
 skin and the eye, then whatever beliefs it involves which 
 these cannot verify are naturally discredited, and treated 
 as curiosities of artificial manufacture. If our human 
 characteristics are throughout the developed instincts of the 
 brute, differing only in degree, then the moment they 
 present us with intuitions which are distinct in kind, they 
 begin to play us false ; and those who see through the cheat 
 naturally warn us against them. And so we are constantly 
 told that our highest attributes are only the lower that have 
 lost their memory, and mistake themselves for something 
 else. 
 
 It is not my present intention to call in question either 
 of these varieties of evolution. Inadequate as the evidence 
 of them both appears to be, I will suppose their case to be 
 made out : and still, I submit, it does not justify the scep- 
 tical estimate which it habitually fosters of the intellectual, 
 moral, and religious intuitions of the human mind. For, 
 
 (i) Though animal sensation, with its connected instinct, 
 should be the raw material of our whole mental history, it 
 is not on that account entitled to measure all that conies 
 after it, and stand as the boundary-line between fact and 
 dream, between terra firma and " airy nothing." That 
 which is first in Time has no necessary priority of rank in 
 the scale of truth and reality ; and the later-found may well 
 be the greater existence and the more assured. If it is a 
 development of Faculty, and not of incapacity, which the 
 theory provides, the process must advance us into new light, 
 and not withdraw us from clearer light behind : and we 
 have reason to confide in the freshest gleams and inmost 
 visions of to-day, and to discard whatever quenches and 
 confuses them in the vao;ue and turbid becrinniners of the
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 593 
 
 Past. With what plea will you exhort me, " If you would 
 rid yourself of intellectual mysteries, come with us, and see 
 the stuff your thought is made of: if you would stand free 
 of ideal illusions, count with us the medullary waves that 
 have run together into the flood- tide of what you call your 
 conscience : if you would shake off superstition, look at 
 the way in which the image of dead men will hang about 
 the fancy of a savage, or the personification of an abstract 
 quality imposes on the ignorance of simple times " ? Is 
 our wisdom to.be gathered by going back to the age before 
 our errors ? And instead of consulting the maturity of 
 thought, are we to peer into its cradle and seek oracles in 
 its infant cries? If the last appeal be to the animal 
 elements of experience, we can learn only by unlearning ; 
 and by shutting one after another of the hundred ideal eyes 
 of the finished intellect, we shall have a chance of seeing 
 and feeling things as they are. If nothing is to be deemed 
 true but what the pre-human apes saw, then all the sciences 
 must be illusory ; with the suicidal result that, with them, 
 this doctrine of Evolution must vanish too. Or if, stopping 
 short of this extreme distrust of the acquired intuitions, 
 you make a reservation in favour of the new visions of the 
 intellect, what right can you show for discharging those of 
 the conscience ? The tacit assumption therefore that you 
 upset a super-sensual belief, by tracing the history of its 
 emergence among sensible conditions, is a groundless 
 prejudice. 
 
 (2) Further, the question to be determined may be pre- 
 sented as a problem in physiology, to be resolved by 
 corresponding rules : What is the function of certain parts 
 of our human constitution, viz., the Reason and the Moral 
 Faculty ? Now it is a recognized principle that, in estimat- 
 ing function, you must study the organ, not in its rudimen- 
 tary condition, before it has disengaged itself from adjacent 
 admixtures and flung off the foreign elements, but in its 
 perfect or differentiated state, so as to do its own work and 
 nothing else. In order to give the idea of a timepiece to 
 
 VOL. IV. Q Q
 
 594 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 one who had it not, you would not send him to one of the 
 curious medieval clocks which could play a tune, and fire 
 a gun, and announce the sunrise, and mark the tides, and 
 report twenty miscellaneous things besides ; but to the 
 modern chronometer, simple and complete, that, telling only 
 the moment, tells it perfectly. And in natural organizations, 
 to learn the capabilities and project of any structure, you 
 would not resort to the embryo where it is forming but not 
 working : you would wait till it was born into the full 
 presence of the elements with which it had to deal; not 
 till then could you see how they played upon it, and what 
 was its response to them. In conformity with this rule, 
 whither would you betake yourself, if you wanted to measure 
 the intrinsic competency of our intellectual faculty, and 
 determine what its very nature gives it to know ? Would 
 you take counsel of the nurse who held you " when you first 
 opened your eyes to the light,"* or otherwise study " the 
 first consciousness in any infant," " before the time when 
 memory commences,"! and disregard every thing " subse- 
 quent to the first beginnings of intellectual life "? i On the 
 Contrary, you would avoid that soft inchoate promise of 
 nature, only nominally born, where the very structures of its 
 finer work have not yet set into their distinctive consistence 
 and form ; and would hold your peace till the faculty is awake 
 and on its feet, and can clearly tell you what it sees for itself, 
 and what it makes out at second-hand : just as, to gauge 
 the lunar light, you must have patience while the thin 
 crescent grows, and wait till the full orb is there. Still less 
 can you take the report of the Moral Faculty from the con- 
 fessions of the cradle, or from the quarrels and affections 
 of the apes ; the conditions being not yet present for the 
 bare conception of a moral problem. The most that can 
 be asked of an intuition is, that it shall keep pace with the 
 cases as they arise, and be on the spot when it is wanted ; 
 and if you would know what provision our nature holds for 
 
 * Mill's Examination of Hamilton, 3rd ed. p. 172. 
 t Ibid. J Ibid. p. 160.
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 595 
 
 dealing with its Duty and interpreting its guilt, you must go 
 into the thick of its moral life, and bid it tell you what it 
 sees from the swaying tides of temptation and of victory. 
 The " purity " of intuitions is not " pristine," but ultimate ; 
 cleared at length from accidental and irrelevant dilutions, 
 and with essence definitely crystallized, they realize and 
 exhibit the idea that lay at the heart of all their tentatives, 
 and constitutes their truth. Am I told that it is hopeless at 
 so late an hour to separate what is an indigenous gift from 
 what is implanted by education ? I reply, it no doubt 
 requires, but it will not baffle, the hand of skilled analysis ; 
 it is a difficulty which, in other cases, we find it not impos- 
 sible to overcome ; for there are assuredly instincts and 
 affections, strictly original and natural, that make no sign 
 and play no part till our maturer years, yet which are readily 
 distinguished from the products of artificial culture. 
 
 If, to find the functions of our higher faculties, we must 
 look to their last stage, and not to their first, we at once 
 recover and justify the ideal conceptions which the exposi- 
 tors of Evolution are accustomed to disparage as romance. 
 For among these functions are present certain Intuitive 
 beliefs ; for the Reason, in Divine Causality; for the Con- 
 science, in Divine Authority ; together blending into the 
 knowledge of a Supreme and Holy Mind. These august 
 apprehensions, we are entitled to declare, are not the illu- 
 sions, but the discoveries of Man ; who, by rising into 
 them, is borne into more of the Universe of things than any 
 other being upon earth, and is made conscious of its trans- 
 cendent and ultimate realities. If these trusts are indeed 
 the growth of ages, from seeds invisibly dropped upon the 
 field of time, be it so ; it was not without hand ; there was 
 a Sower that went forth to sow. 
 
 II. We turn now to the Second Form of doubt raised by 
 the doctrine of Evolution : under which it weakens our 
 objective trust in an originating Mind. 
 
 A naturalist who to his own satisfaction has traced the 
 pedigree of the human intellect, conscience, and religion, 
 
 Q Q 2
 
 596 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 to Ascidian skin-bags sticking to the sea-side rocks, is not 
 likely to arrest the genealogy there, at a stage so little fitted 
 to serve as a starting-point of derivative being. Or, if his 
 own retreat should go no further, others will take up the 
 regressive race, and, soon passing the near and easy line 
 into the vegetable kingdom, will work through its provinces 
 to its lichen-spotted edge : and, after perhaps one shrinking 
 look, will dare the leap into the dead realm beyond, and 
 bring home the parentage of all to the primitive elements 
 of "matter and force." To give effect to this extension 
 over the universe at large of the theory of Evolution, the 
 scientific imagination of our day has long been meditating 
 its projected book of Genesis, and has already thrown out 
 its special chapters here and there ; and though the scenes 
 of the drama as a whole are not yet arranged, the general 
 plan is clear : that the Lucretian method is the true one ;. 
 that nothing arises for a purpose, but only from a power ; 
 that no Divine Actor therefore is required, but only atoms 
 extended, resisting, shaped, with spheres of mutual attrac- 
 tion and repulsion ; that, with these minima to begin with, 
 a growth will follow of itself by which the maxima will be 
 reached ; and that thus far the chief and latest thing it has 
 done is the apparition of Mind in the human race and 
 civilization in human society, conferring upon man the 
 melancholy privilege of being, so far as he knows, at the 
 summit of the universe. 
 
