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THE RELIGION OF THE 
 COMMON MAN 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE RELIGION 
 
 OF 
 
 THE COMMON MAN 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR HENRY WRIXON, K.C. 
 
 If 
 
 AUTHOR OF " THE PATTERN NATION," ETC. ETC. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1909 
 
W 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 CF 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE question whether the foundation prin- 
 ciple of religion, that there is a God whom 
 men ought to worship, is based upon truth, 
 has often been discussed in our time. In 
 this inquiry there is nothing new, since it 
 has engaged the mind of man ever since the 
 dawn of human thought. What is new now 
 is, that it is no longer confined to philo- 
 sophers and theologians, but has been 
 brought down among the crowd, is ventilated 
 in cheap literature, and debated by popular 
 speakers at Sunday gatherings in the parks. 
 All free discussion must produce some error, 
 and especially so in such a subject as this, 
 where any man can ask a question which no 
 
 V 
 
 192607 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 man can answer, and where the talk of 
 the streets can propound problems, and also 
 pronounce upon them, which the Imperial 
 thinkers of the race have pondered over for 
 ages. And sometimes, taking a first -im- 
 pression view of things, it would seem as if 
 this surface discussion of religion had so 
 discredited it, and indeed its object, the 
 Creator too, that little was left for mankind 
 but to tacitly discard it and let it quietly die 
 out, like the old faith in Oracles, or the more 
 recent belief in sorcery and witchcraft ; 
 while men say, some openly, more in their 
 hearts, that there is no God. 
 / But such a view of the subject would be 
 a mistake. The fact is that Religion has 
 reality behind it, and is indestructible in 
 the heart of man. Hence it survives the 
 attacks of its foes, and the mistakes of its 
 friends, and also the revelations of science, 
 though they destroy primitive beliefs which 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 used to be considered necessary for its 
 support. And it remains to-day still a 
 living force among us, responding to a 
 natural instinct of the heart for communion 
 with its Creator, and supplying a needful 
 support to mankind in the stress of life. 
 Not a few plain men realise this fact for 
 themselves, and are satisfied that there is 
 truth in religion, both from the conclusions 
 of their intellect, and also from the needs 
 of their nature. 
 
 The thoughts of these men and the 
 reasons which influence them, though they 
 may lack the finish of the speculations of 
 the philosopher, have a special value of 
 their own, as being the natural product 
 of the mind of plain men, the rough ore 
 of the human intellect, though it be not 
 wrought into perfect shape by the cunning 
 hand of the skilled artificer. Thus if some of 
 the crowd discredit religion, others are true 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 to it, and as we are among the crowd, we 
 may as well take the voices on both sides. 
 
 But these men who hold to religion, 
 attract little notice amidst the din and 
 bustle of the highway. They do not engage 
 the attention which is given to those who 
 raise the flag of revolt, and renounce 
 allegiance to the old standard of faith. So 
 they think on to themselves in silence. 
 But this is not owing to want of mental 
 discernment on their part, or to a craven 
 disposition which quails before free inquiry 
 and the truth, whatever it be, to which it 
 leads. They think out their conclusions 
 quite as earnestly as the innovators, 
 and perhaps more impartially ; not being 
 fascinated by the glamour which attaches 
 to novelty, and to the assertion of in- 
 tellectual superiority over other men, and 
 old beliefs. It may be of value to us to 
 learn something of the thoughts of men 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IX 
 
 such as these upon this subject, a subject 
 of which that man does not live, who can 
 say that it is no concern of his. 
 
 The object of the following pages, then, 
 is to record the reflections and the con- 
 clusions of a man of average intellect and 
 ordinary information, as he muses upon and 
 wrestles with the problem of his existence 
 here and his future destiny, and seeks to 
 discover, if not a complete solution of that 
 problem, light at least enough to guide him 
 on his earthly journey. To illustrate his 
 ideas, we have at times made reference to 
 the works of philosophers, with which he 
 himself, possibly, could not claim acquaint- 
 ance. But throughout, his thoughts are his 
 own. And in the last resort all philosophy, 
 and all metaphysics, must justify itself to 
 the plain mind of mankind. 
 
 In these pages we have styled him the 
 " Common Man." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Is RELIGION DYING OUT? i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE COMMON MAN 14 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 UNLETTERED THOUGHT 21 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MIND AND THE MORAL SENSE ... 44 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 HISTORY 77 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PHILOSOPHY . . . . . . .105 
 
 xi 
 
xii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BELIEF . . . . . . . .122 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 DIFFICULTIES 134 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 WHENCE THE EVIL? . . . . . .144 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 SUMMARY 173 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE 
 COMMON MAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IS RELIGION DYING OUT? 
 
 IT is declared in the fifty-third Psalm that 
 " The fool hath said in his heart, There is no 
 God." It is to be observed that in David's 
 time, if David be the author of this psalm, 
 the imputation against the foolish person is, 
 not that he makes open declaration of his 
 disbelief in a Deity, but only that he says 
 it in his heart. And it is probable that 
 in these words the Psalmist truly describes 
 what in the past ages of the world has been 
 the attitude of most of those who were 
 wanting in "wisdom," to use the word in 
 an ancient sense, in regard to the truths of 
 
 B 
 
2 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 religion. Such men generally kept their 
 ideas to themselves, and did not openly 
 challenge the public faith in God; nor would 
 they have had much sympathy from their 
 fellow-men in such a defiance of the generally 
 accepted creed. Probably they did not in- 
 terrogate themselves very closely as to what 
 their ideas on the subject really were, but at 
 least they did not obtrude them upon the 
 public. Such discussion of the subject as 
 there was, the learned carried on among 
 themselves, sometimes in the dead languages, 
 but always in a literature that did not reach 
 the mass of men. 
 
 The fact then, that in our time the 
 existence of the Deity, and with it the 
 truth of the religious conception of life, is 
 disbelieved by some in the quiet seclusion 
 of their own personality, need not cause 
 surprise to thoughtful men, and would not 
 call for special comment or investigation. 
 But what does give reason for reflection 
 and some disquietude, is when we see this 
 disbelief in one of the main foundations of 
 human character, proclaimed aloud among 
 
THE COMMON MAN 3 
 
 the crowd, and welcomed as some new 
 development of human progress and en- 
 lightenment. The difficult, and at times 
 perplexing problems, which are involved in 
 the question of the truth of religion, and 
 which used to tax the strength of the trained 
 intellects of the world, are now passed on to 
 the contention of the market-place. And, 
 since it is not possible to demonstrate, as a 
 matter of logical proof, all the truths upon 
 which religion rests, any more than it is to 
 demonstrate the foundation facts of any 
 science, it is not to be wondered at if the 
 first impression of many is, that what are 
 called the truths of religion are, after all, 
 merely fictions fancies of the pious mind, 
 destined to disperse, like the impalpable 
 shades of night, before the rising light of 
 the growing knowledge and discernment of 
 modern times. 
 
 Various causes, and causes most of which 
 we regard with just satisfaction, despite 
 the difficulties which they induce, have con- 
 tributed to this result. General education, 
 superficial, as it must necessarily be as far 
 
4 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 as this subject is concerned, cheap literature, 
 the free and easy debates of the popular 
 club and the park gathering, private judg- 
 ment and the disposition which is fostered 
 in times of change to throw off old beliefs, 
 not so much because they have been proved 
 to be untrue, as because they are old, all 
 these, while they secure the people from 
 ancient superstitions, at the same time leave 
 them faced by the difficulties which freedom, 
 whether civil or religious, always brings 
 with it to temper its blessings. The people 
 have escaped from the despotism of Egypt, 
 but they have still to find their way through 
 the windings of the wilderness. 
 
 This application of the principle of equality 
 to the human mind is the latest, and in some 
 respects most serious, phase of its develop- 
 ment. To search after truth independently, 
 each man for himself, was not a privilege 
 given to, or shall we say, a burden cast 
 upon, mankind in the past. The philoso- 
 phers of Greece and Rome, while they 
 smiled at the credulity of the people, yet 
 paid outward homage to the national religion, 
 
i THE COMMON MAN 5 
 
 and even took part in the ceremonies 
 connected with it. Some of them expressly 
 declare that it is one's duty not to disturb 
 the common faith. In our own country 
 the early school of Freethinkers would have 
 scorned to address their disquieting theories 
 to the crowd. They held that religion was 
 necessary for the people. Hume advised 
 that a young friend of his, who held dis- 
 believing views similar to his own, should 
 nevertheless keep to the Church as a profes- 
 sion, since it offered the best provision for a 
 man of letters. He writes : " It is putting 
 too great a respect upon the vulgar and their 
 superstitions, to pique oneself upon sincerity 
 with regard to them. Did one ever make 
 it a point of honour to speak the truth to 
 children or madmen ? I wish it were still 
 in my power to be a hypocrite in this 
 particular." 
 
 There is this, at least, to be said for 
 the principle of authority in matters of faith. 
 In the past when some great prophet, or 
 leader of men proclaimed his message to 
 the people, which was by them implicitly 
 
6 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 accepted, the most ignorant and simple- 
 minded man in the crowd had the benefit of 
 all the enlightenment which the new faith 
 could confer. The message was supported 
 by all the weight which the personality of 
 the prophet could give to it, and it dealt 
 with a subject which men in general did not, 
 as yet, claim to be able to deal with them- 
 selves. " I am the Lord thy God. Thou 
 shalt have none other Gods but Me." The 
 poorest Israelite of the tribes who thronged 
 round the plain at the base of Sinai, was at 
 once enlightened by this majestic declaration 
 of the unity of the Deity. The flaming 
 mountain, the thunder, the voice from 
 Heaven itself, of which the Jewish legend 
 tells, might give an awful surrounding to 
 the revelation, but they added nothing to 
 the sublime truth itself, which then became 
 the patrimony of the whole people, as much 
 a part of each Israelite's life as if he had 
 discovered it for himself. It remains to the 
 present time the most distinguishing feature 
 in the faith of their descendants. The day 
 of prophets is now left behind us, and each 
 
r THE COMMON MAN y 
 
 man is his own prophet. If the masses are 
 now to be inspired they must get the 
 inspiration from themselves. But the fact 
 that religion is now remitted to the judgment 
 of the people at large, does not make the 
 problems which lie at its base less difficult 
 to grapple with, than the philosophers of 
 every age have already found them to be. 
 There is nothing worth having but the 
 price must be paid for it. Free discussion, 
 the blessing of our age, while it leads some 
 men to truth, leads other men to error. It 
 is no wonder if a subject which has tasked 
 the intellects of the imperial thinkers of the 
 world, should prove perplexing to the casual 
 debater in the street. If there is no royal 
 road to learning, there is no public highway 
 to truth. 
 
 The difficulties, too, of religion, it must 
 be admitted, have been increased by the 
 false positions which its friends have taken 
 up in the past, and which have, one after 
 another, had to be abandoned before the 
 onward sweep of knowledge. In the name 
 of misunderstood revelations, they invaded 
 
8 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 the province of science, and disastrously 
 linked the cause of religion to theories about 
 man and Nature, which the advance of 
 knowledge absolutely disproves. It can- 
 not be wondered at if this leaves the 
 impression that the rest of what has been 
 taught in the name of religion will in time 
 be as readily refuted, as have been the false 
 positions which are now abandoned. And 
 in this aspect of the subject, we must add 
 that one of the least recognised, but yet 
 most insidious of the difficulties with which 
 the cause of intelligent Belief has to contend, 
 is, strange to say, religious education itself, 
 the methods which are too often adopted 
 in the religious education of the young. 
 The subject, no doubt, is a difficult one in 
 which to strike the true medium. But what 
 is the fact ? No thinking person now holds 
 that the Bible is literally inspired, or believes 
 in the reality, as facts, of all the narratives 
 which it contains. No Church now demands 
 such a belief. The ancient legends were 
 generally above the level of their age and often 
 embody living truth, but they are legends. 
 
THE COMMON MAN 9 
 
 It impairs the value and the meaning of 
 those venerable writings, when we impute 
 to their authors a knowledge of Nature and 
 her mysteries, which it is obvious that 
 Providence had not, in their time, imparted 
 to the sons of men. Yet, we often go on 
 teaching to the young, in the early and 
 confiding years of childhood, a series of 
 narratives as facts, and facts surrounded by 
 the authority of religion, which when they 
 are out of the schoolroom, they find that all 
 men, their parents and teachers included, 
 are agreed in holding to be mythical, and 
 not facts at all. Eve and her apple, once 
 a grim warning to the learner, he discovers 
 to be a subject of pleasantry among his 
 elders. What is the natural, though mis- 
 taken conclusion ? Simply that the young 
 people, ^as they begin to think, readily settle 
 down to the conviction, not only that the 
 narratives are myths, but that all which 
 they were taught, as connected with them, 
 is equally illusory. A chilling, dubious 
 feeling of the unreality of religion sets in, 
 a feeling that it is not meant seriously for 
 
io THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 grown-up people, but only a make-believe 
 for children. And so a passive condition 
 of unbelief permeates through the young. 
 Thus the cause of Faith becomes dis- 
 credited, so much so, that, at times, one 
 might think that the foundations of religion 
 themselves were crumbling away. 
 
 But all the time we have still the facts 
 of existence to face, and we have human 
 nature to deal with. Man remains the re- 
 ligious animal that he ever was, and the 
 moral and spiritual principle in his nature 
 imperatively demands relations with his 
 Maker. And not less does he, in the 
 emergencies of life, feel practically the need 
 of religion. Even if he would, he can- 
 not wholly free himself from this feeling. 
 Life is such a serious thing, its course is 
 often so perplexing, its events at times so 
 tragic, with its inevitable, yet baffling end 
 in the apparent extinction of the grave, 
 life is such, this life of ours, that man to 
 bear the burden requires support from 
 above, if he is not to sink into a mere 
 animal existence, and to rest content with 
 
i THE COMMON MAN 11 
 
 the hopeless philosophy, " Let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die." History 
 proves the reality of these factors in human 
 nature. From the infancy of the race on- ' 
 wards, we find man ever seeking for light 
 to reveal to him something of his source and 
 his destiny, and ever struggling to wrest 
 from the eternal Heavens, a response to the 
 promptings of that moral faculty which he 
 finds to be a part of his nature. And the 
 different families of the earth claim to have 
 had inspirations of the truth from God Him- 
 self, and these inspirations have moulded the 
 course of successive civilisations. The most 
 living portion of man's history, is that which 
 deals with his development as a moral 
 being. In these aspirations towards his 
 Maker, man differs from the other animals 
 who inhabit this globe. Are all those 
 aspirations vain ? Are all the longings of 
 the human heart to have communion with 
 its Source delusions ? Has the universal 
 voice of human supplication to Heaven, 
 poured forth in continuing succession from 
 age to age, from civilisation to civilisation, 
 
 
12 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 like one great constant prayer from the race 
 of man to its Creator, no real object to 
 justify or explain it? Is it all at last to 
 end in blank nothingness ? If so, then our 
 existence here must be declared to be not 
 merely perplexing, but unmeaning and futile. 
 It would be a mockery of our nature, at the 
 same time that we were given a nature to 
 realise that mockery, and to feel despair 
 at it. The problem of human life would 
 become more inexplicable than ever, and the 
 spectacle of a noble man, devoting his life 
 to virtue and self-sacrifice, would be the 
 most meaningless and unaccountable thing 
 in God's creation. 
 
 The outlook of our civilisation then is 
 dreary, if its religion is going to loose its 
 hold upon men. It has no newer develop- 
 ment of Christianity to look to. It has not 
 yet lived up to th^ltandard which Christ set 
 before mankind. It possesses the foremost 
 religion of the world, and the alternative of 
 casting it off, is not some new faith, but a 
 delusive Pantheism or a dreary Materialism. 
 Civilisations cannot start afresh in matters 
 
THE COMMON MAN 13 
 
 of faith, any more than in other conditions 
 of national life. As for the individual man, 
 his needs remain as much as ever a part 
 of his nature ; the want of some support 
 on which to stay himself in this life, and 
 also the rest for his soul demanded by 
 his spiritual aspirations. These cannot be 
 satisfied by a philosophy of negation or of 
 incredulity, which proposes to wave aside 
 the claims of the human soul and the needs 
 of man in the stress of life, by telling him 
 not to mind them. It is with earnestness, 
 therefore, that the thinking man asks himself 
 the question : " Is it indeed true that there 
 is no God ? " 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE COMMON MAN 
 
 NOTWITHSTANDING the spread of disbelief 
 in our time, and amid all the perplexities 
 which popular speculations upon human life 
 and destiny create, there are still to-day 
 millions of plain men scattered over this 
 globe, who believe in God and worship Him, 
 as far as they know, in truth, and at least 
 with sincerity. These men are not masters 
 of the reasoning by which, among the learned, 
 religion is attacked upon the one side, or 
 defended on the other. They are not 
 familiar with the subtle metaphysical con- 
 troversies in which man and his soul, and 
 the exterior world, have been involved. To 
 this extent they may be said to be ignorant 
 men. But they have thought earnestly upon 
 
 14 
 
CHAP, ii THE COMMON MAN 15 
 
 the subject, and the sincere thoughts of the 
 plainest man, grappling with the mystery of 
 his existence, have a value of their own. 
 These men have been led by reasons which 
 appear to them to be sufficient reasons, to 
 believe in God and in His Government of 
 the world, and to have their lives influenced 
 by this belief. The fact that there are 
 millions of such men is in itself a great fact. 
 Even was what they believe not capable of 
 proof, still the fact that a considerable portion 
 of mankind do worship, as they are convinced, 
 their Creator, is one which must challenge 
 the attention of all reflecting men. 
 
 It may be instructive if we take the case 
 of one of these Common Men, and try to 
 follow out the reasoning, simple and un- 
 tutored though it may be, by which he 
 arrives at his momentous conclusions. He 
 does not, for his present purpose, call to his 
 aid the light of revelation, even though he 
 may believe that there has been such a light 
 shed in some form upon mankind ; since the 
 inquiry upon which he is now engaged, 
 precedes the question of the message of 
 
16 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 revealed religion. He can make no claim 
 to erudition. He misses, probably, in his 
 cogitations the more subtle phases of his 
 subject. Of some of the metaphysical argu- 
 ments he is ignorant, of others he can only 
 give a simple rendering of the way in which 
 things present themselves to his own mind. 
 Critics may declare that he fails to scientific- 
 ally handle the problems which he deals 
 with. But the value of his reflections, if 
 value they have, is that they are the natural 
 and sincere musings of a human soul faced 
 by the problems of existence, and struggling 
 to discover some principle of belief on which 
 to rest, which will respond to the instincts 
 of his heart and, at the same time, satisfy 
 the reasonable claims of his understanding. 
 On this raft, a frail one though it be, he 
 hopes to be borne over the " waves of this 
 troublesome life " to the end of his voyage, 
 and through its end, death. The specula- 
 tions of the philosopher, the discoveries of 
 the man of science, the keen subtleties of 
 the metaphysician, are wonderful things ; 
 but there is nothing more wonderful to 
 
THE COMMON MAN 17 
 
 contemplate, than the soul of man brought 
 to bay by the facts of existence, which stand 
 imminent before it, and casting about within 
 itself to satisfy its inherent craving for some 
 answer to the problem of the ages whence 
 its source, and what its destiny ? 
 
 The first question which presents itself to 
 our Common Man is the great, the funda- 
 mental one, whether there is indeed a God, 
 or whether in truth and in fact there is no 
 God ; whether it is a true conclusion that 
 there is one stupendous Power and Intelli- 
 gence, an infinite and independent Essence, 
 the Source and Preserver of all things ; or 
 whether the Universe is the product of, and 
 is impelled by, the unconscious force of 
 material powers, streams of blind impulse, 
 generated we know not how and tending 
 we know not whither? Of the object and 
 meaning of those streams of tendency, he 
 obviously cannot learn anything ; since, as 
 they are, on the supposition with which we 
 are dealing, themselves destitute of directing 
 intelligence, it is plain that he cannot dis- 
 cover it in them. The difficulty arises from 
 
i8 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 a want, not in him, in this case, but in them ; 
 not from the feebleness of his nature, but 
 from the blank in theirs. What man naturally 
 aspires to and tries to realise, is some great 
 Intelligence above him, shaping human 
 destiny by methods known to Him, if not 
 to us. Here is something to believe in and 
 to rest in if indeed it be a fact. Here is 
 something to meet what the soul of man has 
 sought after from the first, a Power above 
 it, which it can seek to raise itself to and have 
 communion with. But if there is no such 
 Intelligence, then there is nothing for this 
 soul of man to aspire to, and all religion is a 
 myth. All the prayers, and longings, and 
 expectations of men towards God, from the 
 infancy of the race onwards, would be like 
 the doings of some Eastern tribes of which 
 we read, when they seek to save themselves 
 from the effects of an eclipse of the sun. 
 As the eclipse begins they sound horns and 
 beat their tom-toms wildly, in the belief that 
 they will thus dispel the darkness ; and 
 when in fact the gloom does pass away, they 
 congratulate themselves upon the success of 
 
THE COMMON MAN 19 
 
 their efforts, and also give their gods thanks 
 for blessing their labours. 
 