 The main support of this doctrine is found in two 
 arguments, supplied respectively by physical science and by 
 natural history ; each of which we will pass under review. 
 
 i. The former relies on the new scientific conception of 
 the Unity of Force. When Newton established the com- 
 position of Light in his treatise on Optics, and the law of 
 Gravitation in his Principia, he conceived himself to be 
 treating of two separate powers of nature, between which, 
 quick as he was to seize unexpected relations, he dreamt 
 of no interchange. Yet now it is understood that when 
 collisions occur of bodies gravitating on opposite lines, the
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 597 
 
 momenta that seemed to be killed simply burst into light 
 and heat. When Priestley's experiments detected the most 
 important chemical element on the one hand, and the fun- 
 damental electrical laws on the other, he seemed to move 
 on paths of research that had no contact. Yet, in the next 
 generation, chemical compounds were resolved by electri- 
 city ; which again turns up in exchange for magnetism, and 
 can pass into motion, heat, and light. To see the transmi- 
 gration of natural agency, trace only through a few of its 
 links the effect of sunshine on the tropic seas. So far as it 
 warms the mass of waters, either directly or through the 
 scorched shores that they wash, it stirs them into shifting 
 layers and currents, and creates mechanical power. But it 
 also removes the superficial film ; and thus far spends itself, 
 not in raising the temperature, but in changing the form 
 from liquid to vapour, and so altering the specific gravity as 
 to transfer what was on the deep to the level of the 
 mountain-tops. It is the Pacific that climbs and crowns the 
 Andes, resuming on the way the liquid state in the shape of 
 clouds, and as it settles crystallizing into solid snow and ice. 
 The original set of solar rays have now played their part, 
 and made their escape elsewhere. But there is sunshine 
 among the glaciers too, which soon begins to resolve the 
 knot that has been tied, and restore what has been stolen. 
 It sets free the waters that have been locked up, and lets 
 their gravitation have its play upon their flow. As they 
 dash through ravines, or linger in the plains, they steal into 
 the roots of grass and tree, and by the tribute which they 
 leave pass into the new shape of vital force. And if they 
 pass the homesteads of industry, and raise the food of a 
 civilized people, who can deny that they contribute not only 
 to the organic, but to the mental life, and so have run the 
 whole circuit from the lowest to the highest phase of 
 power? That the return back may be traced from the 
 highest to the lowest, is shown by every effort of thought 
 and will : which throngh the medium of nervous energy in 
 one direction sets in action the levers of the limbs, and in
 
 598 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 another works the laboratory of the organic life, and forms 
 new chemical compounds, of which some are reserved for 
 use, while others pass into the air as waste. Still further : 
 all doubt of identity in the force which masks itself in these 
 various shapes is said to be removed by the test of direct 
 measurement before and after the change. The heating of 
 a pound of water by one degree has its exact mechanical 
 equivalent ;* and a given store of elevated temperature will 
 overcome the same weights, whether applied directly to lift 
 them, or turned first into a thermo-electric current, so as to 
 perform its task by deputy.! The inference drawn from 
 the phenomena of which these are samples is no less than 
 this : that each kind of force is convertible into any other, 
 and undergoes neither gain nor loss upon the way ; so that 
 the sum-total remains for ever the same, and is only differ- 
 ently represented as the proportions change amongst the 
 different forms of life, and between the organic and the 
 inorganic realms. Hence arises the argument that, in 
 having any force, you have virtually all; and that, assuming 
 only material atoms as depositories of mechanical resistance 
 and momentum, you can supply a universe with an exhaus- 
 tive cosmogony, and dispense with the presence of Mind, 
 except as one of its phenomena. 
 
 To test this argument, let us grant the data which are 
 demanded, and imagine the primordial space charged with 
 matter, in molecules or in masses, in motion or rest, as you 
 may prefer. Put it under the law of gravitation, and in- 
 vest it with what varieties you please of density and form. 
 Thus constituted, it perfectly fulfils all the conditions you 
 have asked ; it presses, it moves, it propagates and dis- 
 tributes impulse, is liable to acceleration and retardation, 
 and exhibits all the phenomena with which any treatise on 
 Mechanics can properly deal. In order, however, to keep 
 the problem clear within its limits, let us have it in the 
 
 * Viz., the fall of 772 Ibs. through a foot. See Mr. Joule's Experi- 
 ments in " Grove's Correlation of Physical Forces," p. 34, 5th ed. 
 t See " Grove's Correlation, p. 255, 5th ed.
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 599 
 
 simplest form, and conceive the atoms to be all of gold ; 
 then, I would fain learn by what step the hypothesis pro- 
 poses to effect its passage to the chemical forces and their 
 innumerable results. Heat it may manage to reach by the 
 friction and compression of the materials at its disposal ; 
 and its metal universe may thus have its solid, liquid, and 
 gaseous provinces ; but, beyond these varieties, its homo- 
 geneous particles cannot advance the history one hair's 
 breadth through an eternity. It is not true, then, that the 
 conditions which give the first type of force suffice to pro- 
 mote it to the second ; and in order to start the world on 
 its chemical career, you must enlarge its capital and pre- 
 sent it with an outfit of heterogeneous constituents. Try, 
 therefore, the effect of such a gift ; fling into the pre-exist- 
 ing caldron the whole list of recognized elementary sub- 
 stances, and give leave to their affinities to work : we 
 immediately gain an immense accession to our materials 
 for the architecture and resources for the changes of the 
 world, the water and the air, the salts of the ocean, and 
 the earthy or rocky compounds that compose the crust of 
 the globe, and the variable states of magnetism and heat, 
 which throw the combinations into slow though constant 
 change. But with all your enlargement of data, turn them 
 as you will, at the end of every passage which they explore, 
 the door of life is closed against them still ; and though 
 more than once it has been proclaimed that a way has been 
 found through, it has proved that the living thing was on 
 the wrong side to begin with. It is not true, therefore, 
 that, from the two earlier stages of force, the ascent can be 
 made to the vital level ; the ethereal fire yet remains in 
 Heaven ; and philosophy has not stretched forth the 
 Promethean arm that can bring it down. And if, once 
 more, we make you a present of this third phase of power, 
 and place at your disposal all that is contained beneath and 
 within the flora of the world, still your problem is no easier 
 than before ; you cannot take a single step towards the 
 deduction of sensation and thought : neither at the upper
 
 600 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 limit do the highest plants (the exogens) transcend them- 
 selves and overbalance into animal existence ; nor at the 
 lower, grope as you may among the sea-weeds and sponges, 
 can you persuade the sporules of the one to develop into 
 the other. It is again not true, therefore, that, in virtue of 
 the convertibility of force, the possession of any is the 
 possession of the whole : we give you all the forms but one ; 
 and that one looks calmly down on your busy evolutions, 
 and remains inaccessible. Is, then, the transmigration of 
 forces altogether an illusion ? By no means ; but before 
 one can exchange with another, both must be there ; and to 
 turn their equivalence into a universal formula, all must be 
 there. With only one kind of elementary matter, there can 
 be no chemistry ; with only the chemical elements and 
 their laws, no life ; with only vital resources, as in the 
 vegetable world, no beginning of mind. But let Thought 
 and Will with their conditions once be there, and they will 
 appropriate vital power ; as life, once in possession, will ply 
 the alembics and the test-tubes of its organic laboratory ; 
 and chemical affinity is no sooner on the field than it plays 
 its game among the cohesions of simple gravitation. Hence 
 it is impossible to work the theory of Evolution upwards 
 from the bottom. If all force is to be conceived as One, 
 its type must be looked for in the highest and all-compre- 
 hending term ; and Mind must be conceived as there, and 
 as divesting itself of some specialty at each step of its 
 descent to a lower stratum of law, till represented at the 
 base under the guise of simple Dynamics. Or, if you retain 
 the forces in their plurality, then you must assume them all 
 among your data, and confess, with one of the greatest 
 living expositors of the phenomena of Development, that 
 unless among your primordial elements you scatter already 
 the germs of mind as well as the inferior elements, the 
 Evolution can never be wrought out.* But surely a theory, 
 which is content simply to assume in the germ whatever it 
 
 * :t Lotze's Mikrokosmus," B. iv. Kap. 2, Band ii. 33, seqq.
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 601 
 
 has to turn out full-grown, throws no very brilliant light on 
 the genesis of the Universe. 
 
 ii. The second and principal support of the doctrine 
 under review is found in the realm of natural history, and 
 in that province of it which is occupied by living beings. 
 Here, it is said, in the field of observation nearest to us, we 
 have evidence of a power in each nature to push itself and 
 gain ground, as against all natures less favourably consti- 
 tuted. There is left open to it a certain range of possible 
 variations from the type of its present individuals, of which 
 it may avail itself in any direction that may fortify its posi- 
 tion ; and even if its own instincts did not seize at once the 
 line of greatest strength, still, out of its several tentatives, 
 all the feeble results would fail to win a footing, and only 
 the residuary successes would make good their ground. 
 The ill-equipped troops of rival possibilities being always 
 routed, however often they return, the well-armed alone are 
 seen upon the field, and the world is in possession of " the 
 fittest to live." We thus obtain a principle of self-adjusting 
 adaptation of each being to its condition, without resorting 
 to a designing care disposing of it from without ; and its 
 development is an experimental escape from past weakness, 
 not a pre-conceived aim at a future perfection. 
 
 I have neither ability nor wish to criticize the particular 
 indications of this law, drawn with an admirable patience 
 and breadth of research from every department of ani- 
 mated nature. Though the logical structure of the proof 
 does not seem to me particularly solid, and the dispropor- 
 tion between the evidence and the conclusion is of necessity 
 so enormous as to carry us no further than the discussion 
 of an hypothesis, yet, for our present purpose, the thesis 
 may pass as if established ; and our scrutiny may be 
 directed only to i.ts bearings, should it be true. 
 
 (i) The genius of a country which has been the birth- 
 place and chief home of Political Economy is naturally 
 pleased by a theory of this kind ; which invests its favourite 
 lord and master, Competition, with an imperial crown and
 
 602 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 universal sway. But let us not deceive ourselves with mere 
 abstract words and abbreviations, as if they could reform a 
 world or even farm a sheep-walk. Competition is not, like 
 a primitive function of nature, an independent and original 
 power, which can of itself do any thing : the term only 
 describes a certain intensifying of power already there; 
 making the difference, under particular conditions, between 
 function latent and function exercised. It may therefore 
 turn the less into the more ; and it is reasonable to attribute 
 to it an increment to known and secured effects ; but not 
 new and unknown effects, for which else there is no pro- 
 vision. It gives but a partial and superficial account of the 
 phenomena with which it has concern ; of their degree ; of 
 their incidence here or there ; of their occurrence now or 
 then : of themselves in their characteristics it pre-supposes, 
 and does not supply, the cause. To that cause, then, let 
 us turn. Let us consider what must be upon the field, 
 before competition can arise. 
 