 As for the Common Man, creation is 
 before him ; boundless space, the invisible 
 frame of all things, is around him ; he is faced 
 by Eternity, he communes with his own soul, 
 and it seems to him that if Creation had not 
 an intelligent source, it must have had an 
 unintelligent one, or have had no source at 
 all. In passing, it may be said that the very 
 ideas of this boundless space and endless 
 time appear to him to demand Deity as their 
 background. He lingers over this first 
 question which arises in his mind, for it 
 seems to him that much is involved in it ; 
 indeed, that everything is involved in it. 
 It is like the key to a position on a battle- 
 field. Whoever gets it has won the day, 
 though there may be a good deal of fighting 
 to be done in detail before the whole field 
 is carried. If there is an intelligent Power 
 presiding over the Universe, then not only 
 is religion true generally, but it will be 
 found that most of the postulates of religion 
 naturally follow. For an ancient notion, that 
 
20 THE RELIGION 
 
 CHAP. II 
 
 there is an Almighty Power, but that He 
 regards His creation with indifference, leav- 
 ing it to look after itself; or if observing it 
 at all, rather enjoying the struggles and 
 perplexities of the hapless sons of men, this 
 notion will be found to be, perhaps, the most 
 untenable of all the many theories upon this 
 momentous subject. Should our Common 
 Man then believe in a Maker and Ruler of 
 the Universe, or should he say in his heart 
 that there is no God? He is aware that 
 the incomprehensible faces him as the 
 ultimate phase of the existence of Deity. 
 But experience has taught him that he 
 must at times " believe " in things which he 
 cannot understand ; only it must be some- 
 thing which his intellect recommends to 
 him as a proper subject for belief, for faith. 
 The intellectual authority must bring it 
 before the spiritual, and submit it as a 
 matter properly coming within the spiritual 
 jurisdiction. His whole nature would revolt 
 against being called upon to take to itself 
 a mere futility. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 UNLETTERED THOUGHT 
 
 OUR Common Man in his unlettered 
 thoughts on the existence of Deity does 
 not stop to settle the questions raised by 
 the learned, as to how different sources of 
 the idea of God are to be traced in the 
 early history of mankind. How far it is 
 inherent in the human mind ; to what extent 
 it is owing to the impressions created in the 
 infancy of the race by the mighty forces of 
 Nature, or by the notion of ghosts and 
 local powers of the air, and how far it was 
 gradually developed out of early and natural 
 systems of many inferior types of Deity, 
 these and questions such as these, the 
 Common Man, we say, does not undertake 
 to deal with. He is not familiar with the 
 
 21 
 
22 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 vast field of interesting research upon them, 
 and it would not affect his convictions if 
 he were. The methods, how far direct or 
 how far gradual, or how far both, which 
 Providence may have chosen to give light 
 to mankind, do not seem to him to be the 
 essential part of the inquiry. The question 
 is, What light have we got? What con- 
 clusion ought a thinking man now to arrive 
 at? So he ponders over the problem for 
 himself, with such aid as the accumulated 
 experience of mankind may afford him. 
 
 And in his homely cogitations, he starts 
 with the foundation fact that he himself 
 exists. Here, again, he does not involve 
 himself in the learned disquisitions upon 
 this subject, which have perplexed mankind 
 without enlightening them ; for, indeed, he 
 is unacquainted with them. He follows out 
 his own natural reasoning upon the matter, 
 and argues from what he feels he has 
 knowledge of. He says to himself, " I 
 think, therefore I am " ; not a new idea 
 upon his part, certainly, but one which is 
 as satisfactory to him as it has been to 
 
in THE COMMON MAN 23 
 
 many others before him. As has been said, 
 he who doubts of everything else cannot 
 doubt that he doubts. And when he says, 
 " I exist/' he means to assert this of a dual 
 personality within himself; a body, and a 
 mind which dwells within the body, and 
 also a moral sense which is part of his 
 personality. To tell him that his mind is 
 nothing but an idea corresponding to certain 
 affections of his body, is to make a state- 
 ment which he is not able to believe ; 
 indeed, which he is not able to comprehend 
 the meaning of. Certainly he feels that 
 there is a mysterious sympathy between 
 his body and his mind. When his body is 
 weakened by sickness, his mind is also 
 often affected, though not always so, nor 
 necessarily so ; also he learns surprising 
 things about his brain, and the part which it 
 takes in thinking. It appears to him to be 
 a kind of thought organ, but not to create 
 thought, any more than a piano creates 
 the tune that is played on it. As to his 
 body and his mind, he is convinced, so far 
 as he can realise anything, that they are 
 
24 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 two distinct things, and not merely dual 
 sides of the one entity. Matter and mind 
 seem to him to be inherently different in 
 their nature. Matter may be changed from 
 one form to another form, as when you 
 burn a piece of paper. Obstruct an electric 
 current, and you make it take the form of 
 ight ; such is our power over energy to 
 transform it. But you cannot thus manipu- 
 late or alter the condition of mind. 
 
 Both thinking and sensation lead him to 
 this conclusion. With his body he can only 
 move from place to place, under certain 
 limited conditions. He can project his 
 mind in a moment to some star which is 
 billions and billions of miles distant, and can 
 busy himself in contemplating what he there 
 observes, and realising in his mind the 
 results, as he scrutinises the motion and the 
 constitution of the distant object. And were 
 such a star to be suddenly projected twice 
 the distance from his body, it would make 
 no difference to his mind. In a dream the 
 mind has presented to it and entertains, as 
 in its grasp, things which are distant from 
 
THE COMMON MAN 25 
 
 the body, and, in a few seconds, will have 
 drawn out before it the apparent transac- 
 tions of days or months. He also finds that 
 a great part of his body may be injured, 
 or even destroyed, without his mind being 
 affected. Further, it is common knowledge 
 that the particles of the body are con- 
 stantly changing and leaving it ; so that 
 the body of a man of thirty years of age is 
 not the same substance as it was when he 
 was twenty, nor at forty what it was at thirty, 
 and so on. But his mind is not altered by 
 these changes. It preserves its identity. 
 It is a matter of experience that mind 
 communicates with mind, owing to some 
 mysterious influence, when the two minds are 
 apart from one another, and notwithstanding 
 any material obstacles which may intervene. 
 So it seems to him that his mind and his 
 body are two distinct things, and his moral 
 sense different from both. When he meets 
 a friend and converses with him, he believes 
 that he is conversing not with his friend's 
 body, but with something within his friend's 
 body which animates it ; and when his friend 
 
 A 
 
 v UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
26 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 dies and he looks upon his corpse, he is 
 convinced that his friend is not there, but 
 only his " remains." In so thinking he is 
 supported by the universal belief of mankind, 
 that of the philosopher as well as of the 
 peasant. One of the most striking mani- 
 festations of religious thought in ancient 
 Greece, had its foundation in the belief in 
 the absolute distinction between the mind 
 and the body. " How shall we bury you ? " 
 was the question, Plato tells us, which the 
 disciple Crito asked of his master, just 
 before Socrates took the poison. "As you 
 please," replied the philosopher, " only don't 
 imagine, Crito, that you are burying me, 
 the Socrates who is speaking to you ; you 
 can only bury my body. I myself when I 
 drink the poison will bid you good-bye and 
 go away." 
 
 " I think, therefore I exist," then, says our 
 Common Man. Taking this as his starting- 
 point, his musings are withal logical, though 
 they do not lead him to absolute knowledge. 
 He finds it to be part of his nature to believe 
 that there is no effect without a cause ; and 
 
THE COMMON MAN 27 
 
 he also knows that this is the undeviating 
 experience and the universal belief of man- 
 kind. He exists, and he finds that he is 
 made up, not only of body and of mind, but 
 also of moral feelings ; and he concludes that 
 there must be some superior source from 
 which he and his qualities are derived. The 
 methods by which the superior Power may 
 have seen fit to evolve him or his qualities, 
 mental or moral, seem to him to be a 
 secondary consideration. All he concludes 
 is, that, however the thing is worked out or 
 explained, he must, somehow, have had an 
 intelligent and righteous source. In this 
 way he gets the conception of some great 
 power from whom he springs and upon 
 whom he is dependent. 
 
 This belief of his would, so far, be but an 
 imperfect guide in leading him to a general 
 conclusion. But when he goes further, and 
 applies his faculty of inquiry and observation 
 to the world outside him, he finds himself 
 confronted with facts which expand and 
 strengthen the belief which he derives from 
 his own qualities and his own existence. He 
 
28 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 sees that the world is full of marks of active 
 design, which are in daily operation through- 
 out all Nature. And he goes on to draw in 
 his mind the conclusion that this Creation 
 must have had a Creator, and that these 
 marks of design show a Designer. Why 
 this conviction ? Why does he conclude 
 that every effect must have had a cause ? 
 Because it is the final answer of his con- 
 sciousness. Upon this all science rests. 
 You must ever, in the end, come to something 
 which is known, but unproveable. True, 
 some friend who is more learned than he is, 
 may seek to stay the scope of his meditations 
 at the outset, by telling him that he is 
 assaying to deal with a matter of which he 
 knows nothing; and not only so, but of 
 which he can know nothing, since he has 
 knowledge of this world only, and has no 
 experience of any other worlds with which 
 he could compare his observations, and then 
 draw his conclusions. Also that if there be, 
 what he calls marks of design in Creation, 
 they by no means prove the ideal Deity 
 which he has in his mind ; that they do 
 
THE COMMON MAN 29 
 
 not reach to that extent, but only prove 
 something that is much less than he is 
 prepared to believe. 
 
 The Common Man is not silenced, nor 
 yet satisfied by these objections. He never 
 claimed that the argument from design 
 proved, in its entirety, the nature of God ; 
 and he does not deny that, as far as intellect 
 alone is concerned, he finds himself in regard 
 to some aspects of this subject in the same 
 position as we are in all branches of human 
 thought, scientific or religious, namely, faced 
 in the ultimate analysis by the unknowable. 
 But what he claims is, that when he discovers 
 intelligence, not blind movement, behind the 
 screen of Creation, he lays one part of the 
 foundation, on which afterwards is raised the 
 superstructure of his faith. As we will see 
 later on, the moral sense, and the lesson to be 
 learned from the moral element in humanity, 
 supply another buttress for the foundation of 
 that faith. Other considerations have their 
 weight. The completion of the superstruc- 
 ture is a spiritual affair. Only, in the first 
 instance, he wants to know if there is any- 
 
30 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 thing to build upon. His search is for some 
 reasonable basis, upon which to raise the 
 edifice of his faith. And hence at the outset 
 he is impressed by the evident marks of 
 design in the Universe, as they seem to him 
 to show intelligence at the back of Creation. 
 And what specially challenges his attention is, 
 not alone where this world came from, but 
 it is the active, incessant operations of some 
 Causing power, which he sees going on in 
 it every day, now. It is by no means a 
 question only of the inception of matter ; it 
 is the continuous series of existences and of 
 manifestations of activity which he sees daily 
 going on before his eyes, impelled by the 
 force of orderly principles, coming from some 
 source. Nowhere is chaos to be found, or 
 the traces of chaos. The analysis of " Cause," 
 into uniform sequence, appears to the 
 Common Man to be rather a postponement 
 of the question, than its solution. Does not, 
 he thinks within himself, such a disposition 
 of designing causes, toiling away to produce 
 their appropriate effects, toiling ceaselessly, 
 silently, admirably, demand for its explana- 
 
THE COMMON MAN 31 
 
 tion, intelligence behind it ? The Earth, 
 "it neweth every day" under the ever 
 pressing energy of these living forces. And 
 why should he not believe in the agency of 
 that intelligence? In the part of creation 
 of which we have direct knowledge, we are 
 far from having only dead matter and un- 
 conscious agencies to deal with. We find 
 it to be permeated with mind and teeming 
 with life. We have not only the ocean and 
 the tempest, the mountain and the flood ; 
 this earth has also her long roll of great 
 intellects, from Plato to Kant, from Homer 
 to Tennyson, from Pythagoras to Newton, 
 who have moulded the course of human 
 thought. And we have the spiritual leaders 
 of men, who called away the mind of the 
 race from material things to Heaven. And 
 is contriving mind, and the spirit that is a 
 force over things material, to be found no- 
 where else in God's creation ? And has it 
 never been there in the past ? From what 
 we see around us, and what we know of our 
 present state, are we driven to the necessity 
 of imagining the rise of all things to come 
 
32 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 about, without mind or purpose, in a manner 
 so foreign to our existing knowledge and 
 our inherent beliefs? Is this, he asks him- 
 self, reasonable ? No blind impulses trund- 
 ling things along somehow ; this idea seems 
 to him the most unbelievable of all things. 
 Thus he reasons from what he sees and 
 feels about him. And is he not justified in 
 doing so? Is he not justified in reasoning 
 from principles which are at the root of all 
 human knowledge? Is it any answer to 
 remind him that he is finite and that he can- 
 not grasp the Infinite? Because Providence 
 has decreed bounds to human knowledge, 
 is he not to trust his intellect as far as it 
 does lead him, to guide him in the twilight 
 of earthly life ? 
 
 Objections such as these do not prevent 
 our Common Man from observing the marks 
 of design with which Nature abounds, and 
 drawing from them the conclusion which 
 they naturally suggest to him. The very 
 amplitude of these and their regularity, 
 impair their effect. If there were only a 
 few of them, occurring now and then, they 
 
THE COMMON MAN 33 
 
 would excite more attention. It has been 
 truly observed, that if mankind after living 
 a life of darkness, were for the first time 
 to see the sun rise, all would acknowledge 
 a power Divine. But as these wonders 
 surround us on every side, and we run up 
 against them daily in our lives, we come to 
 regard them as matters of course, common- 
 place affairs, and do not take to heart the 
 lessons which they are ever spelling before 
 our eyes. 
 
 For example, consider one of the most 
 familiar facts of everyday life, the genera- 
 tion of the young. First, we find an 
 imperious instinct, traceable to what im- 
 mediate causes does not matter, implanted 
 in animals, in order to bring about that 
 union of the sexes, which, without such 
 an impelling force, there would be no in- 
 ducement to. Next we see, as a result of 
 this union, a surprising work of nature is 
 accomplished in the female, by which in 
 due time the new animal is produced. But 
 this alone would not carry out the purpose 
 of continuing life on the globe. For, if all 
 
34 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 the product of this union of animals were 
 of the male, or all were of the female sex, 
 then life on the earth would soon be extinct, 
 and so the object of generation be defeated. 
 Or if three-fourths, say, were male, or three- 
 fourths female, difficulty in carrying on life 
 and confusion would follow. Or if, again, 
 the product of the union of animals was an 
 uncertain matter, being sometimes a majority 
 of the one sex, and sometimes of another, 
 regular conditions of life and growth would 
 be defeated. But what do we find to be 
 the fact ? We find that about one-half of 
 the particles of life from which the young 
 develop, belong to the male sex, and the 
 other half to the female sex the small 
 majority of males, about five or six per cent, 
 being apparently provided, owing to some 
 prescience, to make up for the greater 
 wear and tear of male life, in hunting, 
 fighting, and living the outdoor life. Thus 
 the young being born into the world equally 
 male and female, life is enabled to be 
 continuously carried on. How this is 
 brought about we have no idea. All we 
 
THE COMMON MAN 35 
 
 know is, that if the unknown causes did 
 not operate unfailingly, and at the right 
 moment, to produce this equal disposition 
 of sex germs, the purpose of maintaining 
 life upon the planet would be soon defeated. 
 What makes the working out of such a 
 purpose the more striking, is that with 
 individual parents, the progeny may be all 
 male or all female, yet on the whole of 
 the births the balance of half and half is 
 maintained. 
 
 During the period of gestation, we find 
 that the organs of sight, hearing, digestion 
 of solids and so on, are being gradually 
 formed, without there being any need for 
 them at present, in the womb ; but for 
 which, by some pre-arrangement, every- 
 thing is ready and waiting in the outside 
 world, as soon as it is reached by birth. 
 When the young are produced, the means 
 taken to carry on the purpose of nature 
 are no less striking. The mother we 
 now speak of the mammalia is pro- 
 vided with a special means of nourishment 
 from herself, with which to feed her ofif- 
 
36 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 spring, and is impelled by an all powerful 
 instinct to defend them, if need be, at the 
 risk of her own life. As they grow up, 
 she seeks for suitable food for them, and 
 starves herself that they may be fed. In 
 itself, there is no reason for all this self- 
 sacrifice, so far as she is concerned ; but 
 without it, Nature's purpose to have life 
 carried on would be defeated. Then the 
 young, who at first cling to the mother 
 instinctively, forget all about her as soon 
 as they are strong enough to look after 
 themselves, and the need for her no longer 
 exists. The mother too, in the lower 
 animals, forgets all about them, and her 
 instincts, still pursuing the purpose of 
 nature, are devoted to a new set of off- 
 spring, until they too are launched in life. 
 There is no sense, we say, in a selfish 
 point of view, the point of view from 
 which natural instincts in life are generally 
 directed, for all this maternal devotion ; but 
 the purposes of the world, and of the Power 
 which directs them, render it necessary that 
 she should sacrifice herself, in order to 
 
in THE COMMON MAN 37 
 
 prevent the young from perishing after 
 birth. We see this speaking drama of 
 Nature going on so commonly around us 
 that we take little heed of it ; but we have, 
 nevertheless, staring us in the face at every 
 stage of it, the disposition of some direct- 
 ing Power. 
 
 So, at least, thinks the Common Man. 
 And it does not satisfy his inquiries, to be 
 told that what he observes does not point 
 to an intelligent direction, but only to 
 methods of evolution coming along in 
 some way which no one can comprehend. 
 The methods by which Creation may be 
 controlled are not, as has been said, the 
 important question to him, so long as the 
 directing Intelligence is there. But, that 
 these evidences of design typify merely 
 phases of a progressive development, which 
 arise from the blind working of the de- 
 structive powers of Nature in rejecting 
 unfit forms of life, and leaving the field to 
 better and stronger types, this he does not 
 believe. He can understand progressive 
 development as the means in the hand 
 
38 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 that directs the initial principle, but not as 
 the hand itself. 
 
 He learns, indeed, that some do hold that 
 it is owing to automatic principles of natural 
 selection, that those types of life are pre- 
 served which we see to survive in the 
 animal world, while others, owing to the 
 same cause, die out. So that, in regard to 
 the example we are dealing with, were any 
 type to fail in maintaining the due propor- 
 tion of male and female, it would naturally 
 soon be elbowed out of existence by those 
 in which the proper balance was maintained. 
 And that thus it comes about, that the 
 rightly constituted types remain in posses- 
 sion of the field, while the defective ones 
 die out. This explanation seems to the 
 Common Man to make as large a demand 
 upon his credulity, as could the most fanciful 
 dogmas of religion. So he still remains 
 impressed by the designing Power which is 
 behind those apparently fortuitous operations 
 of Nature. He cannot believe that they all 
 really come about by the blind working 
 of things. He looks at the result, produced 
 
m THE COMMON MAN 39 
 
 somehow, that the young are born with 
 the sexes equally divided, and that if they 
 were not so divided, the life of the world 
 could not be carried on. What complex 
 means, what network of agencies the 
 designing Power may employ, does not 
 affect the conclusion, in his mind, that 
 there must be intelligence to be reached 
 in the last resort. 
 
 Nor is he silenced by being asked, Does 
 he really believe in a Being up in the sky, 
 directing these daily affairs of life ? The 
 methods of manifestation of the ultimate 
 reality which is behind things are, he is 
 aware, not capable of logical analysis and 
 definition by him. He doubts whether, with 
 his present mental machinery, he could com- 
 prehend them, even were they to be stated 
 to him. But he not the less strives to learn 
 so much about them as will suffice for his 
 needs in this life, and chiefly whether he 
 can reasonably conclude that there is some 
 intelligent Power there, such a Power as 
 answers to the religious impulses which he 
 finds to be implanted within him. 
 
40 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 If our Common Man looks up to the 
 Heavens, he finds there the same proofs of 
 design and of the sustained arrangement of 
 things at work over the whole Universe, 
 only all upon a scale of grandeur which 
 perplexes him. Confining his attention to 
 his own corner of the sky, he finds that the 
 moon is rolling round the earth, and the 
 earth and the other planets round the sun, 
 in obedience to certain laws, to which it 
 seems to him they are subject. If it be a 
 more correct expression to say that those 
 laws are inherent in them, the fact which 
 impresses him remains unaltered. What he 
 is struck by is the manner in which they go 
 through their revolving courses with exact- 
 ness, or, where slight deviations occur, that 
 provision is made, by whatever influences 
 them, to maintain the proper equilibrium in 
 the long run. If all this constitution of 
 things was not arranged by some Power, 
 there might be at any moment a universal 
 smash up of the solar system, and of other 
 systems which were under its influence. 
 But no, the moon rolls round the earth, not 
 
in THE COMMON MAN 41 
 
 very far away. On it rolls, round and round. 
 The velocity of its motion produces a centri- 
 fugal force, the effect of which is exactly 
 counterbalanced by the " pull " of gravitation 
 which draws it to us ; and so this co-operation 
 of forces makes it go steadily on its path 
 round the earth. If at any moment the 
 power of attraction weakened, off into space 
 the moon would dash. If at any moment 
 the centrifugal force failed, down would the 
 moon come crushing upon us, and there 
 would be an end of this world, as we know 
 it. But owing to principles of action which, 
 imposed by some authority, operate in those 
 bodies, any such catastrophe is prevented, 
 and the moon keeps revolving safely round 
 and round the earth, as it seems to us, for 
 ever. 
 
 A similar provident arrangement controls 
 the movements of the millions of worlds 
 which fill ^the immensity of the Heavens. 
 Comets, which Sir Isaac Newton surmised 
 have some special purpose to fulfil with 
 regard to the planets, sometimes visit us 
 from appalling depths of space ; but they also 
 
42 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 are under strict control, though they describe 
 quite different paths round the sun from 
 those which the planets describe. At times 
 astronomers discover some of these apparent 
 wanderers, hastening towards the sun as if 
 they were going to plunge into it. If they 
 did, the result in certain cases, we are told, 
 would be fatal to life upon our globe and to 
 several other worlds as well. But we find 
 that the stupendous sweep of these bodies is 
 so directed that, while they go very near to 
 the sun, right up to it, and round it, they 
 are still constrained to keep to their orbit, 
 and off they fly again into space, leaving the 
 sun and the planets to go on their appointed 
 way unmolested. 
 
 The Universe thus seems to our Common 
 Man, to present to all observing creatures a 
 standing contradiction of that creed, or no 
 creed, which either denies the existence of 
 the ultimate Power or Intelligence which we 
 call Deity, or denies that the Universe is 
 under His control. To account for what we 
 see, we want not only matter, with its force 
 and motion, but some directing Power over 
 
in THE COMMON MAN 43 
 
 these, in order to produce Creation instead 
 of Chaos. A universal welter would be the 
 result of matter and force without direction. 
 
 Our Common Man then, using the mind 
 which Nature has given him, and drawing 
 conclusions from his reflections thus far upon 
 his subject, in the same way as he draws 
 them in other serious affairs of life, finds 
 himself led on to the belief, that at the base 
 of all things there is a supreme Intelligence 
 which maintains the whole. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MIND, INSTINCT, MORAL SENSE, AND 
 CONSCIENCE 
 
 BUT so far, we have dealt only with one part 
 of the Creation which engages the attention 
 of the Common Man, that material part 
 which he apprehends with his senses. He is 
 even more deeply impressed when he con- 
 templates the wonders of Creation within 
 him the mental powers of man, however 
 they be explained or derived, and especially 
 his spiritual and moral qualities ; also the 
 surprising workings of Instinct in all animals. 
 The mind, with its varied powers and infinite 
 capacities, so well adapted to serve man, 
 appears to him to show purpose and design 
 in every phase. It guides us in life, and is 
 bestowed in such power on some men that 
 
 44 
 
CHAP, iv THE COMMON MAN 45 
 
 they are able to lead and illuminate the 
 whole race. The accumulated results of the 
 teachings of these great minds, ever grow- 
 ing with the centuries, form a standard for 
 all mankind, of knowledge and virtue, which 
 is higher than that which the average man 
 could of himself set up, but of which, never- 
 theless, he and the whole race has the benefit. 
 Reason appears to be an attribute derived 
 from Divinity itself, enabling man to con- 
 template the Deity, to speculate upon his 
 own destiny, and also to direct and, if need 
 be, to suppress his animal nature. 
 
 And under the head of Mind we would 
 briefly refer to the fact of Instinct. We say 
 briefly, for marvellous as is instinct, and won- 
 derful the lessons which it is daily teaching, 
 the facts are on the surface, ever obtruding 
 themselves on even the casual observer. 
 He who looks may read, and learn, if he 
 will learn. We find that Nature plants in 
 animals who are not guided by reason, and 
 in men before they can reason, and before 
 they are capable of knowing even the mean- 
 ing of what they do, an imperative impulse 
 
46 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 to do the very thing that it is essential for 
 them to do, if they are to live, and the very 
 thing which they would do did they know 
 all the facts, and were they able to reason 
 about them. They act as they would do, 
 if they were directed by an affectionate 
 and far-seeing parent. The sparrow begins 
 fluttering about and collecting, with per- 
 sistent toil, material for building its nest ; 
 then selecting some sheltered spot ; then 
 constructing the nest with the skill of a 
 trained artificer ; and all this long before 
 she actually wants to lay her eggs. The 
 bee stores up honey during the ample 
 summer for the needs of the starving winter, 
 and packs it away in a hive, which is con- 
 structed for securing space on a plan that 
 the mathematician could not improve upon. 
 The beetle prepares for itself a hole in the 
 ground, much larger than its then size 
 requires, so as to be ready for the coming 
 chrysalis stage in its career. The caterpillar 
 constructs the cocoon, in anticipation of its 
 future state as a butterfly. The infant, with 
 its senses still undeveloped, knows how to 
 
iv THE COMMON MAN 47 
 
 turn unerringly to the mother's breast. 
 Some authority takes care to ensure all this 
 provident arrangement for carrying on life 
 and the scheme of Creation. What is it ? 
 Whence derived ? " Lapsed intelligence " ? 
 "The result of profitable variations " to the 
 species ? " A propensity prior to experi- 
 ence " ? " A little dose of reason " ? Well, 
 thinks the Common Man, whichever of these 
 ideas give the true explanation, all that 
 he can certainly see, is the fact of some 
 provident cause, or actuating principle, 
 having implanted in creatures a wise motive 
 power, without which life on the globe could 
 not go on. And, as it is not derived from 
 the intellect, or from any other existing 
 principle in the animal, it seems to be intro- 
 duced into its life in a direct and peremptory 
 manner, producing the result which is wanted 
 and terminating with the accomplishment of 
 its purpose. 
 
 When the Common Man, from looking 
 without looks w r ithin, he finds within him 
 the idea of right, justice, virtue, truth, rising 
 to and resting upon the lofty ideal of absolute, 
 
48 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 perfect goodness, which lofty ideal is truly 
 only imperfectly apprehended by us ; but 
 there it is, still ever there, for men to turn 
 to from the dust and tumult of earthly 
 existence. He cannot help thinking that 
 this sublime instinct in the human race must 
 have its origin in some supreme source, 
 which embodies that perfect ideal of good- 
 ness, to which men can only dimly aspire, 
 but which, nevertheless, they cannot help 
 believing to exist. 
 
 For what is it that he finds to be a part 
 of himself? A something which is different 
 from his animal nature, the obligation upon 
 him, as if imposed by some superior Power, 
 to do the true and the just thing, and not 
 to do the false and the base thing, and the 
 conviction which possesses him, that this 
 obligation would be as imperative in the 
 fixed stars as it is upon this planet, and as 
 much so a million years hence as it is to-day. 
 When he contemplates such a principle as 
 this, his heart refuses to assign to it an 
 earthly origin. 
 
 We are not now discussing the founda- 
 
THE COMMON MAN 49 
 
 tion of this belief, in all its aspects. At 
 present we only say, that such is the belief 
 of our Common Man. It is also, it must be 
 added, the belief of some millions of other 
 men, and has been so in the past ages of the 
 world, as well as to-day. And certainly, the 
 fact that such a belief is held by thinking 
 beings, is a striking fact. If, indeed, in the 
 whole Universe, there was only one thinking 
 Self who was possessed by such a faith, he 
 would be an object worthy of the contempla- 
 tion of gods and men. 
 
 Our Common Man seeks to learn what 
 he can about this moral sense in man and 
 its voice Conscience. He can claim, how- 
 ever, but slight acquaintance with the 
 ingenious and varied theories which have 
 engaged the attention of the learned regard- 
 ing its supposed origin. Whether the germs 
 of the moral sense are to be found in animals, 
 and its source for human beings is to be 
 traced to the wants and lessons of the early 
 tribal times ; whether we must look for the 
 agencies which have promoted its growth, 
 
 in reason, or in utility, or in the mere dread 
 
 E 
 
50 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 of its reproaches, these are questions which 
 the Common Man does not undertake to 
 determine. Nor does it seem to him to be 
 necessary for his present purpose to explore 
 all the knowledge, or the speculations on the 
 subject, any more than if he were called 
 upon to recognise the purpose and the virtue 
 of some medicine and restorer of man's bodily 
 system, designed by a great physician, the 
 saving value of which all men felt, he should 
 decline to do so until he could fully search 
 out the exact scientific nature of its composi- 
 tion, could assign the true value to each of 
 its component parts, and was acquainted 
 with the methods employed by the great 
 physician in the recesses of his laboratory. 
 The practical thing for him to know about 
 the medicine is, its purpose and how far it 
 gives effect to that purpose. He can draw 
 his own conclusions as to there being a 
 physician to whom it owes its composition, 
 and as to his intentions in providing it. 
 So with regard to conscience, what now 
 concerns our inquirer, is not so much the 
 methods by which it has expanded among 
 
THE COMMON MAN 51 
 
 men, as what in fact it seems to be, and 
 what part it has actually taken in the 
 making of the human character. What- 
 ever be the sources from which it springs, 
 and by whatsoever means it has been 
 speeded on its growth, he can only con- 
 clude that such have been the sources, and 
 such were the methods which the Power to 
 which it owes its origin has assigned to it 
 and to its development ; unless, to be sure, 
 these developments have come about by 
 themselves and are fortuitous. The pro- 
 cess may be long drawn out, the conducing 
 agencies may be varied ; what challenges 
 the attention of the Common Man is the 
 result. 
 
 In thinking over this part of his subject, 
 as in other phases of his cogitations, he 
 begins, as we have said, by observing what 
 he finds to be within himself. And he 
 certainly finds within himself a principle 
 which reproaches him, and makes him con- 
 scious that he is in the wrong, if, overcome 
 by some sinister influence, he does a thing 
 which his judgment condemns as being a 
 
52 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 defiance of the moral sense of right and 
 wrong which he finds to be implanted within 
 him. True, he also feels a sense of self- 
 reproach, in regard to mistakes which he 
 may have made, and even awkward episodes 
 which may have befallen him. Thus, if 
 he makes some blunder in social etiquette 
 which exposes him to ridicule, when next 
 day he regards the incident, he may, if a 
 sensitive man, feel a sense of annoyance. 
 Also, if he had unwittingly done some- 
 thing that was injurious to another, he 
 would regret it. But these feelings are 
 widely different from that which he would 
 experience if he had fallen into some act 
 of moral baseness. Such a bad act our 
 Common Man inherently feels to be in itself 
 disgraceful, and of such a nature that it would 
 distress him to recall in the face of death, or 
 of the serious trials of life. But the other 
 lapses would not so affect him. And the 
 base act, he cannot deny to himself to be 
 base, even though it were to be successful, 
 and whether found out or not. 
 
 He is sufficiently informed to know that 
 
THE COMMON MAN 53 
 
 under the varying conditions of human life, 
 in different ages and among many races of 
 men, the manifestations of conscience have 
 not always been uniform. But this is found 
 to be owing to the differences caused by 
 surrounding conditions of life, rather than to 
 changes in the moral sense itself. For 
 example, in ancient Sparta, thieving was 
 under certain circumstances enjoined upon 
 the youth ; not that theft was in itself 
 reckoned a good thing, but that it was 
 thought desirable to encourage dexterity 
 and services that might be useful to the 
 country. This was a distorted view of the 
 matter truly, but it was not owing to the 
 moral sense about dishonesty being non- 
 existent in Sparta, but owing to its being 
 overborne by the considerations we have 
 alluded to. Testimony is given to the truth 
 of this view, by the notice which this freak 
 of the Spartan lawgiver excited both among 
 the Spartans themselves and also among 
 other peoples of that time. But the full 
 scope of conscience is seen, not so much 
 from the occasionally blurred manifestations 
 
54 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 of its power in the early times of mankind, 
 or among savage tribes, as from the standard 
 which it has always held with good men, 
 and what it has developed into for the race 
 generally. We judge of its nature from its 
 general effects, and its continued expansion 
 in human affairs, just as we do other in- 
 fluences which make for the improvement of 
 the human race. As men become more and 
 more enlightened, the power of conscience 
 becomes more fully displayed, and its voice 
 more uniform in its monitions the world 
 over. But all the while, it is only the 
 development of a moral sense which has 
 ever been found at the foundation of the 
 human mind and character, feeble though it 
 be and imperfect in the earlier stages of the 
 education of the human race. It does not 
 resemble Minerva in springing forth into 
 being, completely equipped from the first in 
 its Heavenly armour. 
 
 What the Common Man observes about 
 conscience now, is its power over millions 
 of men upon the earth, who regulate their 
 lives more or less according to its pre- 
 
THE COMMON MAN 55 
 
 cepts. He finds that those precepts, speak- 
 ing generally, condemn brutality, perfidy, 
 lying, cowardice, and other forms of vice, 
 and approves honesty, benevolence, courage, 
 and other forms of virtue. That its voice 
 is often disregarded, is true ; but that only 
 shows that it is there to be disregarded. 
 People mostly do wrong things, not because 
 they have no conscience, but because they 
 disregard their conscience. When men are 
 challenged about such actions, they do not 
 avow them, they explain them away. Men 
 often defy themselves, as it were, and do 
 themselves wrong, contrary to the plainest 
 admonitions of their own intelligence ; but 
 no one doubts that the principle of self-love 
 exists. Evil passions in both cases over- 
 power good instincts, alike when we injure 
 our fellows, and when we sacrifice our- 
 selves. 
 
 When the Common Man looks into 
 history, he finds that the reality of con- 
 science and its office to mankind has been 
 recognised on all sides. All the great 
 thinkers of the race, from Confucius down to 
 
56 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 Darwin, have studied its nature and observed 
 its effects, and all agree that, whatever its 
 origin, it is a judge or mentor within the 
 breast of man, the significance of which it is 
 impossible to ignore. The fact that mankind 
 have all along acknowledged this moral 
 censor, and have felt its need to guide 
 them, and also to give life a purpose, such 
 a belief in the race is not likely to have 
 been the enduring force which it has proved 
 to be, if there was no reality behind it to 
 justify the authority over men which it 
 claims. It is truly styled by Professor 
 Shairp "the absolute in the soul." 
 
 Darwin, who, however, does not take the 
 highest view of it, says : " Of all the differ- 
 ences between man and the lower animals the 
 moral sense, or conscience, is the most 
 important " ; and he quotes the words of 
 Kant : " Duty ! Wondrous thought, that 
 workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, 
 nor by any threat, but merely by holding up 
 thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting 
 for thyself always reverence, if not always 
 obedience, before whom all appetites are 
 
iv THE COMMON MAN 57 
 
 dumb, however secretly they rebel, whence 
 thy original ? " 
 
 Locke, in his work on The Human Under- 
 standing, says : " That God has given a rule 
 whereby men should govern themselves, I 
 think there is nobody so brutish as to deny. 
 He has the right to do it and we are His 
 creatures. He has wisdom and goodness to 
 direct our actions to that which is best. 
 This is the only true touchstone of moral 
 rectitude." In another of his writings he 
 declares that the only safety he can find, is 
 in never going against the dictates of his 
 conscience. 
 
 Mackintosh, after dealing with the im- 
 perious and immutable nature of conscience, 
 goes on to observe : 
 
 " Afterwards when the religious principle 
 is evolved, conscience is clothed with the 
 sublime character of representing the divine 
 purity and majesty in the human soul. Its 
 title is not impaired by any number of 
 defeats/' 
 
 Thus the philosopher. Let us hear some 
 famous theologians. 
 
58 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 Dean Swift says that conscience is that 
 knowledge which a man hath within himself of 
 his own thoughts and actions. And because 
 if a man will judge fairly of his own actions, 
 his mind will either approve or condemn 
 him, according as he hath done good or evil, 
 therefore this conscience may be called both 
 an accuser and a judge. Also, he observes, 
 it is a director, or guide. 
 
 Butler puts the subject thus : Men have 
 several instincts in common with the lower 
 animals, but rise above them in having the 
 capacity of sitting in judgment upon their 
 own actions, and naturally and unavoidably 
 approving some actions as virtuous, and 
 condemning others as vicious. " That we 
 have this moral approving and disapproving 
 faculty is certain," from the universal experi- 
 ence of mankind, as is testified by the 
 languages of all peoples, and by the various 
 systems of morals which have obtained among 
 them, by the natural sense of mankind, which 
 instinctively regards a wrongful act, as 
 essentially different from accidental harm on 
 the one hand, or a just punishment on the 
 
THE COMMON MAN 59 
 
 other. A great part of human language and 
 common behaviour throughout the world is 
 formed upon the supposition of this moral 
 faculty being a fact, whether it be called 
 " conscience " or "moral sense," and 
 whether it be " considered as a sentiment 
 of the understanding, or as a perception of 
 the heart, or, which seems the truth, as 
 including both." Nor, he maintains, is it 
 doubtful what course of action this faculty 
 within us approves and what it disapproves, 
 much as it has been disputed wherein virtue 
 consists. For, speaking generally, it is 
 plainly that " which every man you meet 
 puts on the show of," and which the funda- 
 mental laws of communities endeavour to 
 enforce, namely, justice, veracity, and regard 
 to the common good. 
 
 And it might be added, which the great 
 prophets and moral leaders of the world, of 
 every age and race, have substantially, and 
 allowing for minor topical differences, agreed 
 upon. 
 
 Cardinal Newman declares in his Grammar 
 of Assent: " That conscience is the voice of 
 
60 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 God has almost grown into a proverb. ... It 
 is proclaimed in the history and literature of 
 nations, it has supporters in all ages, places, 
 and creeds, forms of social life, professions, 
 and classes. It has held its ground under 
 great intellectual and moral disadvantages, 
 it has recovered its supremacy and ultimately 
 triumphed in the minds who had rebelled 
 against it. Even philosophers, who had 
 been antagonists in other points, agree in 
 recognising the inward voice of that solemn 
 monitor, personal, pre-emptory, unargumen- 
 tative, irresponsible, minatory, definitive." 
 
 Benjamin Jowett, the most educated of 
 thinkers, the translator of Plato, a man who 
 had an intellect which was at once keen and 
 fearless, thus expresses his belief, towards 
 the close of a long life : " God is not other 
 than He is seen to be in this world, if we 
 rightly understand the indications which He 
 gives of Himself. Highest among these 
 indications is the moral law, which exists 
 everywhere and among all men in some 
 degree ; and to which there is no limit, nor 
 ever will be, while the world lasts ; the least 
 
THE COMMON MAN 61 
 
 seed of moral truth possessing an infinite 
 potentiality, and this inspiration for the idea 
 is strengthened and cherished by the efforts 
 of a holy and devoted life, which appears to 
 be the greatest moral power in the world." 
 