 (2) It cannot act except in the presence of some possi- 
 bility of a better or worse. A struggle out of relative 
 disadvantage implies that a relative advantage is within 
 grasp, that there is a prize of promotion offered for the 
 contest. The rivalry of beings eager for it is but an 
 instrument for making the best of things ; and only when 
 flung into the midst of an indeterminate variety of alter- 
 native conditions can it find any scope. When it gets 
 there and falls to work, what does it help us to account 
 for ? It accounts certainly for the triumph and survivor- 
 ship of the better, but not for there being a better to survive. 
 Given, the slow and the swift upon the same course, it 
 makes it clear that the race will be to the swift ; but it does 
 not provide the fleeter feet by which the standard of speed 
 is raised. Nay more ; even for the prevalence of the better 
 (" or fitter to live ") it would not account, except on the 
 assumption that whatever is better is stronger too ; and a 
 universe in which this rule holds already indicates its 
 divine constitution, and is pervaded by an ideal power
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 603 
 
 unapproached by the forces of necessity. Thus the law of 
 " natural selection," instead of dispensing with anterior 
 causation and enabling the animal races to be their own 
 Providence and do all their own work, distinctly testifies 
 to a constitution of the world pre-arranged for progress, 
 externally spread with large choice of conditions, and with 
 internal provisions for seizing and realizing the best. On 
 such a world, rich in open possibilities of beauty, strength, 
 affection, intellect, and character, they are planted and set 
 free ; charged with instincts eagerly urging them to secure 
 the preferable line of each alternative ; and disposing 
 themselves, by the very conditions of equilibrium, into a 
 natural hierarchy, in which the worthiest to live are in the 
 ascendant, and the standard of life is for ever rising. What 
 can look more like the field of a directing Will intent upon 
 the good ? Indeed, the doctrine of " natural selection " 
 owes a large part of its verisimilitude to its skilful imitation 
 of the conditions and method of Free-will ; the inde- 
 terminate varieties of possible movement ; the presentation 
 of these before a selective power ; the determination of the 
 problem by fitness for preference, all these are features 
 that would belong no less to the administration of a pre- 
 siding Mind ; and that, instead of resorting for the last 
 solution to this high arbitrament, men of science should 
 suppose it to be blindly fought out by the competing 
 creatures, as if they were supreme, is one of the marvels 
 which the professional intellect, whatever its department, 
 more often exhibits than explains. 
 
 (3) But, before competition can arise, there must be 
 besides the field of favourable possibility, desire or instinct 
 to lay hold of its opportunities. Here it is that we touch 
 the real dynamics of evolution, which rivalry can only 
 bring to a somewhat higher pitch. Here, it must be 
 admitted, there is at work a genuine principle of pro- 
 gression, the limits of which it is difficult to fix. Every 
 being which is so far individuated as to be a separate 
 centre of sensation, and of the balancing active sponta-
 
 604 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 neity, is endowed with a self-asserting power, capable, on 
 the field already supposed, of becoming a self-advancing 
 power. Under its operation, there is no doubt, increasing 
 differentiation of structure and refinement of function may 
 be expected to emerge ; nor is there any reason, except 
 such as the facts of natural history may impose, why this 
 process should be arrested at the boundaries of the species 
 recognized in our present classifications. Possibly, if the 
 slow increments of complexity in the organs of sentient 
 beings on the globe were all mapped out before us, the 
 whole teeming multitudes now peopling the land, the 
 waters, and the air, might be seen radiating from a common 
 centre in lines of various divergency, and, however remote 
 their existing relations, might group themselves as one 
 family. The speculative critic must here grant without 
 stint all that the scheme of development can ask ; and he 
 must leave it to the naturalist and physiologist to break up 
 the picture into sections, if they must. But then, Why 
 must he grant it ? Because here, having crossed the 
 margin of animal life, we have, in its germ of feeling and 
 idea, not merely a persistent, but a self-promoting force, 
 able to turn to account whatever is below it ; the mental 
 power, even in its rudiments, dominating the vital, and 
 constraining it to weave a finer organism ; and, for that 
 end, to amend its application of the chemical forces, and 
 make them better economize their command of mechanical 
 force. Observe, however, that, if here we meet with a truly 
 fruitful agency, capable of accomplishing difficult feats of 
 new combination and delicate equilibrium, we meet with it 
 here first ; and the moment we fall back from the line of 
 sentient life, and quit the scene of this eager, aggressive, 
 and competing power, we part company with all principle 
 of progress ; and consequently lose the tendency to that 
 increasing complexity of structure and subtlety of combina- 
 tion which distinguish the organic from the inorganic com- 
 pounds. Below the level of life, there is no room for the 
 operation of " natural selection." Its place is there
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 605 
 
 occupied by another principle, for which no such wonders 
 of constructive adaptation can be claimed ; I mean, the 
 dynamic rule of Action on the line of least resistance, a 
 rule, the working of which is quite in the opposite direction. 
 For evidently it goes against the establishment of unstable 
 conditions of equilibrium, and must therefore be the enemy 
 rather than the patron of the complex ingredients, the 
 precarious tissues, and the multiplied relations, of sentient 
 bodies ; and on its own theatre must prevent the per- 
 manent formation of any but the simpler unions among the 
 material elements. Accordingly, all the great enduring 
 masses that form and fill the architecture of inorganic 
 nature, its limestone and clay, its oxides and salts, its 
 water and air, are compounds, or a mixture, of few and 
 direct constituents. And the moment that life retreats and 
 surrenders the organism it has built and held, the same 
 antagonist principle enters on possession, and sets to work 
 to destroy the intricate structure of " proximate principles " 
 with their " compound radicals." With life and mind 
 therefore there begins, whether by modified affinities or by 
 removal of waste, a tension against these lower powers, 
 carrying the being up to a greater or less height upon the 
 wing ; but with life it ends, leaving him then to the 
 perpetual gravitation that completes the loftiest flight upon 
 the ground. Within the limits of her Physics and Chemistry 
 alone, Nature discloses no principle of progression, but 
 only provisions for periodicity ; and out of this realm, 
 without further resources, she could never rise. 
 
 The downward tendency which sets in with any relaxation 
 of the differentiating forces of life is evinced, not only in 
 the extreme case of dissolution in death, but in the well- 
 known relapse of organs which have been artificially 
 developed into exceptional perfection back into their earlier 
 state, when relieved of the strain and left to themselves. 
 Under the tension of a directing mental interest, whether 
 supplied by the animal's own instincts or by the controlling 
 care of man, the organism yields itself to be moulded into
 
 606 MIND IN NATURE 
 
 more special and highly finished forms; and a series of 
 ascending variations withdraws the nature from its original 
 or first-known type. But wherever we can lift the tension 
 off, the too skilful balance proves unstable, and the law of 
 reversion reinstates the simpler conditions. Only on the 
 higher levels of life do we find a self-working principle of 
 progression : and, till we reach them, development wants its 
 dynamics ; and, though there may be evolution, it cannot 
 be self-evolution. 
 
 These considerations appear to me to break the back of 
 this formidable argument in the middle ; and to show the 
 impossibility of dispensing with the presence of Mind in 
 any scene of ascending being, where the little is becoming 
 great, and the dead alive, and the shapeless beautiful, and 
 the sentient moral, and the moral spiritual. Is it not in 
 truth a strange choice, to set up " Evolution" of all things, 
 as the negation of Purpose pre-disposing what is to come ? 
 For what does the word mean, and whence is it borrowed ? 
 It means, to unfold from within ; and it is taken from the 
 history of the seed or embryo of living natures. And 
 what is the seed but a casket of pre-arranged futurities, 
 with its whole contents prospective, settled to be what 
 they are by reference to ends still in the distance. If a 
 grain of wheat be folded in a mummy-cloth and put into a 
 catacomb, its germ for growing and its albumen for feeding 
 sleep side by side, and never find each other out. But 
 no sooner does it drop thousands of years after, on the 
 warm and moistened field, than their mutual play begins, 
 and the plumule rises and lives upon its store till it is able 
 to win its own maintenance from the ground. Not only 
 are its two parts therefore relative to each other, but both 
 are relative to conditions lying in another department of the 
 world, the clouds, the atmosphere, the soil; in the absence 
 of which they remain barren and functionless : and this, 
 from a Cause that has no sense of relation ! The human 
 ear, moulded in the silent matrix of nature, is formed with 
 a nerve susceptible to one influence alone, and that an
 
 AND INTUITION IN MAN. 607 
 
 absent one, the undulations of a medium into which it is 
 not yet born ; and, in anticipation of the whole musical 
 scale with all its harmonies, furnishes itself with a micro- 
 scopic grand-piano of three thousand stretched strings, each 
 ready to respond to a different and definite number of aerial 
 vibrations : and this, from a Cause that never meant to 
 bring together the inner organ and the outer medium, now 
 hidden from each other ! The eye, shaped in the dark, 
 selects an exclusive sensibility to movements propagated 
 from distant skies ; and so weaves its tissues, and disposes 
 its contents, and hangs its curtains, and adjusts its range of 
 motion, as to meet every exigency of refraction and dis- 
 persion of the untried light, and be ready to paint in its 
 interior the whole perspective of the undreamed world 
 without : and this, from a Cause incapable of having an 
 end in view ! Surely, nothing can be evolved that is not 
 first involved ; and if there be any thing which not only 
 carries a definite future in it, but has the whole rationale of 
 its present constitution grounded in that future, it is the 
 embryo, whence, by a strange humour, this denial of final 
 causes has chosen to borrow its name. Not more certainly 
 is the statue that has yet to be, already potentially contained 
 in the preconception and sketches of the artist, than the 
 stately tree of the next century in the beech-mast that drops 
 upon the ground ; or the whole class of Birds, if you give 
 them a common descent, in the eggs to which you choose to 
 go back as first ; or the entire system of nature in any 
 germinal cell or other prolific minimum whence you suppose 
 its organism to have been brought out. Evolution and 
 Prospection are inseparable conceptions. Go back as you 
 will, and try to propel the movement from behind instead 
 of drawing it from before, development in a definite direc- 
 tion towards the realization of a dominant scheme of 
 ascending relations is the sway of an overruling end. To 
 take away the ideal basis of nature, yet construe it by the 
 analogy of organic growth, will be for ever felt as a contra- 
 diction. It is to put out the eyes of the Past, in order to
 
 608 MIND IN NATURE AND INTUITION IN MAN. 
 
 show us with what secure precision, amid distracting paths, 
 and over chasms bridged by a hair, it selects its way into 
 the Future. 
 
 If the Divine Idea will not retire at the bidding of our 
 speculative science, but retains its place, it is natural to ask, 
 what is its relation to the series of so-called Forces in the 
 world? But the question is too large and deep to be 
 answered here. Let it suffice to say, that there need not be 
 any overruling of these forces by the will of God, so 
 that the supernatural should disturb the natural; or any 
 supplementing of them, so that he should fill up their 
 deficiencies. Rather is his thought related to them as, in 
 Man, the mental force is related to all below it ; turning 
 them all to account for ideal ends, and sustaining the higher 
 equilibrium which else would lapse into lower forms. More 
 truly, yet equivalently, might we say, these supposed forces, 
 which are only our intellectual interpretation of classes of 
 perceived phenomena, are but varieties of his Will, the 
 rules and methods of his determinate and legislated agency, 
 in which, to keep faith with the universe of beings, he 
 abnegates all change ; but beyond which, in his transcen- 
 dent relations with dependent and responsible minds, he 
 has left a glorious margin for the free spiritual life, open to 
 the sacredness of Personal Communion, and the hope of 
 growing similitude. 
 
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 CRICKET. By A. G. STEEL and the Hon. R. H. LYTTELTON. With 63 Illus- 
 trations. Crown 8vo. ics. 6i/. 
 
 DRIVING. Hy the DUKE OF BEAUFORT. With 65 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 
 
 IOS. (id.
 
 4 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS SN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 BADMINTON LIBRARY (The) (continued). 
 FENCING, BOXING, AND WRESTLING. By WALTER H. POLLOCK, F. 
 C. GROVE, C. PREVOST, E. B. MICHELL, and WALTER ARMSTRONG. 
 With 42 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. los. 6d, 
 
 GOLF. By HORACE HUTCHINSON, the Rt. Hon. A. J. BALFOUR, M.P., 
 
 ANDREW LANG, Sir W. G. SIMPSON, Bart., &c. With 88 Illustrations. 
 
 Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 TENNIS, LAWN TENNIS, RACKETS, AND FIVES. By J. M. and C. G. 
 
 HEATHCOTE, E. O. PLEYDELL^BOUVERIE, and A. C. AINGER. With 79 
 
 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 105. 6d. 
 RIDING AND POLO. By Captain ROBERT WEIR, Riding-Master, R.H.G., 
 
 J. MORAY BROWN, &c. With 59 Illustrations. Cr. 8vo. 
 
 BAGEHOT (Walter). BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES. 8vo. i2s. 
 
 - ECONOMIC STUDIES. 8vo. IQJ. 6d. 
 
 - LITERARY STUDIES. 2 vols. 8vo. 28s. 
 
 - THE POSTULATES OF ENGLISH POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
 Crown 8vo. zs. 6d. 
 
 A PRACTICAL PLAN FOR ASSIMILATING THE ENGLISH 
 
 AND AMERICAN MONEY AS A STEP TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL 
 MONEY. Crown 8vo. zs. 6d. 
 
 BAGWELL (Richard). IRELAND UNDER THE TUDORS. (3 vols.) 
 Vols. I. and II. From the first invasion of the Northmen to the year 1578. 
 8vo. $2s. Vol. III. 1578-1603. 8vo. iSs. 
 
 BAIW (Alex.). MENTAL AND MORAL SCIENCE. Crown 8vo. IQS. 6d. 
 
 - SENSES AND THE INTELLECT. 8vo. 155. 
 
 - EMOTIONS AND THE WILL. 8vo. 15.5. 
 
 - LOGIC, DEDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE. Part I., Deduction, 
 4-r. Part II., Induction, 6s. 6d. 
 
 - PRACTICAL ESSAYS. Crown 8vo. zs. 
 
 BAKER (James). BY THE WESTERN SEA : a Novel. Cr. 8vo. y. 6,1. 
 
 BAKER. EIGHT YEARS IN CEYLON. With 6 Illustrations. Crown 
 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 - THE RIFLE AND THE HOUND IN CEYLON. With 6 Illustra- 
 tions. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 BALL (The Rt. Hon. T. J.). THE REFORMED CHURCH OF IRE- 
 LAND (1537-1889). 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 HISTORICAL REVIEW OF THE LEGISLATIVE SYSTEMS 
 
 OPERATIVE IN IRELAND (1172-1800). 8vo. 6s. 
 
 BEACONSFIELD (The Earl of). NOVELS AND TALES. The 
 Hughenden Edition. With 2 Portraits and n Vignettes, n vols. Crown 
 8vo. 42s. 
 
 Endymion. 
 
 Lothair. 
 
 Coningsby. 
 
 Yenetia. 
 
 Henrietta Temple. 
 Contarini Fleming, &c. 
 
 Alroy, Ixion, &c. 
 The Young Duke, &c. 
 Vivian Grey. 
 
 Tancred. Sybil. 
 
 NOVELS AND TALES. Cheap Edition, n vols. Crown 8vo. is. each, 
 boards; is. 6d. each, cloth.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN, &> CO. 5 
 
 BECKER (Professor). CALLUS; or, Roman Scenes in the Time of Augus- 
 tus. Post 8vo. 7$. 6d. 
 
 CHARICLES ; or, Illustrations of the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks. 
 Post 8vo. js. 6d. 
 
 BELL (Mrs. Hugh). WILL O' THE WISP : a Story. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 - CHAMBER COMEDIES. Crown 8vo. 65. 
 
 BLAKE (J.).-T \15LES FOR THE CONVERSION OF 5 PER CENT. IN- 
 TEREST FROM -jV TO 7 PER CENT. 8vo. izs. 6d. 
 
 BOOK (THE) OF WEDDING DAYS. Arranged on the Plan of a Birthday Book. 
 With 96 Illustrated Borders, Frontispiece, and Title-page by Walter Crane; 
 and Quotations for each Day. Compiled and Arranged by K. E. J. REIU, 
 MAY Ross, and MABEL BAMFIELD. 410. zis. 
 
 BRASSEY (Lady). A VOYAGE IN THE 'SUNBEAM,' OUR HOME 
 
 ON THE OCEAN FOR ELEVEN MONTHS. 
 
 Library Edition. With 8 Maps and Charts, find 118 Illustrations, 8vo. 2is. 
 Cabinet Edition. With Map and 66 Illustrations, Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 Cheap Edition. With 66 Illustrations, Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 School Edition. With 37 Illustrations, Fcp. 2s. cloth, or 35. white parchment. 
 Popular Edition. With 60 Illustrations, 410. 6d. sewed, 'is. cloth. 
 
 - SUNSHINE AND STORM IN THE EAST. 
 Library Edition. With 2 Maps and 114 Illustrations, 8vo. 2ts. 
 Cabinet Edition. With 2 Maps and 114 Illustrations, Crown 8vo. js. 6d. 
 Popular Edition. With 103 Illustrations, 410. 6d. sewed, 15. cloth. 
 
 -IN THE TRADES, THE TROPICS, AND THE 'ROARING 
 FORTIES'. 
 
 Cabinet Edition. With Map and 220 Illustrations, Crown 8vo. js. 6d. 
 Popular Edition. With 183 Illustrations, 410. 6d. sewed, is. cloth. 
 
 - THE LAST VOYAGE TO INDIA AND AUSTRALIA IN THE 
 'SUNBEAM'. With Charts and Maps, and 40 Illustrations in Monotone 
 (20 full-page), and nearly 200 Illustrations in the Text. 8vo. 2is. 
 
 - THREE VOYAGES IN THE 'SUNBEAM'. Popular Edition. With 
 346 Illustrations, 410. 2s. 6d. 
 
 BRAY (Charles). THE PHILOSOPHY OF NECESSITY ; or, Law in 
 Mind as in Matter. Crown 8vo. y. 
 
 BRIGHT (Rev. J. Franck). A HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 4 vols. Cr.Svo. 
 Period I. Mediteva! Monarchy : The Departure of the Romans to Richard III. 
 
 From A.D. 449 to 1485. 4^. dd. 
 
 Period II. Personal Monarchy : Henry VII. to James II. From 1485 to 1688. =;.f. 
 Period III. Constitutional Monarchy : William and Mary to William IV. 
 
 From 1689 to 1837. js. 6d. 
 Period IV. The Growth of Democracy : Victoria. From 1837 to 1880. 6s. 
 
 BRYDEN (H. A.). KLOOF AND KARROO : Sport, Legend, and Natural 
 History in Cape Colony. With 17 Illustrations. 8vo. IQS. o</. 
 
 BUCKLE (Henry Thomas). HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ENG- 
 LAND AND FRANCE, SPAIN AND SCOTLAND. 3 vols. Cr. 8vo. 24*.
 
 6 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 BULL (Thomas). HINTS TO MOTHERS ON THE MANAGEMENT 
 OF THEIR HEALTH during the Period of Pregnancy. Fcp. 8vo. is. bd. 
 
 THE MATERNAL MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN IN HEALTH 
 
 AND DISEASE. Fcp. 8vo. is. 6d. 
 
 BUTLER (Samuel). EREWHON. Crown 8vo. 5*. 
 
 - THE FAIR HAVEN. A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element 
 in our Lord's Ministry. Crown 8vo. 7 s. 6d. 
 
 LIFE AND HABIT. An Essay after a Completer View of Evolution. 
 
 Cr. 8vo. 7 s. 6d. 
 
 - EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. Crown 8vo. tos. 6d. 
 
 - UNCONSCIOUS MEMORY. Crown 8vo. 7 s. 6d. 
 
 ALPS AND SANCTUARIES OF PIEDMONT AND THE 
 
 CANTON TICINO. Illustrated. Pott 410. IDS. 6d. 
 
 - SELECTIONS FROM WORKS. Crown 8vo. 7 s. bd. 
 