 If from the philosopher, the theologian, 
 and the scholar we look to the sceptic, 
 we find Voltaire to declare that Nature, 
 " say what we will of her," dictates in all 
 ages to all men " principles of Justice which 
 she hath implanted in our hearts." 
 
 Turning from philosophers and theo- 
 logians, scholars and sceptics, to peoples, 
 we find everywhere and in every age the 
 popular recognition of conscience. We 
 might illustrate its power as a national 
 force, by taking the case of two famous 
 ancient peoples and one modern, none of 
 them remarkable for the depth of their 
 religious feelings, the Greeks, the Romans, 
 and in our own time the Japanese. To the 
 Greeks we naturally turn, when we would 
 learn what men have thought on the 
 problems of life. 
 
 In Plato's Republic one of the Athenian 
 
62 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 citizens, in a conversation upon quite another 
 matter, refers to conscience as a subject 
 with which they were all familiar. He re- 
 marks (summarising what he says) : " When 
 a man thinks himself near death, he has 
 fears and cares that never entered his mind 
 before, and he begins to reckon up in his 
 mind what wrongs he has done to others, 
 and he is filled with dark forebodings. But 
 he who is conscious of no sin has in age a 
 sweet hope, of which Pindar charmingly says : 
 ' Hope cherishes the soul of him who lives 
 in holiness and righteousness, and is the nurse 
 of his age and the companion of his journey/ " 
 Aristotle says : " I call that law universal 
 which is conformable merely to dictates of 
 nature ; for there does exist naturally an 
 universal sense of right and wrong, which in 
 a certain degree all intuitively divine, even 
 should no intercourse with each other, nor 
 any compact have existed. . . . For by no 
 means is it for this or the next day merely 
 that this maxim is in force, but for ever ; nor 
 is there any one who knows when it was 
 first revealed. ... It is not right here and 
 
THE COMMON MAN 63 
 
 wrong there, ' but a principle of law to all, it 
 is extended uninterruptedly throughout the 
 spacious firmament and boundless light.' ' 
 
 And, as Froude tells us, in the later 
 Greek authors, we find the supremacy of 
 conscience asserted over the worn-out formal 
 beliefs of the age. Among the Romans, 
 Lucretius, though by no means a lofty 
 moralist, bears the same testimony. He 
 says, that though the earthly punishment 
 of crime may be wanting, " Yet the mind 
 conscious of evil deeds, feeling dread in 
 anticipation, applies to itself stings and 
 tortures itself with scourges,, nor sees what 
 end there can be of its sufferings, and fears 
 lest they should become heavier at death/' 
 
 In our own time the Japanese, different 
 as their religious ideas are in many respects 
 from those of the Western nations, distinctly 
 recognise as a people, the authority of 
 conscience. The official " Regulations con- 
 cerning the elementary School course," of 
 the National system of Education, lay it 
 down that, " The culture of the moral 
 sensibilities should be chiefly attended to 
 
64 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 in the education of children." And Art. 2 
 directs, " Instruction in morals shall be 
 given and the cultivation of the conscience 
 of the children, the fostering of their moral 
 sensibilities, shall be considered the special 
 objects of this instruction." 
 
 All the sound literature of the world goes 
 upon the assumption that there is a moral 
 sense in men, and that there is an eternal 
 righteousness presiding over affairs, in the 
 final resort. This is specially to be seen in 
 the poets, who have given voice to the 
 natural feelings of the human race. 
 
 In Spenser we read that it is vain to 
 think to restrain a people who have no touch 
 of conscience. Shakespeare makes constant 
 reference, both in grave mood and in gayer 
 tone, to the part which conscience plays in 
 the affairs of life. Such does he consider 
 the sensitiveness of human nature to its 
 warning voice, that he proclaims it to be 
 that which invests death with its terrors. 
 
 Milton asks : 
 
 On Earth 
 
 Who against faith and conscience can be heard 
 Infallible ? 
 
THE COMMON MAN 65 
 
 Dryden, alluding to the Heathen, says : 
 
 To Nature's plain indictment they shall plead ; 
 And by their conscience be condemned or freed. 
 
 Pope, in the Universal Prayer, stamps the 
 dictates of conscience as the true guide of 
 life. Burns, in his " Prayer in the prospect of 
 Death," recalls the failings of his life, which 
 " something loudly in my breast " arraigned 
 him for. Byron, even in his sportive 
 allusions to conscience, recognises at least 
 what men commonly felt in regard to it. 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith, whose writings contain 
 admirable illustrations of the homely morality 
 of ordinary life, makes the Vicar of Wake- 
 field exclaim, when urged by his children 
 to submit to the bad squire : " What, my 
 treasures, why will you thus attempt to 
 persuade me to do the thing that is not 
 right ! My duty has taught me to forgive 
 him, but my conscience will not permit me 
 to approve. Would you have me applaud 
 to the world what my heart must internally 
 condemn ? " 
 
 Scott describes the fitful gleams of the 
 moon over " Tees's stream," as resembling 
 
66 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 the changes of a guilty dream, disturbed 
 by the stings of conscience. Readers of 
 Browning and Tennyson and later poets of 
 our own time, will recall many passages in 
 which homage is paid to conscience and the 
 moral sense in man. And generally, it 
 may be said that all writers who have 
 influenced mankind, have recognised the 
 sway of the moral faculty over them. 
 
 And when we are considering whether 
 the moral sense, as a fact, does exist in 
 mankind, it is not to be overlooked that the 
 popular melodrama always brings retribu- 
 tion to the bad man, amid the general 
 applause of the audience. Though the 
 individual life of each one may be far 
 from perfect, yet the collective sense of 
 the whole applauds the spectacle of virtue 
 struggling to maintain itself against the 
 advances of vice. The payment of " con- 
 science money/' years, perhaps, after the 
 default, by those whose act of restitution 
 is known only to themselves, is another 
 instance of the popular belief upon the 
 subject. Even the vicious recognise, and 
 
iv THE COMMON MAN 67 
 
 render homage to, the instinctive belief of 
 mankind in virtue hence what is called 
 hypocrisy. Colonel Chartres, who was one 
 of the worst of men, used to say that 
 though he would not give a farthing for 
 virtue, he would give ten thousand pounds 
 for a character. 
 
 In public affairs the struggle for the 
 rights of conscience has inspired an en- 
 thusiasm into citizen soldiers that has enabled 
 them to overthrow disciplined hosts in war. 
 Oliver Cromwell makes frequent reference to 
 conscience in his speeches. In his address 
 on the dissolution of the first Protectorate 
 Parliament in 1655, we find him laying down 
 the principle that men are not to be 
 trampled upon for their consciences unless, 
 indeed, they only pretend to conscience. 
 And as for himself, he says : " I have thus 
 told you my thoughts, so that my own 
 conscience gives me not the lie to what I 
 say. And then in what I say, I can rejoice." 
 Bismarck considered it to be of the first 
 importance, in his deadly struggle with 
 France, to get the moral sentiment of 
 
68 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 Europe against his enemy. Public speakers, 
 who know how to reach the mass of men, 
 appeal to this moral sense in their hearers, 
 with perfect confidence that they are on 
 sure ground. Erskine, the great English 
 advocate, in one of his forensic speeches, 
 says : " It was the first command and counsel 
 to my youth, always to do what my con- 
 science told me to be my duty, and to 
 leave the consequences to God." 
 
 Daniel Webster, America's statesman and 
 orator, thus in one of his speeches adjures his 
 countrymen : " With conscience satisfied in 
 the discharge of duty, no consequences can 
 harm you. There is no evil that we cannot 
 either face or fly from, but the consciousness 
 of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues 
 us ever. It is omniscient like the Deity." 
 
 Answering to this moral sense in man, 
 we find that the general order of the world 
 is so constituted, that obeying its instincts 
 leads to highly beneficial results for mankind, 
 in forming types of noble men, also in 
 improving the character of men in general, 
 and so promoting the advancement of the 
 
THE COMMON MAN 69 
 
 race even in this world. In those cases, 
 which at times happen, where obedience to 
 the commands of conscience do not conduce 
 to immediate worldly success, its power is 
 often displayed in a striking manner. The 
 moral character of the man is raised by 
 adherence to virtue, whether he be success- 
 ful or unsuccessful. In the face of earthly 
 rebuffs, the belief of the good man in the 
 still imperious claims of conscience upon him, 
 remains unshaken. This lofty and pathetic 
 assurance of the human heart is, at least, as 
 old as Job. In the midst of his greatest 
 troubles he exclaims : " Till I die I will 
 not remove my integrity from me. My 
 heart shall not reproach me as long as I 
 live." And the example of such men sheds 
 abroad light to all mankind, like guiding 
 stars till the day dawns. 
 
 On the other hand, much of the success 
 of conscienceless men is only temporary, and 
 their career even in this life often meets 
 with a fitting retribution. Wickedness does 
 not take lasting root. There is something 
 in evil that makes for instability, and out 
 
70 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 of its own conditions, induces a day of 
 reckoning. 
 
 " It is not possible, Athenians ! it is not 
 possible," exclaims Demosthenes, who, as 
 an orator, felt sure of the response of his 
 audience, "it is not possible to found a 
 lasting power on injustice, perjury, and 
 treachery. These may perhaps succeed for 
 once and borrow for a while from hope a 
 gay and flourishing appearance. But time 
 betrays their weakness, and they fall of 
 themselves to ruin. For as in structures 
 of every kind the lower parts should have 
 the firmest stability, so the grounds and 
 principles of great enterprises should be 
 justice and truth." 
 
 Froude truly says of history : " First it 
 is a voice for ever sounding across the 
 centuries the laws of right and wrong. 
 Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise 
 and fall, but the moral law is written upon 
 the tablets of eternity. For every false 
 word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and 
 oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has 
 to be paid at last : not always by the chief 
 
THE COMMON MAN 71 
 
 offenders, but paid by some one. Justice 
 and truth alone endure and live. Injustice 
 and falsehood may be long-lived, but dooms- 
 day comes at last to them, in French revolu- 
 tions and other terrible ways/' 
 
 This moral sense in man, then, voiced as 
 it is by conscience, seems to the Common 
 Man to perform a Divine purpose, in inspir- 
 ing the human intellect with the idea of 
 perfect goodness, the source of which he 
 must seek in some sphere above the world. 
 Its authority even now prevails among men, 
 and its empire over all, he feels, must in 
 the end prove indefeasible. Even now, 
 the soul of man experiences for this perfect 
 ideal, the longing of an exile for his home. 
 And, as both this higher scope of con- 
 science, and also its practical usefulness in 
 improving the world, must originate from 
 some cause, it seems to the Common Man 
 a reasonable conclusion that it comes from 
 a Power, under whose direction mankind 
 are being trained continuously, if slowly, 
 to better conditions of existence. In the 
 material world, if we see agencies which 
 
72 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 produce some useful result, we infer design ; 
 and in the moral world, if we find agencies 
 also leading to good results, we equally 
 infer design there and attribute them to 
 that design. The two conditions of things 
 are reciprocal and fit into one another. If 
 there is a moral sense in men, and if it is 
 found to be adapted to improving their 
 natures and to elevating the life of the 
 world, we should naturally conclude that 
 it was a righteous Ruler by whose dis- 
 pensation it was imparted to His creatures ; 
 and, conversely, if there is such a Ruler 
 over mankind, we should expect Him to 
 impart, by methods of His own, just such 
 a moral sense to man. And further, from 
 the analogy of the progress of the world 
 generally, and the gradual improvement 
 of mankind in it, we should expect the 
 principle of the moral sense to go on 
 improving and developing, like other of the 
 higher tendencies of our nature. That 
 it does this slowly, and not without lapses 
 in progress, is only too clear. But it does 
 improve. The most striking characteristic 
 
THE COMMON MAN 73 
 
 about the operations of Providence, is their 
 stupendously gradual nature. Time is cer- 
 tainly not of the essence of the matter in 
 hand, whatever it be. It never seems to 
 enter into the computation. 
 
 By the fact then of conscience, and the 
 moral sense in the human race, the 
 Common Man finds himself brought round 
 again to the question of Deity, which his 
 observation of himself and of Nature, at 
 the outset, suggested to him. He finds 
 himself now faced imperiously by the 
 consideration of the real meaning of the 
 phenomena connected with conscience, which 
 he has been contemplating. Whence comes 
 this moral sense, this ideal of what we 
 ought to do, simply because it is right, 
 and this self-reproach if we do wicked 
 things ? Why do we feel self-condemned 
 if we do a bad thing, though no one may 
 know of it but ourselves? The offence 
 which we feel we have given, is to some 
 authority beyond us, and which we are 
 conscious is higher than we are. If we 
 conceive of the world as being without a 
 
74 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 God, then the claims of conscience would 
 fall very flat. A mere general duty to 
 humanity, to avail in the future, which is 
 unknown to us and in which we would be 
 unknown, with nothing behind it, nothing 
 to back it up, is not enough to satisfy the 
 commanding sense of the obligation to do 
 right, which we feel to be part of our 
 moral nature. Conscience, with no moral 
 authority behind it, could not be understood 
 as a phenomenon of human life. How, 
 then, is it, that we have within us the idea 
 of the absolute right, and the perfect 
 good ? and that this exalted ideal is liable 
 to be offended by the perpetration of 
 moral turpitude ? What is its ultimate 
 origin ? According to principles which we 
 have already considered, such an effect 
 must spring from some adequate cause. 
 If this is not to be traced to that Power 
 under whose influence the human race 
 arose, where shall we seek for it ? 
 
 Our Common Man, thus, from these 
 lines of observation and reflection, the 
 abounding evidences of purpose and arrange- 
 
THE COMMON MAN 75 
 
 ment, denoting intelligence behind the 
 screen of Creation ; the mind of man, 
 circumscribed though it be, yet so amply 
 fitted to his needs in this life, together with 
 the marvel of Instinct; and the Moral 
 Sense, with its sublime inspirations in the 
 heart of man, demanding some source from 
 on High, from these lines of thought, 
 our Common Man, we say, is led to believe 
 that there is a God. It is true that he 
 cannot see this divine Entity, or, as a 
 matter of reason, explore and define all 
 His qualities, nor yet grasp Him to his 
 own consciousness by any exercise of 
 mind only ; for he is not now contemplat- 
 ing the experiences of religion, which pass 
 the human understanding, and transcend 
 the bounds alike of argument and of evi- 
 dence. But, in this aspect of the subject, 
 he judges of Him from the manifestation 
 of His presence, external and internal, 
 which he meets. Just as when he speaks 
 to a friend, he has no doubt that the 
 friend is talking to him, but he has no 
 further proof of this than the outward 
 
76 THE RELIGION 
 
 CHAP. IV 
 
 signs of speech, gesture, and so forth, 
 which assure him that his friend is there. 
 The actual friend himself, the personality 
 which we call " I," he has never seen, nor 
 detected by his senses ; he is satisfied of 
 his existence from the outward manifesta- 
 tions of it. in the same way, from the 
 outward manifestations which this frame 
 called " Creation " gives forth, he concludes 
 that there is an Intelligence behind it, 
 animating and directing the whole. The 
 inward inspirations of the moral sense 
 complete his conviction. This conclusion 
 certainly by no means involves or proves 
 all the postulates of what we call " religion " ; 
 but it lays the foundation for them. The 
 superstructure, as has been said, is raised 
 partly by deductions which naturally follow 
 from that great fact, and partly by the 
 spiritual instincts which are a portion of 
 the nature of the Common Man. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 IN arriving at the conclusion which we 
 have stated, the Common Man is acting, 
 though he may not know it, in unison with 
 the general belief of the great family of 
 mankind, in all its branches, and in every 
 period of the world's history. This fact, 
 this mere fact, is a weighty one, and the 
 more we think over it the more we shall 
 find to be involved in it. For the belief 
 in a superior Power, in some form behind 
 Creation, which controls man's destiny, has 
 been held by the human race from the 
 beginning. It has also been acknowledged 
 by the greatest intellects, however they 
 may differ in their other speculations, and 
 it has been voiced in every tongue, from 
 
 77 
 
78 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 the rude incantation of the savage, to the 
 sublime flights of the prophet, and the 
 inspiring message of the evangelist. 
 
 No doubt the ideas which have been 
 held about this superior Power, while at 
 times noble and enlightened, have also 
 been among the mass of men often crude, 
 defective, and doing little credit to either 
 the object of their worship, or to the 
 intelligence of the worshippers. But the 
 point is, that the idea of God, in some 
 form, has always been among the natural 
 beliefs and the inherent aspirations of man- 
 kind. Its earliest impressions were, in some 
 peoples, connected with natural phenomena, 
 with the forces of Nature which men 
 instinctively attributed to an unseen Power 
 behind ; and their ideas were often confused 
 and imperfect, like most of men's early 
 notions ; such as those about astronomy, 
 physics, and science generally. But noble 
 conceptions of Deity were proclaimed from 
 the first by the founders of great religions, 
 though frequently these proved too lofty 
 for the rude and simple peoples to whom 
 
v THE COMMON MAN 79 
 
 they were given, and were by them after- 
 wards corrupted and mixed with polytheism 
 and superstition. Still, the true conception 
 was there, and as the peoples grew in 
 intelligence, they, or the most thoughtful 
 of them, recurred to the purer principles 
 of the early message. The history of the 
 Jewish people affords a striking example 
 of this chequered course of the worship of 
 God. The theology of the East shows 
 much the same experience, at least so far 
 as decadence from a high ideal to lower 
 levels is concerned. 
 
 If we look to the Christian, which is 
 certainly the noblest form of religion among 
 men, we find that it is the creed of the 
 leaders of the human race ; and surely when 
 we are appealing to the experience of man 
 as a reasoning and spiritual being, we are 
 entitled to invoke as the voice of the race, 
 the most enlightened and spiritual form which 
 its religious beliefs attain to what the idea 
 of Deity in human nature as a fact develops 
 into. 
 
 But all the great religions of the world 
 
8o THE RELIGION OF 
 
 show a general uniformity, in having the 
 belief in God as their foundation principle. 
 The Assyrian, Egyptian, Mahometan, Indian, 
 and Persian, as well, of course, as the Jewish 
 and the Christian, agree in this, though their 
 conceptions about the attributes of Deity 
 may differ. In their origin they all had 
 either the idea of one God only, or of one 
 god who was pre-eminent over all lesser 
 gods. For in many forms of Polytheism, 
 we still find in the last resort the belief in 
 one great Ruler. Professor Maspero tells 
 us that the " Egyptians adored a Being who 
 was unique, perfect, endowed with absolute 
 knowledge and intelligence, and incompre- 
 hensible, the sole generator in Heaven and 
 Earth, who Himself is not generated." And 
 we read that in very early times they 
 believed, " That the all scrutinising eye of 
 the Deity penetrated into the secrets of the 
 heart, and as the rewards of the good were 
 beyond conception, so were the punishments 
 of the bad/' In the Egyptian Hymn to 
 Amen Ra, which was written some twelve 
 or thirteen centuries before Christ, amid 
 
THE COMMON MAN 81 
 
 much that is wild and wandering, we read 
 this addressed to the Deity : " Only Form 
 that didst make all that is, One and 
 only one Maker of all who have being, 
 Maker of those who are, Former of those 
 who have been, Hail Thou who didst 
 make all that is ! Lord of Truth, Father of 
 the Gods." The inscriptions in the tombs 
 near Thebes show that the people at their 
 date held the belief in a future state, and a 
 future judgment, and this involves the idea 
 of a Ruler and Judge over all. From 
 the cuneiform writings on the tablets, we 
 learn that the Assyrians prayed to God, 
 centuries before the Christian era. In Central 
 America also, there are found records long 
 anterior to our civilised times, which contain 
 prayers addressed to " The Creator and 
 Maker who seest and hearest us." 
 