 LUCK, OR CUNNING, AS THE MAIN MEANS OF ORGANIC 
 
 MODIFICATION ? Crown 8vo. 7 s. 6d. 
 
 EX VOTO. An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at 
 Varallo-Sesia. Crown 8vo. 105. bd. 
 
 - HOLBEIN'S 'LA DANSE'. y. 
 
 CARLYLE (Thomas). THOMAS CARLYLE: a History of his Life. By 
 J. A. FKOUDE. 1795-1835, 2 vols. Cr. 8vo. 7 s. 1834-1881, 2 vols. Cr. 8vo. 7 s. 
 
 CASE (Thomas). PHYSICAL REALISM : being an Analytical Philosophy 
 from the Physical Objects of Science to the Physical Data of Sense. 8vo. 15^. 
 
 CHETWYND (Sir George). RACING REMINISCENCES AND EX- 
 PERIENCES OF THE TURF. 2 vols. 8vo. 2is. 
 
 CHILD (Gilbert "W.). CHURCH AND STATE UNDER THE 
 TUDORS. 8vo. 155. 
 
 CHISHOLM (G. G.). HANDBOOK OF COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY. 
 With 29 Maps. 8vo. i6s. 
 
 CHURCH (Sir Richard). Commander-in-Chief of the Greeks in the War 
 of Independence : a Memoir. By STANLEV LANE-POOLK. 8vo. 55. 
 
 CLIVE (Mrs. Archer). POEMS. Including the IX. Poems. Fcp. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 CLODD (Edward). THE STORY OF CREATION : a Plain Account of 
 Evolution. With 77 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 
 CLUTTERBUCK ("W. J.). THE SKIPPER IN ARCTIC SEAS. With 
 39 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 COLENSO (J. "W.). THE PENTATEUCH AND BOOK OF JOSHUA 
 CRITICALLY EXAMINED. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 COLMORE (G.). A LIVING EPITAPH : a Novel. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 COMYN" (L. N.). ATHERSTOXE PRIORY: a Tale. Crown 8vo. 2.?. 6d, 
 
 CONINGTON (John). THE .KNEID OF VIRGIL. Translated into 
 
 English Verse. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 THE POEMS OF VIRGIL. Translated into English Prose. Cr. 8vo.6s. 
 
 COX (Rev. Sir G. W.). A HISTORY OF GREECE, from the Earliest 
 Period to the Death of Alexander the Great. With n Maps. Cr. 8vo. 7 s. 6d.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN. &> CO. 7 
 
 CRAKE (Rev. A. D.). HISTORICAL TALES. Cr. 8vo. 5 vols. as. 6tf. each. 
 
 The House of Walderne. A Tale of 
 
 the Cloister and the Forest in the 
 
 Days of the Barons' Wars. 
 Brain Fitz-Count. A Story of Wal- 
 
 lingford Castle and Dorchester 
 
 Abbey. 
 
 Edwy the Fair; or, The First Chronicle 
 
 of ^i'scendune. 
 Alfgar the Dane; or, The Second 
 
 Chronicle of /Escendune. 
 The Rival Heirs : being the Third and 
 
 Last Chronicle of ^'.scendune. 
 
 - HISTORY OF THE CHURCH UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE, 
 A.D. 30-476. Crown Svo. js. 6d. 
 
 CREIGHTON" (Mandell, D.D.) HISTORY OF THE PAPACY DUR- 
 ING THE REFORMATION. Svo. Vols. I. and II., 1378-1464, 32^. ; Vols. 
 III. and IV., 1464-1518, 245. 
 
 CRUMP (A.). A SHORT ENQUIRY INTO THE FORMATION OF 
 POLITICAL OPINION, from the Reign of the Great Families to the Advent 
 of Democrncy. 8vo.~7.r. 6d. 
 
 - AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CAUSES OF THE GREAT 
 P'ALL IN PRICES which took place coincidently with the Demonetisation 
 of Silver by Germany. Svo. 6s. 
 
 CTJRZON (Hon. George N.). RUSSIA IN CENTRAL ASIA IN 1889 
 AND THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN QUESTION. Svo. 2is. 
 
 DANTE. LA COMMEDIA DI DANTE. A New Text, carefully Revised 
 with the aid of the most recent Editions and Collations. Small 8vo. 6s. 
 
 DELAND (Mrs.). JOHN WARD, PREACHER. Cr. Svo. zs. bds., zs. 6d. cl. 
 
 SIDNEY : a Novel. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 THE OLD GARDEN, and other Verses. Fcp. Svo. 5*. 
 
 DE REDCLIFFE. THE LIFE OF THE RIGHT HON. STRATFORD 
 CANNING : yiSCOUNT STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE. By STANLEY 
 LANK-Puoi.E. With 3 Portraits. Crown Svo. js. 6d. 
 
 DE SALTS (Mrs.). Works by : 
 
 Savouries a la Mode. Fcp. Svo. is. 6rf. j Puddings and Pastry a la Mode. Fcp. 
 Entries a la Mode. Fcp. Svo. is. 6a. \ Svo. is. 6d. 
 
 Soups and Dressed Fish a la Mode, j Cakes and Confections a la Mode. 
 Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. 
 
 Drinks a la Mode. Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. 
 Tempting Dishes for Small Incomes. 
 
 Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. 
 
 Dressed Vegetables a la Mode. Fcp. j Floral Decorations. Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. 
 Svo. is. 6d. Wrinkles and Notions for every House- 
 
 Dressed Game and Poultry a la Mode. ! hold. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. 
 Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. 
 
 DE TOCQTJEVILLE (Alexis). DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. Trans- 
 lated by HENRY RKEVE, C.B. 2 vols. Crown Svo. i6s. 
 
 DOWELL (Stephen). A HISTORY OF TAXATION AND TAXES IN 
 ENGLAND. 4 vols. Svo. Vols. I and II., The History of Taxation, 2is. 
 Vols. III. and IV., The History of Taxes, zis. 
 
 DOYLE (A. Conan). -MICAII CLARKE : a Tale of Monmouth's Rebellion. 
 
 \\'ith l-'rontispiecc and Vignette. Crown Svo. y. 6d. 
 THE CAPTAIN OF THE POLESTAR ; and other Tales. Cr. Svo. 6s. 
 
 Oysters a la Mode. Fcp. Svo. is. 6d. 
 Sweets and Supper Dishes a la Mode. 
 
 Fcp. Svo. is. 6d.
 
 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 DRANE (Augusta T.). THE HISTORY OF ST. DOMINIC, FOUNDER 
 OF THE FRIAR PREACHERS. With 32 Illustrations. 8vo. j.y. 
 
 DUBLIN UNIVERSITY PRESS SERIES (The) : a Series of Works 
 undertaken by the Provosttand Senior Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 
 Abbot's (T. K.) Codex Rescriptus 
 Dublinensis of St. Matthew. 410. 215. 
 
 Evangeliorum Versio Ante- 
 hieronymiana ex Codice Usseriano 
 (Dublinensi). 2 vols. Cr. 8vo. zis. 
 
 Allman's (G. J.) Greek Geometry from 
 Thales to Euclid. 8vo. IDS. 6d. 
 
 Burn side (W. S.) and Panton's (A. W.) 
 Theory of Equations. 8vo. 125. 6d. 
 
 Casey's (John) Sequel to Euclid's Ele- 
 ments. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 Analytical Geometry of the 
 Conic Sections. Crown 8vo. js. 6d. 
 
 Davies' (J. F.) Eumenides of .ffischylus, 
 With Metrical English Translation. 
 8vo. 7.?. 
 
 Dublin Translations into Greek and 
 Latin Verse. Edited by R. Y. 
 Tyrrell. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 Graves' (R. P.) Life of Sir William 
 Hamilton. 3 vols. 15.?. each. 
 
 Griffin (R. W.) on Parabola, Ellipse, 
 and Hyperbola. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 Hobart's (W. X.) Medical Language of 
 St. Luke. 8vo. 165. 
 
 Leslie's (T. E. Cliffe) Essays in Politi- 
 cal Economy. 8vo. IDS. 6d. 
 
 Macalister's (A.) Zoology and Morpho- 
 logy of Vertebrata. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 MacCullagh's (James) Mathematical 
 and other Tracts. 8vo. iy. 
 
 Haguire's (T.) Parmenides of Plato, 
 Text with Introduction, Analysis, 
 &c. 8vo. 7$. 6d. 
 
 Monck's (W. H. S.) Introduction to 
 Logic. Crown 8vo. $s. 
 
 Robert's (R. A.) Examples on the 
 Analytic Geometry of Plane Conies. 
 Crown 8vo. y. 
 
 Southey's (R.) Correspondence with 
 Caroline Bowles. Edited by E. 
 Dowden. 8vo. 14^. 
 
 Stubbs' (J. W.) History of the Univer- 
 sity of Dublin, from its Foundation 
 to the End of the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury. 8vo. i2s. 6d. 
 
 Thornhill's (W. J.) The JEneid of 
 Virgil, freely translated into English 
 Blank Verse. Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 Tyrell's (R. Y.) Cicero's Correspond- 
 ence. 
 Vols. I., II. and III. 8vo. each izs. 
 
 The Acharnians of Aristo- 
 phanes, translated into English 
 Verse. Crown 8vo. is. 
 
 Webb's (T. E.) Goethe's Faust, Trans- 
 lation and Notes. 8vo. 125. 6d. 
 
 The Veil of Isis ; a Series 
 of Essays on Idealism. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 Wilkin's ' (G.) The Growth of the 
 Homeric Poems. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 EWALD (Heinrich). THE ANTIQUITIES OF ISRAEL. 8vo. izs. 6d. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL. 8vo. Vols. I. and II. 245. Vols. III. 
 
 and IV. 2is. Vol. V. i8s. Vol. VI. i6s. Vol. VII. 2is. Vol. VIII. i8s. 
 
 FARNELL (G. S.).-THE GREEK LYRIC POETS. 8vo. i6s. 
 FARRAR (F."W.). LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 FIRTH (J. C.). NATION MAKING: a Story of New Zealand Savageism 
 and Civilisation. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 FITZWYGRAM (Major-General Sir F.). HORSES AND STABLES. 
 With 19 pages of Illustrations. 8vo. 5^. 
 
 FORD (Horace). THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ARCHERY. 
 New Edition, thoroughly Revised and Re-written by W. BUTT. 8vo. 145. 
 
 FOUARD (Abbe' Constant).-THE CHRIST THE SON OF GOD. With 
 Introduction by Cardinal Manning. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 145.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN, &> CO. 9 
 
 FOX (C. J.). THE EARLY HISTORY OF CHARLES JAMES FOX. By 
 
 the Right Hon. Sir. G. O. TREVELYAN, Bart. 
 Library Edition. 8vo. 185. | "Cabinet Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 FRANCIS (Francis). A BOOK ON ANGLING : including full Illustrated 
 Lists of Salmon Flies. Post 8vo. 15*. 
 
 FREEMAN (E. A.)- THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 
 With 65 Maps. 2 vols. 8vo. 315. 6d. 
 
 FROTTDE (James A.). THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND, from the Fall of 
 Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. 12 vols. Crown 8vo. 2 ss. 
 
 - THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CEN- 
 TURY. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. 181. 
 
 - SHORT STUDIES ON GREAT SUBJECTS. 
 
 Cabinet Edition. 4 vols. Cr. 8vo. 245. | Cheap Edit. 4 vols. Cr. 8vo. 35. 6d. ea. 
 
 CAESAR : a Sketch. Crown 8vo. 3*. 6d. 
 
 - OCEANA ; OR, ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. With 9 Illus- 
 trations. Crown 8vo. 2s. boards, 2S. 6d. cloth. 
 
 - THE ENGLISH IN THE WEST INDIES; or, the Bow of Ulysses. 
 With 9 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. zs. boards, 2s. 6d. cloth. 
 
 - THE TWO CHIEFS OF DUNBOY; an Irish Romance of the Last 
 Century. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 - THOMAS CARLYLE, a History of his Life. 1795 to 1835. 2 vols. 
 Crown 8vo. ~]s. 1834 to 1881. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 75. 
 
 GALL WEY (Sir Ralph Payne-). LETTERS TO YOUNGSHOOTERS. 
 (First Series.) On the Choice and Use of a Gun. Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 GARDINER (Samuel Rawson). HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 1603- 
 1642. 10 vols. Crown 8vo. price 6s. each. 
 
 - A HISTORY OF THE GREAT CIVIL WAR, 1642-1649. (3 vols.) 
 Vol.1. 1642-1644. With 24 Maps. 8vo. 2is. (out of print). Vol.11. 1644- 
 1647. With 21 Maps. 8vo. 24.?. Vol. III. 1647-1649. [In the Press. 
 
 - THE STUDENT'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Vol. I. B.C. 55-A.D. 
 1509, with 173 Illustrations, Crown 8vo. 4^. Vol. II. 1509-1689, with 96 
 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 43. Vol. III. 1689-1885, with Illustrations. 
 Crown 8vo. 45. Complete in i vol. Crown 8vo. 
 
 GIBERNE (Agues).- MISS DEVEREUX, SPINSTER. 2 vols. Crown 
 8vo. 171. 
 
 - RALPH HARDCASTLE'S WILL. With Frontispiece. Cr. 8vo. 55. 
 
 - NIGEL BROWNING. Crown 8vo. y. 
 
 GOETHE. FAUST. A New Translation chiefly in Blank Verse ; with Intro- 
 duction and Notes. By JAMES ADEY BIRDS. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 FAUST. The Second Part. A New Translation in Verse. By JAMES 
 ADEY BIRDS. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 GREEN (T. H.) THE WORKS OF THOMAS HILL GREEN. (3 Vols.) 
 Vols. I. and II. 8vo. i6s. each. Vol. III. 8vo. 2is. 
 
 - THE WITNESS OF GOD AND FAITH : Two Lay Sermons. Fcp. 
 
 GREVILLE (C. C. F.). A JOURNAL OF THE REIGNS OF KING 
 GEORGE IV., KING WILLIAM IV., AND QUEEN VICTORIA. Edited 
 by H. REEVE. 8 vols. Crown 8vo. 6s. each.
 
 io A CA TALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITER A TURE 
 
 GWILT (Joseph). AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARCHITECTURE. 
 With more than 1700 Engravings on Wood. 8vo. 52^. 6d. 
 
 HAGGARD (Ella). LIFE A*ND ITS AUTHOR: an Essay in Verse. 
 With a Memoir by H. Rider Haggard, and Portrait. Fcp. 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 HAGGARD (H. Rider). SHE. With 32 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 - ALLAN QUATERMAIN. With 31 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 MAIWA'S REVENGE. Crown 8vo. 2s. boards, 2s. 6d. cloth. 
 
 COLONEL QUARITCH, V.C. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 CLEOPATRA : With 29 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 - BEATRICE. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 - ERIC BRIGHTEYES. With 51 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 HAGGARD (H. Rider) and LANG (Andrew). THE WORLD'S 
 DESIRE. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 HALLIWEIiL-PHILLIPPS (J. O.) A CALENDAROFTHEHALLI- 
 WELL-PHILLIPPS COLLECTION OF SHAKESPEAREAN RARITIES. 
 Second Edition. Enlarged by Ernest E. Baker. 8vo. xo.r. 6d. 
 
 OUTLINE OF THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE. 2 vols. Royal 
 
 8vo. 2is. 
 
 HARRISON" (Jane E.). MYTHS OF THE ODYSSEY IN ART AND 
 LITERATURE. Illustrated with Outline Drawings. 8vo. i8j. 
 
 HARRISON (F. Bayford). THE CONTEMPORARY HISTORY OF 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Crown 8vo. 3 s. 6d. 
 
 HARTE (Bret). IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS. Fcp. 8vo. is. bds., 
 is. 6d. cloth. 
 
 - BY SHORE AND SEDGE. i6mo. is. 
 
 - ON THE FRONTIER. 161110. is. 
 
 HARTWIG (Dr.). THE SEA AND ITS LIVING WONDERS. With 12 
 
 Plates and 303 Woodcuts. 8vo. IDS. 6d. 
 
 THE TROPICAL WORLD. With 8 Plates and 172 Woodcuts. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 THE POLAR WORLD. With 3 Maps, 8 Plates and 85 Woodcuts. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 THESUBTERRANEAN WORLD. With 3 Mapsand8oW T oodcuts. 8vo. IDS. 6d. 
 THE AERIAL WORLD. With Map, 8 Plates and 60 Woodcuts. 8vo. IDS. 6d. 
 
 HAVELOCK. MEMOIRS OF SIR HENRY HAVELOCK, K.C.B. By 
 JOHN CLARK MARSHMAN. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 HEARN (W. Edward). THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND: its 
 Structure and its Development. 8vo. i6s. 
 
 - THE ARYAN HOUSEHOLD : its Structure and ts Development. 
 An Introduction to Comparative Jurisprudence. Svo. i6.r. 
 
 HISTORIC TOWNS. Edited by E. A. FREEMAN and Rev. WILLIAM HUNT. 
 With Maps and Plans. Crown Svo. 3.5. 6if. each. 
 
 Bristol. By Rev. W. Hunt. 
 Carlisle. By Dr. Mandell Creighton. 
 Cinque Ports. By Montagu Burrows. 
 Colchester. By Rev. E. L. Cults. 
 Exeter. By E. A. Freeman. 
 London. By Rev. W. J. Loftie. 
 Oxford. By Rev. C. W. Boase. 
 
 Winchester. By Rev. G. W. Kitchin. 
 New York. By Theodore Roosevelt. 
 Boston (U.S.). By Henry Cabot 
 
 Lodge. 
 York. By Rev. James Raine. 
 
 \Inprefara iion .
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN, &> CO. n 
 
 HODGSON (Shadworth H.). TIME AND SPACE: a Metaphysical 
 Essay. 8vo. i6s. 
 
 - THE THEORY OF PRACTICE : an Ethical Enquiry. 2 vols. 8vo. 24*. 
 
 - THE PHILOSOPHY OF REFLECTION. 2 vols. 8vo. 21*. 
 
 OUTCAST ESSAYS AND VERSE TRANSLATIONS. Crown 8vo. 
 
 8s. 6d. 
 
 HOWITT (William). VISITS TO REMARKABLE PLACES. 80 Illus- 
 trations. Crown 8vo. y. (>d. 
 
 HULLAH (John). COURSE OF LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF 
 MODERN MUSIC. 8vo. 8s. 6d. 
 
 COURSE OF LECTURES ON THE TRANSITION PERIOD OF 
 
 MUSICAL HISTORY. 8vo. 105. 6d. 
 
 HUME. THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF DAVID HUME. Edited 
 by T. H. GREEN and T. H. GROSE. 4 vols. 8vo. 56.?. 
 
 HTJTCHINSON (Horace). CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE: a 
 Novel. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. 25^. 6d. 
 
 - CRICKETING SAWS AND STORIES. With rectilinear Illustrations 
 by the Author. i6mo. is. 
 
 - FAMOUS GOLF LINKS. By HORACE G. HUTCHINSON, ANDREW- 
 LANG, H. S. C. EVERARD, T. RUTHERFORD CLARK, &c. With numerous 
 Illustrations by F. P. Hopkins, T. Hodges, H. S. King, c. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 HUTH (Alfred H.). THE MARRIAGE OF NEAR KIN. Royal 8vo. 2is. 
 
 INGELOW (Jean). POETICAL WORKS. Vols. I. and II. Fcp. 8vo. 
 I2s. Vol. III. Fcp. 8vo. 5^. 
 