 In India, Hindooism originally announced 
 some noble conceptions of one great Creator 
 and Ruler of the Universe, such as mark the 
 early stages of several of the religions of the 
 world. But owing to causes which we need 
 not trace, the daily religion of the Hindoos 
 
82 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 has now become a thing which is beneath 
 criticism, as a phase of human faith. But 
 that the true idea was there at the beginning, 
 appears from the Vedas and the Vedant, the 
 sacred books of the Hindoos. In these, 
 which were written probably a thousand 
 years before Christ, God is described as the 
 universal spirit which pervades and diffuses 
 itself through all nature. All beings receive 
 their life from Him. There is only one 
 God, Himself all in all. He sees all beings 
 which fill his immensity the only principle, 
 the Light of Heaven, the Father of all. 
 He produces everything, He orders and 
 disposes everything ; He is the reason, the 
 life and motion of all things. As for the 
 teaching of Buddha himself, it seems, as far 
 as we can grasp its full meaning, to show a 
 marvellously keen insight into the ultimate 
 problem of the Universe and to assume 
 the existence of the Deity, though not to 
 enforce it. Nor can we deny to peoples 
 who hold the Eastern idea of reincarnation, 
 a deep sympathy with the religious principle. 
 For they not only believe in the Great Father 
 
THE COMMON MAN 83 
 
 of Spirits, but they hold that the soul of man, 
 after repeated terms of schooling in this life, 
 returns to the bosom of the Divinity. 
 
 China and Japan are countries where the 
 religious impulse of humanity is not mani- 
 fested in such direct belief, as it is in other 
 branches of the human family. But it is a 
 remarkable fact that the ancient religion of 
 China contained the idea of one great and 
 good God, the Ruler of all things, though, 
 certainly, other and lesser Deities were 
 recognised. The truth was there, though 
 error was attached to it. That the worship 
 of this great God has become dissipated, 
 does not destroy the fact, that the idea was 
 there to start with, and there can be little 
 doubt that it still remains in many thinking 
 and religious minds in China. Indeed it seems 
 clear that the reverence paid to ancestors, 
 is mingled with the principle of what we 
 term " religion," and with the idea of Deity 
 itself. It is not something hostile to that 
 idea, or even distinct from it, while it is 
 surely one of the most moving manifesta- 
 tions of the spiritual principle in mankind. 
 
84 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 This Monotheism of the early religion of 
 China always was, and still is, recognised by 
 the State. For the past 4000 years the 
 Chinese Emperor, as an official act, offers 
 worship to the Deity on behalf of the people. 
 As for their wise men, they recognise God 
 after a manner of their own, quite opposed 
 to Atheism, though no doubt at times running 
 into Pantheistic shapes. They speak of the 
 " imminence of a holy influence through 
 space." Laotse, the contemporary of Con- 
 fucius, in his writing entitled The Book of 
 Reason and Virtue, gives this explanation of 
 the Deity : " Before Chaos which preceded 
 the creation of Heaven and Earth, there 
 existed one single Being, immense, silent, 
 and immovable, yet incessantly active ; 
 that is the Author of the Universe. I do 
 not know how this Being is named, but I 
 designate it by the word, ' Reason/ Every 
 created thing emanates from His bosom, 
 and all will return to Him. He has neither 
 form nor substance, nor name. He is the 
 beginning and the end." 
 
 The indefiniteness of this teaching has 
 
THE COMMON MAN 85 
 
 left its mark upon the following of Confucius. 
 But yet it is the fact, that even among the 
 most confused and defective forms of religion, 
 there has ever been kept alive, in some 
 hearts and minds, nobler and truer concep- 
 tions. As to the pure all things are pure, 
 so the spiritual man takes to himself high 
 spiritual conceptions, out of vague philo- 
 sophies, or even from the idolatry of the 
 crowd. Thus we find that some Eastern 
 philosophers have from Confucianism itself, 
 derived grand ideas of God. One of the 
 prophets of old Japan thus clearly announces 
 a true conception of Deity, derived from the 
 Chinese Classics : " There is a great Lord 
 over all. This Lord is the great and only 
 spirit. He is the Lord and Father of 
 Heaven and Earth, and all things. From 
 the mighty Universe to the tiny mote, from 
 the eternity to moment, there is nothing 
 outside of His glorious regard. His Mystery 
 fills all space, God of God, Spirit of Spirit/' 
 Another Japanese teacher makes this declara- 
 tion of his faith : " God is not distant : the 
 heart is the house of God." In the same 
 
86 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 way we meet in the Greek and Roman 
 authors, lofty descriptions of the Deity, 
 rising high above notions of the popular 
 Polytheism. 
 
 In Japan, however, as has been said, the 
 popular spirit of religion finds its expression 
 in deep and feeling expressions of rever- 
 ence for ancestors, and especially for the 
 ancestors of the Imperial family, and in 
 pilgrimages to the sacred shrine. But it 
 must be observed, that Divinity is ascribed 
 to the Imperial ancestors, and religious 
 sentiments and moral obligations are con- 
 nected with this form of worship. The 
 natural instinct to seek the superior Power 
 takes a different and a lower form, than that 
 which it does in nations that are higher in 
 the spiritual scale. Professor Nobushige, 
 Professor of Law in the Imperial University 
 of Tokyo, tells us that " Ancestor worship 
 was the primeval religion of Japan from the 
 earliest times of our history, which dates 
 back more than 2500 years, and it is 
 universally practised by the people at the 
 present moment. The worship of the 
 
THE COMMON MAN 87 
 
 Imperial Ancestors and especially the first 
 of them, Amaterasu Omi-Kami, or the 
 'Great Goddess of celestial Light,' may be 
 styled the national worship." This is only 
 another form of the worship of God, however 
 imperfect in its conception. Recent inquiry 
 also points to the conclusion that the stern 
 and intense sense of duty among the 
 Japanese, is founded, as we might expect, 
 upon the belief in a great Ruler of all things. 
 The religion which Mahomet proclaimed, 
 is intensely believed in by a numerous family 
 of the human race, and his teaching upon 
 this subject is unmistakable. The Koran 
 announces : " Your God is one God ; there is 
 no God but He, the most merciful. There 
 is no God but He, the living, the self-sub- 
 sisting. God is He Who heareth and seeth. 
 God is the Patron of those who believe. 
 God is bounteous and wise. The Lord 
 knoweth what the breast of men conceal." 
 Jelalu-d-Din, a saint and poet of Islam, 
 taught this prayer on his death-bed : " O 
 our Lord God, I breathe but for Thee, 
 and I stretch forth my spirit towards Thee. 
 
88 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 O our Lord God ! lay not on me an 
 ailment that may make me forgetful to 
 commemorate Thee, or lessen my yearning 
 towards Thee, or cut off the delight I 
 experience in reciting the litanies of Thy 
 praise. Grant me not a health that may 
 endanger or increase me in presumptuous or 
 thankless insolence. For Thy mercies sake, 
 O Thou most Merciful of the compassionate! 
 Amen." 
 
 That the religious principle is alive in 
 Persia is shown by its religious records. 
 This is the impressive prayer of their sacred 
 poet, Sadi, who lived eight centuries ago, 
 and is now recognised as a saint, pilgrims 
 from distant provinces visiting his tomb : 
 " O God have pity on the wicked ! As for 
 the good, Thou hast done everything for 
 them in making them good ! " And here 
 is another noble prayer of the Persians : 
 " Thou pure and persuading Spirit ! Mani- 
 fest Thyself in me as light when I think, 
 as mercy when I act, and when I speak as 
 truth, always truth ! " 
 
 If we go lower down in the human family, 
 

 THE COMMON MAN 89 
 
 we find still the belief in God. James 
 Freeman Clarke in his Ten Great Religions 
 says: " The excellent missionary Oldendorp, 
 who took great pains to be accurately ac- 
 quainted with the Negroes of Africa, assures 
 me that he recognised among them an 
 universal belief in the existence of a God, 
 who made the world. He says : ' Among 
 the black nations with whom I have become 
 acquainted, even the most ignorant, there is 
 not one who does not believe in a God, give 
 Him a name and regard Him as the Maker 
 of the world. Besides this supreme bene- 
 ficient Deity, whom all worship, they believe 
 in many inferior Gods. They pray to the 
 good Gods only/ The daily prayer of a 
 Wat Ja Negress was, * O God I know Thee 
 not, but Thou knowest me I need Thy 
 help ! ' " 
 
 If we look to the Greeks and Romans, 
 we find that they had noble conceptions of 
 God, the source of good and the Ruler of all 
 things ; but the popular expression of the 
 religious sentiment was low and defective. 
 They weakened the idea of Deity by their 
 
90 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 numerous gods and goddesses, which were 
 only partially believed in, even by the vulgar. 
 Though even among them, to deny that 
 there were gods was a serious matter. 
 More than once public justice was invoked 
 against those who so offended against the 
 popular sentiment. But their philosophers 
 appear to have regarded the idea of these 
 lesser Deities as pointing merely to different 
 manifestations, or aspects, of the central 
 Deity ; and they have left us valuable con- 
 tributions to the conceptions of mankind 
 about the universal Lord of all. In the 
 most remarkable development of the re- 
 ligious idea in Greek thought, known as the 
 Orphic phase, the central principle was that 
 the soul of man was derived from a heavenly 
 source, while the body was of the earth, 
 earthy. And hence came among some of 
 the most intellectual of the Greeks, the 
 belief in the immortality of the soul, which 
 involves the existence of Deity, when the 
 body was claimed by " Death, the all-con- 
 quering." In the Dialogues of Plato we 
 find the noblest expression possible of this, 
 
THE COMMON MAN 91 
 
 which has been the central hope of man- 
 kind, the anchor of the human soul, through 
 all the perplexities which surround life. 
 
 The views that Socrates announced, as 
 they are interpreted to us by Plato, are 
 among the most remarkable. Some, indeed, 
 have thought that Socrates was condemned 
 to death by the Athenians, because he 
 maintained the unity of the Deity, against 
 the Polytheism of his time. But though 
 facts do not bear out this view, yet when we 
 read his words, we feel that no one could 
 have spoken as he did, unless he had some 
 inspiration as to the truth about the Father 
 of all Spirits. 
 
 In the Phaedo, just before his death, he 
 thus discusses the question of a future life : 
 " But then, O my friends, if the soul is 
 really immortal what care should be taken 
 of her, not only in respect of that portion of 
 time which is called life, but of eternity ! 
 And the danger of neglecting her from this 
 point of view does indeed appear to be 
 awful. If death had only been the end of 
 all, the wicked would have a good bargain 
 
92 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 in dying ; for they would have been happily 
 quit, not only of their bodies, but of their 
 own evil with their souls. But now as it 
 appears plainly to be immortal, there is no 
 release or salvation from evil, except the 
 attainment of the highest virtue and wisdom/' 
 
 In later Greece we find the philosophical 
 Plutarch, in his Essays, proclaiming the 
 existence of the supreme Being, the moral 
 Ruler of the Universe, and discussing the 
 reasons for believing in a future state in an 
 enlightened manner. He thus answers the 
 objection of those who argued that there 
 could not be other worlds than our own, 
 since they would require other gods to 
 govern them. He says: "Is not one Ex- 
 cellent Being endued with reason and 
 intelligence, such as He whom we acknow- 
 ledge to be the Father and Lord of all 
 things, sufficient to direct and rule those 
 worlds? If there were more supreme 
 agents, their decrees would be vain and 
 contradictory to each other." 
 
 Epictetus, amongthe Latins, well describes 
 man's duty to God. He exhorts men thus : 
 
THE COMMON MAN 93 
 
 "If a man should be able to assent to this 
 doctrine, as he ought, that we are all sprung 
 from God in an especial manner, I suppose 
 he would never have an ignoble or mean 
 thought about himself. For yourself, from 
 your thoughts, cast away sadness, fear, desire, 
 envy, malevolence, avarice, effeminacy, in- 
 temperance. But it is not possible to eject 
 these things otherwise than by looking 
 to God only, by fixing your affections on 
 Him only, by being consecrated to His 
 commands. But if you choose anything 
 else, you will with sighs and groans be 
 compelled to follow what is stronger than 
 yourself, always seeking tranquillity and 
 never able to find it ; for you seek your 
 tranquillity there where it is not, and you 
 neglect to seek it where it is." 
 
 When we turn from those races which 
 we call Heathen, to the Jewish and the 
 Christian Faiths, we find ourselves faced 
 by the most emphatic, and at the same time 
 the most enlightened declarations of the 
 belief of man in God. We find men living 
 their lives under the absolute conviction 
 
94 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 that there was a God, and a God who heard 
 their prayers, and with Whom they could 
 hold spiritual communion, and in which 
 communion He made Himself known to 
 them. With the explanation of the early 
 Polytheism of the Jews, and of its surprising 
 development into a racial conviction of the 
 truth of the sublime message, " Hear, O 
 Israel, the Lord thy God is one God," the 
 Common Man is not concerned. He judges 
 by the completed revelation as the Jews 
 prized it, and the truths embodied in their 
 Hebrew Scriptures ; in the light of which, 
 the personality of the Deity is neither 
 weakened by Pantheistic tendencies, nor 
 dwarfed by the least drift towards Polytheism. 
 However we may explain it, the Jews 
 certainly developed into the " chosen race/' 
 for expressing faith in God in the highest 
 form that had yet been given to mankind. 
 The difference between the utterances of 
 the great Jews, with the message of 
 Christianity widening and casting light upon 
 the earlier dispensation, and the other 
 leading Faiths of the world, is instructive, 
 
THE COMMON MAN 95 
 
 as showing the high range which the 
 religious principle can attain to in human 
 nature. Those two religions show what 
 men are capable of reaching in the spiritual 
 direction. The other faiths often proclaim 
 noble principles ; there is, indeed, something 
 divine in every religion. But they want 
 the inspiring insight of the Jewish message 
 and the Christian gospel. It is the difference 
 between the statue developed by the cunning 
 hand of the artist, and the animating presence 
 of the living, breathing man himself. And 
 we are entitled to take the faith in God 
 which they proclaimed, as a part of the 
 heritage of the race. It shows what man is 
 capable of, when he does aspire in his 
 search after God. 
 
 And when we contemplate the religious 
 literature of the Jewish people, we must 
 not forget their history. They have sur- 
 vived a succession of great Empires, to 
 whose material strength they could offer 
 no resistance, who triumphed over them 
 and strove to extirpate their race the 
 Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Roman, the 
 
96 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 Turkish. In later ages, too, they have 
 been often persecuted and driven from 
 country to country. The Romans not only 
 trampled upon them, but intellectually re- 
 garded them as common subjects of ridicule, 
 as a by-word for all that was absurd and 
 incredible. Yet now the Roman Empire 
 is extinct, while the Jews are flourishing all 
 over the civilised world. They make the 
 power of their people felt everywhere, and 
 in some lands rise to the highest positions ; 
 but, all the while, they keep themselves a 
 separate and a peculiar people, worshipping 
 the God of Israel in just the same fashion, 
 so far as principles and belief go, as did their 
 remote ancestors 4000 years ago. Their 
 race appears everywhere, vigorously moving 
 along with the tide of human life, but such 
 is the force of their ancient belief, that they 
 nowhere mingle their race or its faith, in 
 the tide of the nationalities which surround 
 them. And to-day, if you go into the home 
 of the faithful Jew, whether in Europe, or in 
 Asia, the backwoods of America, the veldt 
 of South Africa, or the Bush of Australia, 
 
THE COMMON MAN 97 
 
 you will find that he diligently teaches his 
 children the old Hebrew tongue, the language 
 of his Prophets, so that they may read and 
 learn, in words hallowed to them by the 
 inspiration of ages, such passages as these : 
 
 SOLOMON'S PRAYER ON THE DEDICATION 
 OF THE TEMPLE 
 
 (About 1000 B.C.) 
 
 Then Solomon said : The Lord hath said that he 
 would dwell in thick darkness. But I have built a 
 house of habitation for Thee ... a house for the 
 name of the Lord God of Israel. . . . But will God 
 indeed dwell upon the Earth? Behold the Heaven 
 and the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Thee, 
 how much less the House which I have builded ? Yet 
 have thou respect to the prayer of Thy servant, O 
 Lord, my God ! They Thine eyes may be open 
 towards this House night and day. What prayer soever 
 be made by any man, which shall know every man the 
 plague of his own heart. Then hear Thou in Heaven 
 Thy dwelling-place and forgive. 
 
 (Observe the peculiar force which belongs 
 to these words, from the fact that they ran 
 counter to pride and enthusiasm felt both 
 by himself and by the people who crowded 
 around him, for the grand Temple which, 
 with so much sacrifice and labour, they had 
 
 H 
 
98 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 erected. He begins to speak about its 
 glories and the greatness of their under- 
 taking, now at last successfully completed, 
 and then, as if struck and overpowered by 
 the sense of the majesty of the true God, 
 exclaims, " But will God indeed dwell upon 
 the earth ? " etc. etc.) 
 
 Or take these from the Psalms : 
 
 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger 
 and plenteous in mercy. For as the Heaven is high 
 above the Earth, so great is His mercy towards them 
 that fear Him. Like as a Father pitieth his children, 
 so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. Bless the 
 Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits. 
 
 As the Hart panteth after the water brooks, so 
 panteth my soul after Thee O God ! My soul thirsteth 
 for God, for the living God : when shall I come and 
 appear before God ? Why art thou cast down O my 
 soul, and why art thou disquieted within me ? Hope 
 thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him, who is the 
 health of my countenance and my God. 
 
 Three thousand years have passed since 
 these aspirations were breathed out from the 
 soul of man. Since that time not only have 
 nations lived and died, and civilisations risen 
 and decayed, but the tone and methods of 
 human thought have changed, as can be 
 
THE COMMON MAN 99 
 
 seen by the reasonings which are preserved 
 for us in the Dialogues of Plato, compared 
 with the intellectual methods of our own 
 time. Yet the spiritual outpourings of the 
 old Hebrew express exactly the feelings 
 of the religious heart to-day. And why? 
 The reason is because they give voice to 
 what is part of man's nature. Intellectual 
 methods change, but the heart of man 
 remains the same. 
 
 When we come to Christianity we find, 
 putting aside for our present purpose the 
 question of direct inspiration, a transcendent 
 manifestation of the religious side of man's 
 nature. The words of Christ and His life 
 are without parallel in their revelation of the 
 Divine element in man. As Goethe says : 
 " Let mental culture go on advancing, let 
 science go on gaining in depth and strength, 
 and the human intellect expand as it may, it 
 will never go beyond the elevation and 
 moral culture of Christianity, as it shines in 
 the Gospels." 
 
 We certainly cannot claim Jean Jacques 
 Rousseau as a moral teacher, but yet even 
 
ioo THE RELIGION OF 
 
 his testimony to Christianity may be given. 
 " What prejudices, what blindness," he 
 exclaims, " a man must have when he 
 dares to compare the son of Sophroniscus 
 (Socrates) with the son of Mary. The 
 death of Socrates philosophizing tranquilly 
 with his friends is the most gentle that a 
 man could desire ; that of Jesus expiring in 
 torments, insulted, jeered, cursed by a whole 
 people, is the most horrible that a man 
 could dread. Socrates taking the poisoned 
 cup blesses him who presents it, and the 
 man weeps ! Jesus in his horrible punish- 
 ment prays for His savage executioners. 
 Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are 
 those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus 
 are those of a God." 
 
 And what is the Christian revelation 
 about Deity ? Christ proclaims to the whole 
 family of the human kind, of whatever race 
 (black or white), condition, clime, or civilisa- 
 tion, that God is their Father, hearing their 
 prayers, compassionating their sorrows, 
 knowing their hearts, calling on them to 
 cast their cares upon Him. This trans- 
 
THE COMMON MAN 101 
 
 cendent declaration was first made to a 
 few peasants, ignorant men. They and 
 their followers are described by both 
 their foes and their friends, as belong- 
 ing to the lowest class in the social scale. 
 Caecilius says to them : " The greater 
 part of you are men collected from the 
 lowest dregs of the people, ignorant, 
 credulous women, unpolished boors, illiter- 
 ate, ignorant, they do not understand civil 
 matters, how can they understand divine ? 
 They have left their tongs, mallets and 
 anvils to preach about the things of 
 Heaven." The Christian Fathers give 
 much the same account of their proselytes. 
 St. Jerome says: "They are gathered not 
 from the Academy, or the Lyceum, but 
 from the low populace. " According to 
 Theodoret, " they are white-smiths, servants, 
 farm-labourers, woodmen, men of sordid 
 trades, beggars." Against these beggars, 
 and the message of Christ, there was 
 marshalled the whole power of the existing 
 civilisation, its intellectual force as well as 
 the incubus of its luxury and its vices, and 
 
102 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 the authority of its government. Not un- 
 naturally so, indeed, since that message 
 proclaimed nothing less than destruction of 
 that system of civilisation. It had nothing 
 human to aid it, except the response which 
 it met with in the heart of man. And does 
 it not throw a striking light upon the 
 religious element in man's nature, when 
 we find that this noble appeal to its loftiest 
 impulses, was caught up and responded to 
 by mankind as just what was wanted to 
 satisfy them ? 
 