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 12 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
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 JUSTINIAN. THE INSTITUTES OF JUSTINIAN ; Latin Text, with 
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 KALISCH (M. M.). BIBLE STUDIES. Part I. The Prophecies of 
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 KALISCH (M. M.). COMMENTARY ON THE OLD TESTAMENT ; with 
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 Vol. III. Leviticus, Part I. 155., or adapted for the General Reader, 85. 
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 KENDALL (May). FROM A GARRET. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
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 ' SUCH IS LIFE ' : a Novel. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
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 KILLICK (Rev. A. H.). HANDBOOK TO MILL'S SYSTEM OF 
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 OUTLINES OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. A Text-Book 
 
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 LECKY (W. E. H.). HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 
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 LEGER (Louis). A HISTORY OF AUS PRO-HUNGARY. From the 
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 LEWES (George Henry). THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, from 
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 LIDDELL (Colonel R. T.). MEMOIRS OF THE TENTH ROYAL 
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 LOUDON (J. C.). ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING. With 1000 
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 14 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 MACAULAY (Lord). ESSAYS (continued). 
 
 CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Student's Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 People's Edition, 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 8s. 
 
 Trevelyan Edition, 2 vols. Crown Bvo.gs. 
 Cabinet Edition, 4 vols. Post 8vo. 245. 
 Library Edition, 3 vols. 8vo. %6s. 
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 Addison and Walpole. 
 Frederic the Great. 
 Croker's Boswell's Johnson. 
 Hallam's Constitutional History. 
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 The Earl of Chatham (Two Essays). 
 
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 Banke and Gladstone. 
 Milton and Hachiavelli. 
 Lord Bacon. 
 Lord Clive. 
 
 Lord Byron, and the Comic Drama- 
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 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF LORD MACAULAY. 
 
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 MACFARREW (Sir G. A.). LECTURES ON HARMONY. 8vo. izs. 
 
 MACKAIL (J. W.). SELECT EPIGRAMS FROM THE GREEK AN- 
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 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF BANKING. Vol. I. 8vo. iss., 
 
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 THE TH EORY OF CREDIT. 8vo. Vol. I. [New Edition in the J J ress] ; 
 
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 16 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
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 i8 A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
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 of the Earth, and 24 Zodiacal Haps, 
 
 &c. Demy 410. $s. 
 Strength and Happiness. With 9 
 
 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. y. 
 Strength: How to get Strong and 
 
 keep Strong. Crown 8vo. 2s. 
 Bough Ways Made Smooth. Essay son 
 
 Scientific Subjects. Crown 8vo. y. 
 Our Place among Infinities. Cr. 8vo. 5.1. 
 The Expanse of Heaven. Cr. 8vo. y. 
 The Great Pyramid. C'rown 8vo. y. 
 Myths and Marvels of Astronomy 
 
 Crown 8vo. y. 
 Nature Studies. By Grant Allen, A. 
 
 Wilson, T. Foster, E. Clodd, and 
 
 R. A. Proctor. Crown 8vo. y. 
 Leisure Readings. By E. Clodd, A. 
 
 W r ilson, T. Foster, A. C. Ranyard. 
 
 and R. A. Proctor. Crown 8vo. 5-f. 
 
 PRYCE (John). THE ANCIENT BRITISH CHURCH: an Historical 
 Essay. C'rown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 RANSOME (Cyril). THE RISE OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERN- 
 MENT IN ENGLAND : being a Series of Twenty Lectures. Cro\\ n Svo. 6s. 
 
 RAWLINSON (Canon Q.). THE HISTORY OF PHCENICIA. Svo. 24;. 
 
 RENDLE (William) and NORMAN (Philip). THE INNS OF OLD 
 SOUTHWARK. and their Associations. With Illustrations. Royal Svo. 28.1. 
 
 RIBOT (Th.). TH E PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION. Crown Svo. y. 
 
 RICH (A.). A DICTIONARY OF ROMAN AND GREEK ANTIQUITIES. 
 With 2000 \\'oodcuts. Crown Svo. 75. 6<l.
 
 20 A CATALOGUE OF BOOK'S IN GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 RICHARDSON (Dr. B. W.). NATIONAL HEALTH. A Review of 
 the Works of Sir Edwin Chadwick, K.C. B. Crown 4^. 6d. 
 
 RILEY (Athelstan). ATHOS ; or, The Mountain of the Monks. With 
 Map and 29 Illustrations. 8vo. 215. 
 
 ROBERTS (Alexander). GREEK THE LANGUAGE OF CHRIST 
 AND HIS APOSTLES. 8vo. i8s. 
 
 ROGET( John Lewis). A HISTORY OFTHE 'OLD WATER COLOUR- 
 SOCIETY. 2 vols. Royal 8vo. 425. 
 
 ROGET (Peter M.). THESAURUS OF ENGLISH WORDS AND 
 PHRASES. Crown 8vo. IQS. 6d. 
 
 RONALDS (Alfred). THE FLY-FISHER'S ETYMOLOGY. With 20 
 Coloured Plates. 8vo. 14^. 
 
 ROSSETTI (Maria Francesca). A SHADOW OF DANTE : being an 
 Essay towards studying Himself, his World, and his Pilgrimage. Cr.8vo. ios.6d. 
 
 RUSSELL. A LIFE OF LORD JOHN RUSSELL. By SPENCER WALPOLE. 
 2 vols. 8vo. 36$. Cabinet Edition, 2 vols. Crown 8vo. i2s. 
 
 SEEBOHM (Frederick). THE OXFORD REFORMERS JOHN 
 COLET, ERASMUS, AND THOMAS MORE. 8vo. i+r. 
 
 THE ENGLISH VILLAGE COMMUNITY Examined in its Re- 
 lations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems, &c. 13 Maps and Plates. 8vo. i6s. 
 
 THE ERA OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. With Map. 
 
 Fcp. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 SEWELL (Elizabeth M.). STORIES AND TALES. Crown 8vo. is. 6d. 
 each, cloth plain ; 2s. 6d. each, cloth extra, gilt edges : 
 
 Amy Herbert. 
 The Earl's Daughter. 
 The Experience of Life. 
 A Glimpse of the World. 
 Cleve Hall. 
 
 Katharine Ashton. 
 Margaret Percival. 
 Laneton Parsonage. 
 Ursula. 
 
 Gertrude. 
 Ivors. 
 Home Life. 
 After Life. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE. BOWDLER'S FAMILY SHAKESPEARE, i vol. 8vo. 
 With 36 Woodcuts, 14^., or in 6 vols. Fcp. 8vo. zis. 
 
 - OUTLINE OF THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE. By J. O. 
 HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS. 2 vols. Royal 8vo. 1 u. 
 
 - SHAKESPEARE'S TRUE LIFE. By JAMES WALTER. With 500 
 Illustrations. Imp. 8vo. 2is. 
 
 THE SHAKESPEARE BIRTHDAY BOOK. By MARV F. DUNBAR. 
 
 321110. TJ. 6cl. cloth. With Photographs, 321110. 5^. Drawing -Room Edition, 
 with Photographs, Fcp. 8vo. los. G.I. 
 
 SHORT (T. V.). SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF 
 ENGLAND to the Revolution of 1688. Crown 8vo. js. 6d.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN, 6> CO. 21 
 
 SILVER LIBRARY, The. Crown 8vo. price 33. 6d. each volume. 
 
 She : A History of Adventure. By II. 
 
 Rider Haggard. 32 Illustrations. 
 
 Allan Quatermain. By H. Rider 
 Haggard. With 20 Illustrations. 
 
 Colonel Quaritch, V.C. : a Tale of 
 Country Life. By H. Rider Haggard. 
 
 Cleopatra. By H. Rider Haggard. 
 With 29 Full-page Illustrations. 
 
 Micah Clarke. A Tale of Monmouth's 
 Rebellion. By A. Conan Doyle. 
 
 Petland Revisited. By the Rev. J. G. 
 Wood. With 33 Illustrations. 
 
 StrangeDwellings : aDescriptionofthc 
 Habitationsof Animals. By the Rev. 
 J. G. Wood. With 60 Illustrations. 
 
 Out of Doors. Original Articles on 
 Practical Natural History. By the 
 Rev. J. G. Wood, n Illustrations. 
 
 Familiar History of Birds. By Edward 
 Stanley, D.D. 160 Illustrations. 
 
 Eight Years in Ceylon. By Sir S. W. 
 Baker. With 6 Illustrations. 
 
 Rifle and Hound in Ceylo.-. By Sir 
 
 S. W. Baker. With 6 lllu_ 'rations 
 
 Story of Creation : a Plain Account of 
 Evolution. By Edward Clodd. 
 With 77 Illustrations. 
 
 Life of the Duke of Wellington. By the 
 Rev. G. R. Gleig. With Portrait. 
 
 History of the Romans under the 
 Empire. By the Very Rev. Charles 
 Merivale. 8 vols. 
 
 Memoirs of Major-General Sir Henry 
 Havelock. By J. Clark Marshman 
 
 Short Studies on Great Subjects. B\ 
 James A. Froude. 4 vols. 
 
 Caesar : a Sketch. By James A. Froude. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle: a History of hi> 
 Life. By J. A. Froude. 1795-1855. 
 2 vols. 1834-1881. 2 vols. 
 
 The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: an Irish 
 Romance of the Last Century. By 
 James A. Froude. 
 
 Visits to Remarkable Places. By 
 William Howitt. 80 Illustrations. 
 
 Field and Hedgerow. Last Essays of 
 Richard Jefferies. With Portrait. 
 
 The Story of My Heart; My Auto- 
 biography. By Richard Jefferies. 
 
 Apologia Pro Yita Sua. By Cardinal 
 Newman. 
 
 Callista : a Tale of the Third Century. 
 By Cardinal Newman. 
 
 Loss and Gain : a Tale. By Cardinal 
 Newman. 
 
 Essays, Critical and Historical. By 
 
 Cardinal Newman. 2 vols. 
 
 An Essay on the Development of 
 Christian Doctrine. By Cardinal 
 Newman. 
 
 The Arians of the Fourth Century. 
 By Cardinal Newman. 
 
 Verses on Various Occasions. By 
 
 Cardinal Newman. 
 