 True, its growth was slow. It had not 
 the whirlwind success of a creed imposed 
 upon men by a conquering hero. Its 
 advance was owing to the complete way in 
 which it met the wants of the human heart ; 
 the heart responding to its influence much as 
 a well and truly adjusted receiver in wire- 
 less telegraphy, catches up the throb from 
 the aether which is designed for it. And 
 presently it lights up the world with a living 
 faith in God, which men realise so vividly, 
 that they glory in dying for it. Let us 
 take this declaration of Deity made, in early 
 
v THE COMMON MAN 103 
 
 times, on behalf of Christianity : " I declare 
 unto you God that made the world and 
 all things therein, seeing that He is Lord 
 of Heaven and Earth, dwelleth not in 
 Temples made with hands. He giveth all 
 life and breath and all things. And hath 
 made of one blood all nations of men ! that 
 they should seek the Lord, if haply they 
 might feel after Him and find Him, though 
 He is not far from every one of us. For in 
 Him we live and move and have our being." 
 
 The spokesman of this faith, when some 
 years later he suffered martyrdom for it, 
 thus affirmed his own personal confidence 
 in it, when in the face of impending death. 
 " I am now ready to be offered and the 
 time of my departure is at hand. I have 
 fought a good fight, I have finished my 
 course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth 
 there is laid up for me a crown of righteous- 
 ness, which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, 
 shall give me at that day." 
 
 This vivid belief in the unseen, in what 
 cannot be grasped by the senses, is the 
 greatest fact in the spiritual history of 
 
104 THE RELIGION CHAT.T 
 
 mankind. No doubt the fact that men have 
 believed in certain things, does not prove that 
 those things existed, exactly as they imagined 
 them. But it seems to the Common Man, 
 that a belief which mankind has agreed in 
 holding in all ages of the world, and among 
 all peoples, the most learned and intelligent 
 included, and which has produced such 
 practical results among men, cannot be a 
 mere figment of the imagination cannot be 
 a mere fancy come some way among men, 
 only to mislead them. History teaches that 
 no general impulse of man's nature and no 
 general, abiding conclusion of the human 
 mind, is without some basis to justify it. 
 

 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IF we now look from the spiritual side of 
 man's nature to his intellect, and ask what 
 the thinkers of the race have said upon this 
 subject, we find the great majority of them 
 to have agreed in the belief that there is a 
 God who controls the Universe, and, gener- 
 ally, in the conclusions which naturally 
 follow from this belief. The voice of some 
 of these leaders of men, in different nations, 
 has already been referred to, when dealing 
 with the evidence of the religious instinct 
 in man. The conclusions of some of the 
 other intellects, which have left their im- 
 press upon mankind, may be added. 
 
 Many of the early philosophers of Greece 
 proclaim one God. 
 
 105 
 
106 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 Aristotle cannot be said to have thrown 
 much light on the nature of the Deity, 
 though he described Him as, " Eternal, 
 perfect ; indivisible, perfect, without parts, 
 devoid of passions and unchanging/' But 
 Plato taught that all Creation was under the 
 government of the one great, all-wise God. 
 He, however, seems to have been oppressed, 
 and not unnaturally so, by the difficulty of 
 conceiving the act of the creation of matter 
 at all, and of the Divine power over it ; 
 though some later philosophers of Greece 
 disowned this, as an imputation on the school 
 of Plato. It is, however, noticeable that 
 the Jewish account of creation, represents 
 the world as being constituted out of pre- 
 existing materials. And the truth is, that 
 while the act of creation is inconceivable to 
 us, we are at the same time faced on all 
 sides by undoubted facts which science 
 reveals, but the real nature of which we can 
 form no conception of, any more than we 
 can of the act of creation. And Plato speaks 
 of God as the " Maker and Father of the 
 Universe" ; while he is indignant with those 
 
vi THE COMMON MAN 107 
 
 who say that the superior Power, or Powers, 
 have no interest in the affairs of the world. 
 And of many of the speculations of Plato 
 about the Soul, and the spiritual manifesta- 
 tions and the progress of which it is capable, 
 it is no exaggeration to say, that they are 
 sublime, and that they can claim place among 
 the Divine inspirations which have been 
 given to man. 
 
 Pythagoras, who lived 2600 years ago, 
 tells us : " There is only one God, who being 
 Himself all in all, sees all the beings who 
 fill His immensity. The only principle, the 
 Light of Heaven, the Father of all. He 
 produces everything, He orders and disposes 
 everything." 
 
 Much the same conclusion is arrived at 
 by the wise men of Arabia, by the philo- 
 sophers of the Middle Ages, and by most 
 masters of modern thought. Descartes, 
 Bacon, Leibnitz, Kant, Locke, Hegel, 
 Herder, Schelling, and Spinoza, all bear 
 testimony to their belief in the existence 
 of a God ; though the difficulty which the 
 subject presents, in a metaphysical point of 
 
io8 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 view, to a logical analysis and a complete 
 definition, is shown by the varying views 
 which, at different periods of his life, one of 
 those eminent thinkers held. Spinoza, we 
 read, at one time maintained the idea, 
 simply, of one God ; while at another, he, 
 as far as can be understood, weakened this 
 into almost a form of Pantheism. Bacon's 
 straightforward judgment is : " I had rather 
 believe all the fables in the Legend and 
 the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that 
 this universal frame was without a Mind. 
 And therefore God never wrought a miracle 
 to convince Atheism, because His ordinary 
 works convince it. It is true that a little 
 philosophy inclineth men's minds to Atheism, 
 but depth in philosophy bringeth the men's 
 minds about to religion. For while the 
 mind of man looketh upon second causes 
 scattered, it may sometimes rest in them 
 and go no further ; but when it beholdeth 
 the chain of them confederate and linked 
 together, it must needs fly to Provi- 
 dence and Deity." Descartes says : " With 
 respect to God were I not occupied by 
 
THE COMMON MAN 109 
 
 prejudices, and my thought beset on all sides 
 by the continual presence of the images 
 of sensible objects, I should know nothing 
 sooner nor more easily than the fact of 
 God's existence. For is there any truth 
 more clear than the existence of a Supreme 
 Being, or of a God, seeing that it is to His 
 essence alone that existence necessarily and 
 eternally pertains ? Without the knowledge 
 of God, it would be impossible to ever know 
 anything else." Locke puts it this way : 
 " From the consideration of ourselves, and 
 what we infallibly find in our own constitu- 
 tions, our reason leads us to the knowledge 
 of this certain and evident truth, that there 
 is an eternal, most powerful, and most 
 knowing being : which whether any one will 
 please to call God, it matters not. The 
 thing is evident, and from this idea duly 
 considered, will easily be deduced all those 
 other attributes, which we ought to ascribe 
 to this eternal being. If, nevertheless, any 
 one should be found so senselessly arrogant 
 as to suppose man alone knowing and wise, 
 but yet the product of mere ignorance and 
 
no THE RELIGION OF 
 
 chance, and that all the rest of the Universe 
 acted only by that blind haphazard, I shall 
 leave him to that very rational and emphatic 
 rebuke of Tully, to be considered at his 
 leisure. What can be more sillily arrogant 
 and misbecoming, than for a man to think 
 that he has a mind and understanding in 
 him, but yet in all the Universe beside there 
 is no such thing ? Or that those things 
 which, with the utmost stretch of his reason, 
 he can scarce comprehend, should be moved 
 and managed without any reason at all ? 
 From what has been said it is plain to me, 
 we have a more certain knowledge of a 
 God, than of anything our senses have not 
 immediately discovered to us. Nay, I pre- 
 sume I may say, that we more certainly 
 know that there is a God, than that there is 
 anything else without us. When I say we 
 know, I mean there is such a knowledge 
 within our reach which we cannot miss, if 
 we will but apply our minds to that as we 
 do to several other inquiries." 
 
 To the astronomers it may be said that 
 " The Heavens are telling." Kepler de- 
 
THE COMMON MAN in 
 
 clares : " My greatest desire is that I may 
 perceive the God whom I find everywhere 
 in the eternal world, in like manner also 
 within and inside myself." And Newton, 
 turning from his transcendent investigations 
 into the motive power of the Universe, to 
 the consideration of the First Cause, exclaims: 
 " God we know by His qualities and attri- 
 butes and by His most wise and excellent 
 structure, and by final causes." 
 
 Following on this, we read of the con- 
 clusion of Richard Owen, the naturalist. 
 " He closed his discourse by saying that he 
 was brought to the same conclusion as that 
 which Newton himself arrived at, that there 
 is a First Cause, which he was convinced 
 was not mechanical." And Darwin says : 
 " Authors of the highest eminence seem to be 
 fully satisfied with the view that each species 
 has been specially created. To my mind it 
 accords better with what we know of the 
 laws impressed upon matter by the Creator, 
 that the production and extinction of the 
 past and present inhabitants of the world 
 should have been due to secondary causes, 
 
ii2 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 like those determining the birth and the 
 death of the individual. There is grandeur 
 in this view of life, with its several powers 
 having been originally breathed by the 
 Creator into a few forms or into one ; and 
 that while this planet has gone cycling on 
 according to the fixed law of gravity, from 
 so simple a beginning, endless forms most 
 beautiful and most wonderful have been and 
 are being evolved." 
 
 Turnirlg to the class of practical men, 
 men of " affairs," we find that Bolingbroke, 
 though a Freethinker, maintained that there 
 " lives and works, self- existent and indi- 
 visible, one Almighty God ; that the world 
 is His creation," and that we can discern 
 from this creation, infinite wisdom coincid- 
 ing with infinite benevolence, operating not 
 by particular, but by general laws ; and 
 that we can also discern a fundamental 
 connection between the idea of God and 
 the reason of man, the basis of morality. 
 Bismarck said that the State must rest on 
 a religious basis. When some one praised 
 the power of " genius " in his presence, he 
 
THE COMMON MAN 113 
 
 affirmed that the sense of "duty" stood 
 higher, and by duty he meant what Kant 
 defines as the Categorical Imperative, which, 
 we take it, necessarily argues Deity in the 
 background. Burke, who has been styled 
 the greatest philosopher in practice whom 
 the world has ever seen, gives his verdict 
 thus : " We know that man is by his 
 constitution a religious animal, and that 
 Atheism is against not only our reason, 
 but our instincts, and that it cannot prevail 
 long." So true is it, as had been remarked 
 by Freeman Clarke, that the belief in God 
 has been held by "all the great masters 
 of philosophic thought. However they 
 may differ upon other questions, they all 
 with one consent agree in this sublime 
 faith. The consent of thought in this belief 
 is most extraordinary." 
 
 Even where no distinct belief is to be 
 found, as in the Demonology of past times and 
 in the modern developments of Spiritualism, 
 we still see evidence of this instinct of our 
 nature ; only that it finds its expression in 
 abnormal manifestations, instead of in direct 
 
ii4 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 religious faith. Idolatry itself is a witness, 
 though a stupid witness, in favour of the 
 belief in a real Deity. In these cases the 
 religious feeling is side-tracked from the 
 main line, but is still in communication with 
 it. Some have urged that the variety of 
 religions is an argument against the truth 
 of any of them. But as the vast majority 
 of them, however antagonistic to one an- 
 other, agree in declaring that there is a 
 God, their united testimony upon this point 
 is only made stronger by their antagonism 
 in other matters. All human powers are 
 weak, man's mental machinery, as well as 
 his spiritual insight ; so we must be content 
 if we find a residuum of truth, as the result 
 of the many sided struggles of our race after 
 light more light. 
 
 Our Common Man then, looking back 
 into history and looking around him now in 
 this twentieth century, finds that there is 
 an aptness in the human mind, come from 
 some source, to believe in a God ; and 
 also a general agreement among the leading 
 intellects of mankind, that He does in fact 
 
 i 
 
THE COMMON MAN 115 
 
 exist. From this has followed an equally 
 general impulse, by which a large proportion 
 of the race are led to seek after God, and 
 to address prayers to Him. Those prayers 
 often do not seem to be directly answered ; 
 but on men pray. And whence comes this 
 instinct of prayer? Various explanations, 
 more or less correct, may be given of its 
 earlier manifestations among men ; but 
 whence its primal source ? Whence this 
 impulse of man to pour out his soul to 
 the vault of Heaven, silent though it be ? 
 How is it that ages ago, even in the infancy 
 of the world, in wild uncultured times, one 
 of us men is found to exclaim in the earnest- 
 ness of his soul, " My heart and my flesh 
 crieth out for the living God " ? An instinc- 
 tive belief is never implanted in us in vain. 
 A philosopher has indeed questioned this, 
 and has illustrated his objection, by saying 
 that because we have a desire for food, it 
 does not follow that we are able to get it. 
 But the point is, that when Nature implanted 
 the desire for food, it was her purpose and 
 arrangement that it should be satisfied, and, 
 
n6 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 as a fact, this purpose is generally fulfilled. 
 It is part of her plan that animals should not 
 only desire food, but that they should get it. 
 Yes, the abiding instincts of man's nature 
 have always some objective purpose. We 
 find that our other instincts are directed 
 to further some useful result. Is this one 
 alone to be found futile and misleading ? 
 
 Philosophers have in different ages de- 
 bated the question of the plurality of worlds, 
 and upon this, as on all other questions, 
 have framed different theories. To the 
 Common Man it seems reasonable, judging 
 by such intellectual lights as have been 
 vouchsafed to us here, to conclude, as he 
 looks out on the Heavens, that such of 
 those shining orbs as are suited to sustain 
 life, teem with life of some sort. Why not ? 
 The experience of this world teaches us that 
 life may exist under the most various and 
 discordant conditions as widely different 
 as that of the mite in the cheese, and 
 the eagle soaring over the Andes ; or 
 a Newton solving the problems of the 
 Universe, and an oyster resting in his shell. 
 
THE COMMON MAN 117 
 
 Is it reasonable to suppose that men are 
 the only forms of intelligence, above the 
 other animals, in God's Creation ; that there 
 is nothing between Infinite perfection and 
 poor man ? Science teaches us that many 
 of the conditions of our globe are to be 
 found substantially reproduced in the million 
 worlds of space ; such as what we call matter, 
 its power of attraction, electricity, heat, cold, 
 colour. The light which comes to us from 
 some star in the deepest abyss of space, is 
 amenable to the same analysis, and reveals 
 the same qualities as the light which we 
 get from a gas jet in our house. In those 
 heavenly bodies which we can see closer, we 
 find evidence of land and water, mountain 
 and valley, atmosphere, ice, and snow, much 
 the same as on our own globe. In Mars we 
 have clear proof of vegetation, and of pro- 
 longed parallel lines due to some influence, 
 to which it is hard to assign any other 
 than an artificial origin. Some of those 
 other worlds appear to be dead, others to 
 be only in the process of formation ; but 
 millions of them must be in the stage of 
 
n8 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 middle life, so to speak, for we can see them 
 before our eyes in the stages of gradual 
 condensation, from the gaseous state to the 
 solid, just such as our own world has passed 
 through. It would certainly be strange if 
 they were all empty, silent, lifeless, while 
 this planet of ours is full of life, and every- 
 thing is so obviously constituted to maintain 
 life the grass of the field, the leaves of the 
 tree, the fountain bubbling with sustaining 
 water. We could not conceive of it as 
 being other than what it is, a world resound- 
 ing on all sides with the hum of existence. 
 It may be, of course, that all other worlds 
 are dead. Anything is possible. To be sure 
 we have no absolute knowledge about it. 
 We can only reason from such knowledge as 
 we have, and be guided by such intellectual 
 forces as control our minds. But reasoning 
 from all that we know, or think here, we find 
 it hard to believe that such an inconceivable 
 caprice marks the usually uniform operations 
 of God's Creation, and that while this little 
 grain of the Universe, called the Earth, is 
 ever persistently bursting into life, all the 
 
vi THE COMMON MAN 119 
 
 rest of the immensity of matter is sterile, 
 dead ; a vast, eternal grave of Nature and all 
 her works. 
 
 But if there is life and with it intelligence 
 throughout the Universe, is it not likely 
 that there is, with intelligence, the same im- 
 pulse which we find to be in us men, to seek 
 out the source of that intelligence ? Are the 
 spiritual powers and aspirations which we 
 find to be so marked in this world, confined 
 to earth alone ? Are all those peopled 
 worlds crowded only with animal life, and 
 left destitute of those higher principles 
 which have so much assisted to develop the 
 human race, and without which, indeed, the 
 race could not have been developed at all, 
 but must have remained in the same con- 
 dition as the beasts of the field ? But if 
 that is not so, if they too are susceptible to 
 influences from Heaven, if Beings in them 
 also look upwards to their Maker, if from the 
 stupendous circumference of Creation there 
 is ever breathing forth to its Source the 
 universal prayer, what are we to think 
 if, in truth, it is all mere futile chatter, 
 
120 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 sounded out in vain to dumb unheeding 
 space ? 
 
 Or let us consider the moral sense, the 
 power of conscience, which has played such 
 a large part upon this earth. Is it reason- 
 able to believe that it is to be found in this 
 world of ours only, among all the worlds 
 which throng the Heavens? Here with us, 
 we feel from its very nature, that its potency 
 and scope cannot be bounded by this earth, 
 or by any particular region of the Heavens. 
 We cannot conceive it altering when you 
 pass a certain line in the sky, and being 
 something different on the other side of that 
 line. Millions of men are possessed by the 
 instinctive belief, not only that mercy, truth, 
 devotion to the good, self-sacrifice, are 
 inherently noble things, but that from their 
 very nature they must remain so, to all 
 eternity, through all space, and under what- 
 ever changes the personality of man may 
 undergo in the future. They could not 
 believe that cruelty, perfidy, blasphemy, 
 would be good things if displayed upon a 
 star plunged away in the depths of space, or 
 
THE COMMON MAN 121 
 
 ages hence, any more than to-day. But if 
 this moral sense extends to the Beings on 
 other worlds, are we to say that they are all 
 equally misled, all deriving their moral 
 strength from a delusion and a mockery ? 
 Is the Universe peopled by such befooled 
 intelligences ? The heart of man refuses 
 to believe it. 
 
 ^x 
 
 OF THE \i 
 
 (( UNIVERSITY,) 
 
 ^/ 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 BELIEF 
 
 OUR Common Man then has got thus far, 
 drawing conclusions by means of such 
 mental powers and such natural insight as 
 are allotted to man, that he sees good 
 reason to believe that there is a God. 
 Spiritually, he finds within him a need for 
 some such source to aspire to. It is quite 
 true that while he grasps this central fact, 
 he could not as an intellectual process define 
 and prove all that is involved in the nature 
 of the Deity. As far as his intellect goes, 
 all he holds to is, that there is a conscious 
 Power, an infinite and independent Essence, 
 over all things. The idea is surrounded to 
 his small faculties with much that passes his 
 comprehension, and by much that is quite 
 
CHAP, vii THE COMMON MAN 123 
 
 inexplicable to him. But this, as he often 
 calls to mind in his inquiry, is only what his 
 state is in regard to many other problems 
 by which he is faced, both in mental and 
 physical matters. Whichever way we may 
 look, we find ourselves in the presence of 
 facts which are incomprehensible to us, but 
 which, nevertheless, we believe to exist. 
 The greatest thinkers, to whom we Common 
 Men are mere children, after lives spent 
 in inquiry, have to confess that with them, 
 as with us, knowledge begins and ends in 
 wonder. 
 