 Parochial and Plain Sermons. By- 
 Cardinal Newman. 8 vols. 
 
 Selection, adapted to the Seasons of 
 the Ecclesiastical Year, from the 
 ' Parochial and Plain Sermons '. By 
 Cardinal Newman. 
 
 Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans 
 in Catholic Teaching Considered. 
 
 By Cardinal Newman. 2 vols. 
 
 The Idea of a University defined and 
 Illustrated. By Cardinal Newman. 
 
 Essays on Biblical and Ecclesiastical 
 Miracles. By Cardinal Newman. 
 
 Discussions and Arguments onYarious 
 Subjects. By Cardinal Newman. 
 
 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of 
 
 Assent. By Cardinal Newman. 
 
 The Elements of Banking. By Henry 
 D. Macleod. 
 
 A Voyage in the ' Sunbeam '. With 
 66 Illustrations. By Lady Brassey.
 
 22 A CA TALOGUE OF BOOKS IN GENERAL L1TERA TURE 
 
 SMITH (R. Bosworth) CARTHAGE AND THE CARTHAGINIANS. 
 Maps, Plans, &c. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 SOPHOCLES. Translated into English Verse. By ROBERT WHITELAW. 
 Crown 8vo. 8s. 6d. 
 
 STANLEY (E.). A FAMILIAR HISTORY OF BIRDS. With 160 Wood- 
 cuts. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 
 STEEL ( J. H.). A TREATISE OX THE DISEASES OF THE DOG ; 
 being a Manual of Canine Pathology. 88 Illustrations. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 A TREATISE ON THE DISEASES OF THE OX ; being a Manual 
 of Bovine Pathology. 2 Plates and 117 Woodcuts. 8vo. 155. 
 
 - A TREATISE ON THE DISEASES OF THE SHEEP; being a 
 Manual of Ovine Pathology. With Coloured Plate and 99 Woodcuts. 8vo. izs. 
 
 STEPHEN (Sir James). ESSAYS IN ECCLESIASTICAL BIO- 
 GRAPHY. Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 STEPHEN'S (H. Morse). A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLU- 
 TION. 3 vols. 8vo. Vol. I. iSs. Ready. [Vot. //. in the press. 
 
 STEVENSON" (Robt. Louis). A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. 
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 THE DYNAMITER. Fcp. 8vo. is. sewed, is. 6d. cloth. 
 
 - STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Fcp. 8vo. 
 15. sewed, is. 6d. cloth. 
 
 STEVENSON (Robert Louis) and OSBOURNE (Lloyd). THE 
 
 WRONG BOX. Crown 8vo. 5*. 
 
 STOCK (St. George). DEDUCTIVE LOGIC. Fcp. 8vo. 3 s. 6d. 
 
 ' STONEHENGE.' THE DOG IN HEALTH AND DISEASE. With 84 
 Wood Engravings. Square Crown 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 STRONG (Herbert A.), LOGEM AN ( Willem S.) and WHEELER 
 
 (B. I.). INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE HISTORY OF 
 LANGUAGE. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 SUPERNATURAL RELIGION ; an Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revela- 
 tion. 3 vols. 8vo. 365. 
 
 REPLY (A) TO DR. LIGHTFOOT'S ESSAYS. By the Author of ' Super- 
 natural Religion '. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 SYMES (J. E.). PRELUDE TO MODERN HISTORY: being a Brief 
 Sketch of the World's History from the Third to the Ninth Century. With 5 
 Maps. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 TAYLOR (Colonel Meadows). A STUDENT'S MANUAL OF THE 
 HISTORY OF INDIA, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. Crown 
 8vo. 7-r. 6d. 
 
 THOMPSON (D. Greenleaf). THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: an Intro- 
 duction to the Practical Sciences. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 - A SYSTEM OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols. 8vo. 36*. 
 
 - THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS OF THE HUMAN MIND. 8vo. 
 75. 6d. 
 
 SOCIAL PROGRESS : an Essay. 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 - THE PHILOSOPHY OF FICTION IN LITERATURE: an Essay. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s.
 
 PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 23 
 
 THREE IN NORWAY. By Two of THEM. With a Map and 59 Illustrations. 
 Crown 8vo. 2s. boards ; zs. 6d. cloth. 
 
 TOYNBEE (Arnold). LECTURES ON THE INDUSTRIAL REVO- 
 LUTION OF THE i8th CENTURY IN ENGLAND. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 TREVELYAN (Sir G. O., Bart.).-THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF 
 
 LORD MACAU LAY. 
 
 Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6 
 Student's Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 Cabinet Edition, 2 vols. Cr. 8vo. izs. 
 Library Edition, 2 vols. 8vo. 365. 
 
 - THE EARLY HISTORY OF CHARLES JAMES FOX. Library 
 Edition, 8vo. iSs. Cabinet Edition, Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 TROLLOPE (Anthony). THE WARDEN. Cr. 8vo. is. bds., is. 6rf. cl. 
 
 - BARCHESTER TOWERS. Crown 8vo. is. boards, is. 6d. cloth. 
 VIRGIL. PUBLI VERGILI MARONIS BUCOLICA, GEORGICA, 
 
 -.4CNEIS; the Works of VIRGIL, Latin Text, with English Commentary and 
 Index. By B. H. KENNEDY. Crown 8vo. IDS. 6d. 
 
 - THE .4NEID OF VIRGIL. Translated into English Verse. By 
 John Conington. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 - THE POEMS OF VIRGIL. Translated into English Prose. By 
 John Conington. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 - THE ECLOGUES AND GEORGICS OF VIRGIL. Translated from 
 the Latin by J. W. Mackail. Printed on Dutch Hand-made Paper. i6mo. 55. 
 
 WAKEMAN (H. O.) and HASSALL (A.).-ESSAYS INTRODUC- 
 TORY TO THE STUDY OF ENGLISH CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY. 
 By Resident Members of the University of Oxford. Edited by H. O. WAKE- 
 MAN and A. HASSALL. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 WALKER (A. Campbell-). THE CORRECT CARD; or, How to Play 
 at Whist ; a Whist Catechism. Fcp. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 WALPOLE (Spencer). HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE CON- 
 CLUSION OF THE GREAT WAR IN 1815101858. Library Edition. 5 
 vols. 8vo. 4 ioj. Cabinet Edition. 6 vols. Crown 8vo. 6s. each. 
 
 WELLINGTON. LIFE OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. By the 
 Rev. G. R. GLKIG. Crown 8vo. y. 6c/. 
 
 WELLS (David A.). RECENT ECONOMIC CHANGES and their Effect 
 on the Production and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-being of Society. 
 Crown 8vo. TOS. 6d. 
 
 WENDT (Ernest Emil). PAPERS ON MARITIME LEGISLATION, 
 with a Translation of the German Mercantile Laws relating to Maritime Com- 
 merce. Royal 8vo. ^i us. 6d. 
 
 WEYMAN (Stanley J.). THE HOUSE OF THE WOLF : a Romance. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 WHATELY (E. Jane).-- ENGLISH SYNONYMS. Edited by Archbishop 
 WHATKLY. Fcp. 8vo. 3^. 
 
 - LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF ARCHBISHOP WHATELY. 
 With Portrait. Crown 8vo. jos. 6d. 
 
 WHATELY (Archbishop). ELEMENTS OF LOGIC. Cr. 8vo. <jj. &/. 
 
 - ELEMENTS OF RHETORIC. Crown 8vo. ^s. 67. 
 
 - LESSONS ON REASONING. Fcp. 8vo. i.f. 6d. 
 
 BACON'S ESSAYS, with Annotations. 8vo. los. 6d.
 
 24 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. LONGMANS, GREEN, &> CO. 
 
 WILCOCKS (J. C.). THE SEA FISHERMAN. Comprising the Chief 
 Methods of Hook and Line Fishing in the British and other Seas, and Remarks 
 on Nets, Boats, and Boating. Profusely Illustrated. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 WILLICH (Charles M.). POPULAR TABLES for giving Information 
 for ascertaining the value of Lifehold, Leasehold, and Church Property, the 
 Public Funds, &c. Edited by H. BENCE JONES. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 WILLOUGHBY (Captain Sir John C.). EAST AFRICA AND ITS 
 BIG GAME. The Narrative of a Sporting Trip from Zanzibar to the Borders of 
 the Masai. Illustrated by G. D. Giles and Mrs. Gordon Hake. Royal 8vo. ais. 
 
 WITT (Prof.) Works by. Translated by Frances Younghusband 
 
 - THE TROJAN WAR. Crown 8vo. 2s. 
 
 - MYTHS OF HELLAS; or, Greek Tales. Crown 8vo. 3*. 6d. 
 
 - THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES. Crown 8vo. 3*. 6d. 
 
 - THE RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND ; being the Story of 
 Xenophon's ' Anabasis '. With Illustrations. 
 
 WOLFF (Henry W.). RAMBLES IN THE BLACK FOREST. Crown 
 8vo. js. 6d. 
 
 - THE WATERING PLACES OF THE VOSGES. With Map. Crown 
 8vo. 4J. 6d. 
 
 WOOD (Rev. J. G.).HOMES WITHOUT HANDS ; a Description of the 
 Habitations of Animals, classed according to the Principle of Construction. 
 With 140 Illustrations. 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 - INSECTS AT HOME; a Popular Account of British Insects, their 
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 - INSECTS ABROAD ; a Popular Account of Foreign Insects, their 
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 BIBLE ANIMALS ; a Description of every Living Creature mentioned 
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 - STRANGE DWELLINGS; abridged from ' Homes without Hands'. 
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 - OUT OF DOORS ; a Selection of Original Articles on Practical Natural 
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 - PETLAND REVISITED. With 33 Illustrations. Crown Svo. 35. 6d. 
 YOUATT (William). THE HORSE. With numerous Woodcuts. Svo. js, 6d. 
 
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 ZELLER (Dr. E.). HISTORY OF ECLECTICISM IN GREEK PHILO- 
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 - THE STOICS, EPICUREANS, AND SCEPTICS. Translated by 
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