 Isaac Newton and David Hume may be 
 justly taken as two of the finest intellects, 
 each in their own line, ever given to man- 
 kind. And what does Hume say of Newton ? 
 11 While Newton seemed to draw off the veil 
 from some of the mysteries of nature, he 
 showed, at the same time, the imperfections 
 of the mechanical philosophy, and thereby 
 restored her ultimate secrets to that obscur- 
 ity, in which they ever did, and ever will 
 remain." 
 
 And, as well as we can see, our incapacity 
 
i2 4 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 arises, not so much from any inherent 
 difficulty, in the subjects themselves, as 
 from the fact that we have not the mental 
 machinery for grasping them. We see on 
 one side of a thing, but we do not see 
 through it, or all round it. We can conceive 
 all being clear enough to beings of a higher 
 type than we are. We need not doubt that 
 there is a complete explanation of what to us 
 are mysteries, if only we were able to do 
 two things : one to get the right explanation, 
 and next to comprehend it. It seems, there- 
 fore, to the Common Man foolish to reject 
 conclusions which he has reasonable grounds 
 for accepting, and to decline to go as far as 
 they do lead him, only because they do not 
 lead him to an absolute explanation, and a 
 complete comprehension of the whole of the 
 problem which is involved. Providence 
 allows us as much knowledge of God and 
 the unseen world as is adapted to our lives 
 here, and our work in this present state of 
 being. A full and direct knowledge would 
 render us unfit for that work. 
 
 In our own part of Creation, in this world 
 
THE COMMON MAN 125 
 
 of ours, we see that there are various orders 
 of creatures, with widely different mental 
 powers, so that matters which would be quite 
 inexplicable to some classes of them, are 
 readily understood by others. You go into 
 a dark room followed by your faithful and 
 intelligent dog, and, striking a match, the 
 gas blazes forth and the whole place is in an 
 instant flooded with light. Your intelligent 
 dog does not comprehend the many causes 
 which go to produce this result. But you 
 know all about the coal raised from the 
 bowels of the earth, the ingenious processes 
 of the gas-works, the pipes skilfully laid to 
 your house, and directed by clever stops and 
 taps, by all which this wonderful gas (for it, 
 too, is wonderful) is submitted absolutely to 
 your discretion, so that at any moment you 
 have only to will, " Let there be light" and 
 there is light. We have called your dog 
 an intelligent dog, but he would not be an 
 intelligent dog, if, when the light burst upon 
 him, he concluded that the cause of the 
 light was not understood by you, and could 
 not be explained at all, because it was 
 
126 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 inexplicable to him. If he was sufficiently 
 intelligent to think about the matter, and if 
 he had the confidence in, and reverence for, 
 his master that it is natural for men to have 
 for some Power superior to them, he would 
 probably be satisfied that though he could 
 not comprehend it, you had power over the 
 whole thing. Even thus does our Common 
 Man feel about his belief in God, and the 
 mystery of His government of this world. 
 
 Nor let any one look down upon our 
 Common Man for thus holding to his faith, 
 though he cannot fully comprehend the 
 object upon which it centres. He is as 
 much entitled to his belief in God under 
 such circumstances, as scientific men are 
 entitled to say that they believe in many 
 of their most assured conclusions. For ex- 
 ample : the student of astronomy learns that 
 light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a 
 second ; some say even a little more. This 
 fact, to begin with, wants thinking over, in 
 order to be realised by mankind, in com- 
 parison with our human methods of loco- 
 motion. It takes us, with what we consider 
 
 i 
 
THE COMMON MAN 127 
 
 fast travelling, some six weeks to go round 
 the world. But a ray of light would com- 
 plete that journey nearly eight times over in 
 one second. Yet so far removed are many 
 of the fixed stars from us, that, we learn, it 
 would require thousands of years for the 
 light travelling from them, at that rate, to 
 reach this earth. Our student observes the 
 star Arcturus. It, he is taught, is as large 
 as thirteen hundred of our suns rolled 
 together, and it is flying through space at 
 the rate of 257 miles each second; some 
 say 300 miles a second. A rifle bullet 
 moving at less than half a mile a second, 
 and striking a steel target becomes very 
 hot. At only a dozen times this speed, it 
 would develop heat enough to melt itself. 
 Arcturus is moving at least five hundred times 
 as fast as the rifle bullet. At 300 miles a 
 second, a body several miles in diameter flash- 
 ing across the line of sight, a few feet before 
 the eyes, would move so quickly that it 
 would not be perceived. Now this Arcturus 
 has been observed by astronomers, and its 
 place fixed, for more than three thousand 
 
128 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 years. Yet such is its distance from us, that 
 all the while it appears to us to be standing 
 still, fixed on the same spot, as when our pre- 
 decessors on earth marked it three thousand 
 years ago, and long before Job gazed upon it, 
 musing on the unanswerable question : " I 
 will demand of Thee and answer Thou me ; 
 Canst Thou guide Arcturus, with his sons ? " 
 A new star bursts upon the view of the 
 observer, in Perseus. Astronomers tell him 
 that the light from it takes, certainly not less 
 than two thousand years to reach his eye, and 
 probably four thousand, or even six thousand 
 years ; so that the outburst which he had wit- 
 nessed, really occurred at least two thousand 
 years ago, and if the new star were to be 
 obliterated as suddenly as it was created, it 
 would appear to be there for the two 
 thousand years that the last rays of light 
 would take, after leaving it, on their journey 
 to the earth. Also the student learns that 
 some of the fainter nebulae are buried away 
 in such appalling depths of space, that it is 
 estimated that light coming from them 
 would take two millions of years, flashing 
 
vii THE COMMON MAN 129 
 
 on at its incredible speed, before it would 
 reach our globe. Well, the student accepts 
 all this, and he has good reason for doing 
 so. But when he says that he believes it, 
 what exact state of mind does he declare ? 
 
 If, instead of looking upwards, we look 
 downwards in Creation, we are equally 
 astounded. What we call matter, the block 
 of wood, the piece of glass, the street gas-light, 
 consist, it seems, of an inconceivable number 
 of Atoms, and these again are composed of 
 a conglomeration of rotating Electrons, all 
 vibrating round a mean position, so that 
 each Atom is like this Universe of ours, 
 with its minute revolving stars, Electrons, 
 only all so small, so very small ! They 
 are as far outside the search of the strongest 
 microscope, as the most distant stars are 
 beyond the sweep of the most powerful 
 telescope. How inconceivable ! The par- 
 ticles in a clod of earth whirling round their 
 centres, like, even like, as the Planets soar 
 through space round the Sun ! 
 
 Or let us look at another branch of 
 
 Science, electricity. I open books of un- 
 
 K 
 
130 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 doubted authority, and I learn that the 
 electric oscillations of open induction-coils 
 have a period of vibration which is measured 
 by ten-thousandths of a second, while the 
 vibrations in the oscillatory discharges of 
 Leyden jars, such as were observed by 
 Feddersen, follow each other about a 
 hundred times as rapidly. The oscillations 
 here dealt with, one learns, are about a 
 hundred times as rapid as those observed 
 by Feddersen. Their period of oscillation, 
 estimated it is true only by the aid of 
 theory, is of the order of a hundred-millionth 
 of a second. 
 
 If we turn to the discoveries of Hertz 
 we read in scientific accounts of them, this 
 among other wonders : 
 
 Under these conditions electric waves of ten 
 metres long (longer ones can scarcely be observed 
 in an enclosed space) must complete thirty million 
 oscillations per second. In order to generate waves of 
 three metres long, capable of being observed in a 
 physical laboratory, the generating impacts should 
 follow each other a hundred million times in one 
 second. 
 
 This is all very well. Science, I know, is 
 
THE COMMON MAN 131 
 
 science. But, O Man of Science, hundred 
 million times in one second ! Yet, I believe 
 this and I have good reason to believe this. 
 But do either you or I comprehend this? 
 No ; we assent intellectually, for adequate 
 reasons, to a conclusion which personally 
 we cannot fully grasp, nor realise to our 
 consciousness. In the same way, all through 
 Nature we are faced by and have to accept 
 the incomprehensible and the appalling. 
 The imagination sinks under the effort to 
 grasp many of the fundamental postulates of 
 every science. Our mental machinery is 
 not equal to the task, but in the effort 
 falls in upon itself, like the arm of a child 
 trying to push back a weight beyond its 
 strength. 
 
 In truth, the word " believe'' is used to 
 express states of mind that are similar in 
 character, but not the same in fact. Our 
 student of astronomy seeks relief, we will 
 suppose, from his severe studies by reading 
 about Egypt and its Pyramids, and con- 
 versing with friends who have made the 
 holiday trip there. Were he to make the 
 
132 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 statement that he believes that there are 
 Pyramids in Egypt, he would express a 
 different state of mind from that which he 
 would describe, when he says that he 
 believes that the light takes thousands, or 
 millions of years, to come from the distant 
 nebulae. He may be said to know about 
 the Pyramids, while he concludes about 
 the nebulae. There is an element of faith 
 and imagination in the one state of mind, 
 which there is not in the other. His 
 belief in the distance of the nebulae is an 
 act of assent, upon valid reasoning, rather 
 than a fact which his intellect takes to 
 itself as being within its grasp. But it is 
 sufficient for his purpose. It assists our 
 student to prosecute his inquiries into 
 astronomy, which he continues to do, so 
 long as he gets satisfactory grounds upon 
 which to base his belief, and to raise the 
 superstructure of his science. 
 
 In the same way, our Common Man's 
 belief in God rests upon sufficient grounds ; 
 though he is not granted in this inquiry any 
 more than in regard to other problems in 
 
vii THE COMMON MAN 133 
 
 Nature, absolute knowledge, or clear light, 
 right on to the end of the road which he 
 has to travel But his conclusions, from 
 reasoning, about the Deity give him sufficient 
 certainty to guide him in this life, and so 
 serve his practical needs as man, the re- 
 ligious animal on earth. He is reasonably 
 led up to a conclusion which, as to its 
 full comprehension, is beyond his reason. 
 And there is no doubt, that millions of the 
 human race who accept this leading, do 
 afterwards attain an absolute conviction of 
 the truth it points to, and an assurance, 
 not only that God exists, but that they 
 personally feel His presence, in accordance 
 with the ancient declaration, that the secret 
 of Deity is with those who reverence the 
 Deity. This feeling, certainly, is no proof 
 to those who do not experience it. Still, 
 it is a factor in the problem to be solved ; 
 and with those who can lay claim to it, it 
 fits in with and becomes the complement to, 
 the logical belief upon which the foundation 
 of their religion rests. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 DIFFICULTIES 
 
 OUR Common Man, then, believes in God. 
 If God is there, he concludes from natural 
 feelings that he ought to seek Him, if it 
 be possible to have communion with Him, 
 and there are certain other conclusions about 
 the Deity which appear to him to follow 
 naturally from the fact of His existence. 
 Much, in truth, is involved in the fact that 
 there is a God; if, indeed, it be a fact. If 
 we believe that He is, we soon find that 
 we cannot stop short at that belief, but that 
 further confessions of Faith are involved 
 in it. Before, however, going further with 
 the problem which is exercising him, our 
 Common Man, being also a truthful man, 
 confesses that he finds himself faced by 
 
 134 
 
CHAP, viii THE COMMON MAN 135 
 
 some difficulties. The consideration of 
 these will not only clear his way, but the 
 inquiries that they give rise to, may in 
 the end strengthen the position, which they 
 at first threatened. 
 
 One thing which perplexes him, is the 
 apparent insignificance of himself, of the 
 whole human race, of the world, of the 
 Solar system, of all that he has knowledge 
 of, compared with the immensity of the 
 Universe. Walk along the sea-shore, pick 
 up a grain of sand, and in that grain amid 
 miles of beach, you see what our world is 
 amid the vastness of Creation. What we 
 have within our reach, what we may be 
 said to have experiences of, seems so 
 insignificant that we might think we could 
 not draw any conclusions from it regarding 
 the stupendous whole, or its Creator. In 
 this insignificant atom of the Universe, is 
 it not idle for us to attempt to puzzle out 
 the meaning of the immensity with which 
 we are surrounded ? 
 
 The difficulty thus suggested is not an 
 unnatural one. But when we look closer 
 
136 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 into the matter, we find that this perplexity 
 arises from confusing the material world, in 
 all its vastness, with the realm of mind 
 and spirit, and applying to both the same 
 measure. But there is a world of mind 
 and spirit, and there is a world of sense 
 and matter, and the conditions of the one 
 are wholly different from those of the other. 
 On the material side, the comparison of this 
 earth with the immensity of Creation, would 
 be like trying to measure the star depths with 
 a yard-stick. But in the mental and spiritual 
 world, vastness assumes a different aspect. 
 As to space and time, they seem to be 
 conceptions, which, as far as we can grasp 
 them, depend upon conditions within our 
 own minds. In a dream, for example, we 
 appear to pass through the experience of 
 days, in what is often only an instant of 
 time. And with the material elements of 
 our existence, there are joined in inexpli- 
 cable union, though not fused together, 
 spiritual and emotional conditions which 
 reveal to us, even here, wholly diverse 
 forms of existence in the one Being, and 
 
vin THE COMMON MAN 137 
 
 which led Shakespeare to exclaim, in his 
 well-known and sublime words : " We are 
 such stuff as dreams are made on." 
 
 And in the sphere of mind and spirit life, 
 smallness or largeness, expansion to im- 
 mensity, or contraction to a point, are to be 
 regarded differently from the way in which 
 we would look at material matters. The 
 facts of consciousness are as much facts as 
 those of the senses, and the apparently least 
 of things may partake of the nature of the 
 infinite. The operations of the spirit world, 
 the communication between finite spirits and 
 the Father of spirits, are extant throughout all 
 the vastness of Creation, and are not impeded 
 nor affected by the immensity of material 
 nature, nor by the illimitable nature of space 
 itself. Distance and time and size have no 
 longer to be counted with. You can throw 
 your mind back, and speculate on the 
 conditions of the glacial period of the earth 
 millions of years ago, as readily as you can 
 direct it to the causes of some recent earth- 
 quake. In one moment you can project your 
 thoughts to realise the meaning of changes 
 
138 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 that you are looking at in the sun's envelope, 
 and in the next, consider a geological forma- 
 tion in an adjoining field. And there seems 
 to be little doubt that one soul can act upon 
 another at a distance from it, by some 
 process that is quite other than a material 
 process. Man, puny man, can embrace 
 immensity in his spiritual and mental grasp, 
 and while materially he is nothing, in his 
 higher capacity, he defines both time and 
 space. 
 
 Still more in the moral world, in the 
 realm of virtue, the " Kingdom of Heaven," 
 nothing is insignificant, however little or 
 lowly, which is an emanation of the Supreme 
 All Spirit. The tiniest ray of light, lost 
 apparently and dissipated in the depths of 
 space, is as much the offspring of the sun, 
 as are the sweep of his beams when they are 
 caught up and reflected by shining worlds. 
 And in spiritual matters, wherever you find 
 this beam from Heaven, to the verge of 
 space, if space have a verge, to the end of 
 time, if time have an end, wherever you 
 find it, there you are in the presence of a 
 
vin THE COMMON MAN 139 
 
 Divine thing. Considerations of vastness or 
 minuteness, transcendent power or weakness, 
 such even as the weakness of man himself, 
 are not relevant. For we need not hesitate 
 to take the case of man, insignificant though 
 he may seem to be, and lost in the immensity 
 of the Universe. If, as we look upon one 
 of our fellow-men, we find in him the spirit 
 of goodness, devotion to the Creator, en- 
 thusiasm for all that is noble and true, why 
 there, even in this man, you see the prin- 
 ciple of divinity itself. If the ray from God 
 be there, insignificance is clear out of the 
 matter. All are upon one level before the 
 Infinite. If the Divine impulse thrills there, 
 it ennobles the man : he does not belittle it. 
 Connected with the triviality of mankind, 
 there is another difficulty which perplexes 
 our Common Man. Why are we left in 
 such obscurity about the Unseen God, and 
 our future destiny? Is it, in truth, be- 
 cause we and our world are such an in- 
 significant atom in the Universe, that we 
 are lost in the vasty deep, forgotten perhaps 
 by the ruling Power ? But, if indeed, we are 
 
140 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 expected to worship our Creator, why all this 
 obscurity ? Why are we given the instinct 
 to search Him out if, in truth, He is un- 
 searchable ? Wherefore does a merciful 
 Father leave His children to struggle with 
 such perplexities when, as it seems to us, 
 nothing would have been easier than for 
 there to have been an open revelation of 
 God to men, telling them plainly of their 
 duty to Him ? 
 
 If you ask our Common Man to explain 
 this, he will answer that he cannot fully ex- 
 plain it ; not at least by the light of human 
 reason, with which we are now dealing. 
 That our state here is an imperfect and 
 blurred one, is obvious, and this would seem 
 to be one of the defective conditions by which 
 we are surrounded. Many men certainly 
 believe that God has revealed Himself to 
 mankind, and to them personally, in particular. 
 As Solomon says : " They that put their 
 trust in Him, shall understand the truth. " 
 Still, we cannot truthfully say that mankind 
 have that plain revelation of God, upon the 
 absence of which the objection is founded. 
 
THE COMMON MAN 141 
 
 Yet there is not wanting a partial explana- 
 tion, at least, derived from the conditions of 
 human life here, which suggests itself to the 
 Common Man. It is obvious that it is the 
 intention of the Creator that all forms of life 
 on this planet (and, probably, wherever in 
 His Universe forms of life exist) should 
 take the deepest interest in their present 
 state of existence, and should be devoted to 
 the claims of that life in which they find them- 
 selves placed. This is shown by the instinct 
 for living being one of the strongest planted 
 in our nature. The love of life, looked at 
 in the abstract, has imperfect justification 
 for many of those who, nevertheless, are 
 absolutely governed by it. And, Hamlet's 
 soliloquy notwithstanding, it is not based 
 wholly on the fear of death. We have such 
 an inherent love of and interest in life, that 
 we cling to it through all its trials, and when 
 of itself it would not seem worth prizing. It 
 being, then, the obvious purpose of the 
 Creator that we should be devoted to the 
 claims upon us of our life here, it would be 
 inconsistent with this purpose if there was 
 
142 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 placed before men, in the blaze of actual 
 knowledge, the view of God Himself, and of 
 a further state of being, to which men were 
 hurrying through this short stage of existence. 
 For, then, all interest in the affairs of this 
 present world would be gone. Who would 
 have energy to struggle on at his work here, 
 if he had direct knowledge of a wonderful 
 future state immediately at hand ? Napoleon 
 as a young man was absorbed in the politics 
 of Corsica, and, had there been no revolution 
 in France, possibly might have remained so 
 all his life. But if, while busied with writing 
 that eager philippic, which, as a youth, he 
 composed upon the condition of his native 
 island, his future career had been revealed 
 to him, would he have cared to finish his 
 letter, or to further nurse his enthusiasm for 
 Paoli ? 
 
 As well as we can judge, it seems to have 
 been the purpose of Providence, to here 
 only accord to us such knowledge of Him- 
 self, and such grounds of expectation as to 
 our future destiny, as is sufficient for the 
 purpose of improving and generally guiding 
 
THE COMMON MAN 143 
 
 us here. Thus it is, that need is found and 
 scope is given for the foundation principles 
 of all religions faith and hope. Some, 
 indeed, hold that the explanation of the 
 mystery is, that this world is a state of 
 probation for mankind, in view of something 
 beyond it. But this at least is plain, that if 
 we knew certainly about God and a future 
 existence, it would be impossible to retain 
 interest in the little affairs of this life. 
 Indeed we see that this is so, by some 
 classes of devotees now, under all forms 
 of religion. They are so possessed by the 
 conviction of the things unseen, that they 
 lose all concern for this life, neglect its 
 work, and give themselves up to the engross- 
 ing duty of preparing themselves for the 
 next world. Were all men like these, things 
 could not go on. But this would not be 
 fulfilling the purpose of the Creator, so far 
 as the present life is concerned. Thus 
 muses our inquirer upon this one of our 
 perplexities. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 WHENCE THE EVIL? 
 
 BUT our Common Man is faced by a still 
 more serious difficulty as he ponders over 
 the inexplicable problem of evil, whether 
 it be the evil which men do, or the evil 
 which they suffer. And there seems to be 
 so much of it ! He sees evil and sin all 
 around him in the world, and how is he to 
 reconcile this with the rule of a just and 
 merciful God? What is he to say to Sin, 
 the defiance by the creature of his Maker ? 
 Sin whose first appearance among the 
 fallen angels, struck even them with con- 
 sternation. 
 
 Amazement seized 
 
 All the host of Heaven, back they recoiled, afraid 
 At first, and called me Sin, and for a sign 
 Portentous held me. 
 
 144 
 
X THE COMMON MAN 145 
 
 What true happiness, some ask, is to be 
 found in the human struggle called life, and 
 where is the moral purpose in it and in 
 Nature ? There is no greater obstacle 
 than this problem, to the acceptance of the 
 religious principle among men, and par- 
 ticularly among that considerable proportion 
 of men, who take the surface aspect of 
 questions, can see difficulties readily, but 
 have not the time, nor perhaps the in- 
 tellectual power, to search below those diffi- 
 culties and find some explanation of them ; 
 or, what is as likely, find that they are of 
 such a nature that man could not expect to 
 wholly solve them, with his present mental 
 capacity. With people who are religious, 
 the perplexing fact forms only one more 
 exercise for the spiritual side of their nature ; 
 but with many it is, not unnaturally, a 
 stumbling-block to belief in religion at all. 
 
 If we look out on the world, we see 
 a large portion of the human family still 
 sunk in the conditions of savage life. The 
 progress of the race, though real, is slow ; 
 
 the back ranks, at times, seem as if they 
 
 L 
 
146 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 would be for ever left behind on the march. 
 Even in the civilised and advanced races, 
 vice and suffering appear to be spread over 
 a wide area ; though possibly it appears 
 larger, owing to the fact that the disturbing 
 elements of life attract more attention than 
 the quiet tenor of its ordinary course. 
 Behind all, too, is the disappointing and 
 baffling sense of the futility of things, the 
 insignificance of life, and the black thread 
 which seems to be slipped into the web of 
 each one's destiny. Hence that sickness 
 of heart which comes over some, as they 
 look out upon life, and which of old called 
 forth the despairing exclamation, " Where- 
 fore hast Thou made all men in vain ? " All 
 which, when contemplated without such aid 
 as religion and the higher view of life may 
 be able to offer, dispose men to cynicism 
 and to unbelief in the nobler aspirations of 
 mankind. 
 
 Samuel Johnson, we read, in the famous 
 Biography, was discussing with his humble 
 follower Boswell, the recent suicide of the 
 great Lord Clive, which the Moralist attri- 
 
THE COMMON MAN 147 
 
 buted to the crimes that he had committed. 
 Boswell ventured to dispute this. " But, Sir, 
 might not this nobleman have felt everything 
 weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable, as Hamlet 
 says ? " Johnson : " Nay, if you are to bring 
 in gabble, I'll talk no more. I will not 
 upon my honour.'' There is no doubt that 
 Boswell was right, and that mere disappoint- 
 ment with life, and in that case, such a dis- 
 tinguished life, was the cause of the violent 
 end of that great career. The truth is that 
 Johnson's outburst was owing to the fact, 
 that no one suffered more than he did from 
 this very spirit of despondency, and he hated 
 to be reminded of it. But whichever view 
 be taken, whether it be a case of crime in 
 a life of so much glory, followed by re- 
 morse, or of the mere weariness of human 
 existence, the episode illustrates the futility 
 of man's life, if this world is its end-all, and 
 if no moral purpose can be read into it. 
 With some men doing good and others 
 working ill, and evil befalling the good and 
 bad alike, what, say some, is there to show 
 that the whole of life is not a vain thing, 
 
148 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 useless in any aspect and destined to vanish 
 away like the " trace of a cloud," with 
 nothing, after all, in its whole range to show 
 a meaning in it, or to vindicate the cause of 
 " the blameless souls " ? 
 
 A subject so grave claims earnest thought 
 from the inquirer. Whence the evil, is a 
 question which has perplexed mankind, ever 
 since the human mind began to reflect upon 
 life and its purpose. There is something 
 pathetic in the persistent efforts made by 
 men, from the infancy of the race onwards, 
 to account for this grim fact. Sometimes 
 it is the disquisition of the philosopher, some- 
 times the simple legends of peoples, coming 
 down from early times. It is discussed by 
 the writers whom we call Heathen, for 
 example, Plutarch, with a fulness and dis- 
 cernment that leaves little to be supple- 
 mented. At times it is pondered over and 
 accepted simply as a fact that is unaccount- 
 able. " Thy footsteps are not known," is 
 an ancient conclusion. As for our Common 
 Man, he does not profess to be able to answer 
 this question, any more than his brother 
 
THE COMMON MAN 149 
 
 mortals have been in the past. He does not 
 know the full explanation, and he reflects 
 within himself that, in regard to this as to 
 many other things, if he were to be told it, it 
 is highly probable that his present mental 
 faculties would not be adequate to com- 
 prehending it. But nevertheless he struggles 
 for some ray of light on it, enough, at least, 
 to guide him in regard to his duty to God, 
 and to man in this life. For it seems to him 
 that, next to the antecedent question of the 
 existence of Deity, the superstructure of 
 religion very much depends upon the manner 
 in which the question of evil is dealt with. 
 If God does indeed exist, and if He be a 
 Righteous Lord of Creation, then to his 
 mind the other postulates of religion natur- 
 ally follow. But if we have reason to dis- 
 believe either of those premises, then we are 
 dwellers in darkness indeed. 
 
 In this inquiry it is, at times, taken for 
 granted that the only question is whether the 
 existence of evil, in any degree, however 
 small, consorts with the attributes of good- 
 ness and wisdom attributed to the Deity. 
 
150 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 And as some evil certainly does exist, it 
 seems to be taken for granted that this is 
 irreconcilable with the idea of, and the belief 
 in, a righteous Almighty. The two con- 
 ceptions, it is held, are destructive of one 
 another. But it seems to our Common 
 Man that the question of importance is, not 
 whether the fact of evil can be wholly ex- 
 plained away, so as to leave the ground 
 clear for the conception of the good God, 
 but whether evil exists in such a manner 
 and in such a degree, as to be incon- 
 sistent with the belief in a just and merci- 
 ful Ruler of the world. If it does not so 
 exist, if, notwithstanding the evil, still the 
 main purpose of nature and the tendency 
 of human affairs testify, on the whole, 
 to beneficent designs in their government, 
 then the fact that there is some evil to be 
 endured, becomes only one more of the 
 many mysteries of Creation. It is one more 
 of those questions in regard to which, as has 
 been said of old, "Verily God hides Him- 
 self." No doubt the human heart instinctively 
 rejects the idea of imputing evil to the 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 151 
 
 Creator ; and such an idea is inconsistent 
 with the moral sense, which man finds to 
 be within him. But this alone would not 
 be sufficient to rely upon. If, however, the 
 facts justify this natural instinct, then the 
 complete answer to the question " Whence 
 the evil ? " ceases to be of essential import- 
 ance, at least as far as the guidance of our 
 lives here is concerned. For, then, particular 
 cases of evil would not upset the conclusion 
 of a righteous purpose on the whole. Since 
 we know that there are many things which 
 are beyond our comprehension, it follows 
 that, once we are satisfied of the righteous- 
 ness of the Creator, it is reasonable for us to 
 believe that there is some good cause for 
 the evil, though it is unknown to us ; just 
 as a child ought to think of a kind parent 
 who required it to take some bitter medicine. 
 The question, therefore, which challenges 
 the inquiry of the Common Man, is whether 
 the world taken as a whole (and in this 
 matter he can only judge by what he sees 
 and knows of in this world), and having 
 regard to the tendencies which are apparent 
 
152 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 in its history, and the devolutions in mankind 
 which have taken place, bears testimony to 
 a wise and just Creator, or whether they do 
 the reverse ? 
 
 On this question there are some con- 
 siderations which, at the outset, claim his 
 attention. In the first place he sees, not- 
 withstanding the first impressions which the 
 dark passages of life may cause, that pain 
 and evil do not predominate in the world. 
 They claim a part of man's existence, but 
 by no means the whole. In a considerable 
 range of human affairs goodness and happi- 
 ness prevail ; while much of life is passed in 
 a medium condition of content, and a curious 
 compensating element is provided in affairs, 
 owing to which, out of evil and difficulty, 
 healing influences are evolved. Such is the 
 general result of the whole, that few would 
 be unwilling to live their lives over again. 
 In this way Providence, in decreeing the 
 troubles of life, has at the same time infused 
 into those troubles an educating influence 
 and an accompanying compensation. So 
 that many men, and these men of the nobler 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 153 
 
 type, men who find a purpose in life, discover 
 a meaning and a use even in its crosses. 
 To them it is the darkness which reveals 
 the guiding stars of the Heavens, which are 
 not seen in the warm sunshine. Numbers 
 of men are so constituted by the Creator, 
 as to practically show forth this noble ideal. 
 Further, it has to be observed as to the 
 harsher evils of life, that the fact that mis- 
 fortunes and tragic events attract so much 
 notice, shows that they are exceptional. No 
 one's attention is called to the raptures of the 
 lovers, to the silent pleasure of the mother 
 nursing her infant, to the sweetness of rest 
 to the toiler, to the glow of satisfaction in the 
 successful worker, to the inspiring moments 
 of the man of genius, to the peace which 
 passeth understanding in the religious mind. 
 
 But, moreover, our inquirer sees plainly 
 enough, that the Universe is governed by 
 vast general laws, which act inexorably in 
 fulfilling their mission, as indeed it would 
 seem inevitable that they must, since they 
 have to operate over and to regulate the 
 immensity of Creation. Necessarily these 
 
154 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 will cross and conflict in particular cases, 
 especially when they come in contact with 
 beings such as men, who feel that they have 
 power to direct their own actions, and who 
 certainly act as if they had. It would be 
 impossible, except in a state of necessary, all- 
 round perfection, to have those actions free 
 from error ; and, as the general laws are 
 unpitying, sad results which make up much 
 of what we call evil in life, must at times 
 follow. Also even apart from the mistakes 
 of men, the operation of all general laws, 
 however beneficial their general scope, must 
 involve occasional and exceptional evils. 
 The typhoon which sweeps away the germs 
 of pestilence from the Eastern village, may 
 unroof the sheds of the villagers. 
 
 Why this should be so, why the human race 
 were not made all-perfect and placed in an 
 all-happy world, why this baffling network of 
 agencies, often conflicting with one another, 
 none of us men can say. Certainly our 
 Common Man does not feel himself able 
 to undertake the explanation. Some philo- 
 sophers, he understands, have held that the 
 
THE COMMON MAN 155 
 
 primary conditions of the Universe are such, 
 as to render it impossible for Deity itself to 
 free existence from elements of evil, which 
 appear to be inextricably interwoven in 
 larger principles of good. Thus, they argue, 
 if men are to be free agents at all, not mere 
 machines, Deity itself could not carry out 
 the contradiction of their being unable to do 
 wrong, as well as to do right. If they were 
 so framed that they all must do the one 
 right thing, then the world would be peopled 
 by automata, not by free creatures. There 
 would be no immorality then, certainly ; but 
 neither would their be morality as we know 
 it. The essence of goodness would be 
 gone. In truth, it seems to be impossible 
 to have the harmony of the Universe 
 this mysterious music of the spheres 
 without some discordant notes. But 
 we poor mortals cannot rightly judge of 
 the eternal symphony, from the imperfect 
 snatches which we get of it in the moment 
 of this life. Take, for example, the King of 
 Terrors, Death. You cannot conceive this 
 world, so well adapted as it is by Nature 
 
156 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 to sustain life, to be empty and void of life. 
 Yet, if we are to have life and the propagation 
 of life upon the globe, you cannot avoid 
 its natural complement death, and death 
 becomes, not a needless evil, but the 
 necessary consequence of the succession of 
 life on the planet. It is not to be pretended 
 that this takes away the sadness of death, 
 more especially among men, for the survivors, 
 but it leads us to regard it, not as a capri- 
 cious cruelty, but as one essential part of a 
 stupendous scheme. 
 
 And generally, our inquirer is impressed 
 with the fact that the evil in the world is not 
 directly designed and ordered, but arises 
 incidentally. It follows upon the mismanage- 
 ment by men of human conditions, and most 
 of it would disappear if that mismanagement, 
 and the consequences of it, could be set right. 
 Thus, though several organs of the body are 
 so constituted as to give pleasure, none are 
 designed to give pain, but pain in them is 
 caused by disease perverting their true use, 
 which disease, if our progenitors had lived 
 lives regulated by the natural laws of health, 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 157 
 
 and we had done the same, would for the 
 most part die out among men. Disease 
 considered by us the curse of Nature, is in 
 truth her protest against the defying her just 
 laws. It is a matter of common observation 
 that people often indulge themselves without 
 discretion, nothing heeding the lessons of 
 experience, or the warnings of nature, until 
 age comes on and injured nature exacts its 
 penalty. Medical Science tells us that the 
 direst diseases which afflict mankind, are 
 caused by the excesses of men themselves. 
 
 The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
 Make instruments to plague us. 
 
 On the other hand we see men who, owing 
 to self-restraint and sound conditions of life, 
 are able to defy bodily infirmities even to 
 extreme old age. So that there appears to 
 be a purpose behind the consequences which, 
 at first sight, seem to us to come blindly and 
 heedlessly upon hapless mankind, and a 
 moral lesson is thus being taught constantly, 
 if silently, to the human race. For there is 
 the fact ever before us, however we may 
 choose to explain it, that Nature does punish 
 
158 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 vice, and that if only we would resist it, it 
 would be well for us and our children. 
 
 Much the same considerations apply to a 
 great part of the defects and social wrongs 
 of the world, and of the mental unhappiness 
 of mankind. It is a fact, that most of this 
 class of human ills and sorrows are owing, 
 not so much to the conditions of human life, 
 as to the misuse of those conditions. Nature 
 undoubtedly demands from men both dis- 
 cretion and industry in the conduct of their 
 lives. Nature certainly does punish foolish- 
 ness and neglect, as well as crime. It is not 
 enough for a man to be amiable ; he must 
 also avoid acting in a silly way. The kindly 
 feelings of our times make us averse to 
 human vengeance upon wrong-doing ; but 
 Nature goes on upon her old lines, and 
 punishment inevitably follows upon the fault. 
 Hence a great part of the sufferings of man- 
 kind. For there can be no question, that if 
 men acted reasonably themselves and justly 
 to others, the face of the world would soon 
 be changed. Many men indeed do act in 
 this wise way. But others are enslaved by 
 
THE COMMON MAN 159 
 
 the lower instincts of their nature, and though 
 they are a minority of the whole, human 
 affairs generally are upset by them. If 
 men acted justly, then most of the ills which 
 now mar human life would vanish. We 
 would have war no more, and no more 
 standing armies ; no more of the costly 
 agencies for detecting crime, nor of the 
 repulsive machinery now required for punish- 
 ing it ; no more burdensome systems for 
 rescuing the destitute or the vicious ; while 
 those who were afflicted by natural causes, 
 or the accidents of life, w r ould only give easy 
 scope for the exercise of the natural benevo- 
 lence of their fellows. Not less striking 
 would be the deliverance of the lower animals 
 from the cruelty of man, which is now one of 
 the saddest facts of life. All this would 
 come to pass if only it were possible for the 
 forecast of Robert Burns to be realised, and 
 sense and worth to prevail over the world. 
 
 If, we say, the Common Man be, asked, 
 Why are not all men made thus good ? 
 Why has the human race to be disciplined 
 towards virtue, instead of being made virtu- 
 
160 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 ous to start with and then kept so? The 
 answer of the Common Man is that he 
 cannot tell. But yet, what challenges his 
 attention ? Why, that there appears to be a 
 moral purpose, struggling through it all, to 
 make itself felt. He has before him the 
 impressive fact that Nature's operations 
 working on human life through the ages, 
 and working, as it might seem to a super- 
 ficial view, blindly, are yet solemnly pro- 
 claiming that vice is a mistake. Her plan 
 seems to be to leave man free, but to school 
 him, often by sharp methods, to virtue ; to 
 make him learn and take to himself the 
 lesson that wrong-doing degrades him, and 
 will entail retribution in one way or another. 
 As the Angel explains to Adam in Paradise 
 Lost : 
 
 He left ... thy will 
 
 By nature free, not overruled by fate 
 
 Inextricable, or strict necessity : 
 
 Our voluntary service he requires, 
 
 Not our necessitated ; ... for how 
 
 Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve 
 
 Willing or no, who will but what they must 
 
 By destiny, and can no other choose? 
 
THE COMMON MAN 161 
 
 And it is the fact, if we take a broad view 
 of life and of man's history, that we find 
 human nature does resent in nations, as 
 well as in men, the sinking of its nobler 
 parts in lower passions, and takes vengeance 
 upon those nations who would so degrade 
 it. Though it be soiled for a time, man's 
 nature does vindicate itself in the end. 
 
 Our Common Man is also impressed by 
 the consideration, the full scope of which, 
 however, he does not profess to be able to 
 explore, that even evil itself, is not all evil. 
 Some forms of it work out good results, and 
 appear to be necessary to produce those 
 good results. Such is the constitution of 
 things. Pain and struggle often develop 
 noble types of character, which led the sage 
 of old to exclaim that he was to be envied 
 who was either courageous or happy, 
 either fortis or felix. George Washington, 
 who had his share of the trials of life, 
 says, in a private letter to a friend : "At 
 disappointments and losses which are the 
 effects of Providential acts, I never repine, 
 
 because I am sure the Allwise Disposer of 
 
 M 
 
162 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 events knows better than we do what is 
 best for us, or what we deserve." Dr. 
 Arnold of Rugby, when he was dying, 
 after a painful illness, told his son that he 
 felt the pain he had suffered was a beneficial 
 exercise for him. Indeed, without pain and 
 struggle how could we have fortitude, self- 
 denial, manful endurances, and other qualities 
 which ennoble human nature ? You can 
 no more, in our present state, have a true 
 character formed without trials, than you 
 can have a body well-developed without 
 exercise. Labour, if imposed on man as a 
 curse, rightly taken develops into a gift, 
 which the wisest of men have blessed. The 
 selfish instincts of millions of individuals, 
 each working for himself, in a community, 
 are in the outcome found to be so overruled, 
 that the general result is the common good 
 of all. The vices of some men call forth 
 and give scope for the virtues of others. 
 Though all this does not prevent pain from 
 being felt and vice from being vice, it has 
 a significance which challenges the attention 
 of the Common Man. 
 
THE COMMON MAN 163 
 
 But further, he learns from history an 
 impressive fact, that in the leading civilisa- 
 tions of the world the human race is surely, 
 if slowly, getting better. He cannot read its 
 pages without seeing that evil is gradually 
 waning, and good strengthening, and that 
 the principle of " Conscience," always of 
 some weight in human affairs, tends more 
 and more to challenge the supremacy of 
 brute force. The evil passions of men are 
 still there, but they are coming more under 
 the restraint of the moral sense. It is not 
 that new and loftier principles of morality 
 have been discovered for some of the 
 noblest of these have been announced from 
 the first by the Prophets and the leaders of 
 men as that those principles are, impelled 
 by a power which appears to be inherent in 
 them, growing more and more into a living 
 force among mankind. And this, notwith- 
 standing the temporary breaks that mark 
 the general advance, particularly in the 
 decline of civilisations. Civilisations rise and 
 fall away, and with them often both the 
 vices and the virtues which may have marked 
 
1 64 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 them ; but in the new civilisations the virtues 
 generally reappear, often strengthened and 
 improved, while the vices are left behind. 
 The whole progress of humanity may be 
 slow, the slackness of the current may be 
 increased by periods of back-water, but the 
 onward movement is unmistakable. 
 
 We can illustrate this moral advance by 
 the course of our Western civilisation. To 
 take, for example, the most savage manifesta- 
 tion of our nature war. We have still 
 war with us, though there is a feeling 
 growing among advanced peoples, silently 
 and often imperceptibly, like the advancing 
 dawn, that men ought to be ashamed of it ; 
 and in some cases arbitration has been 
 tried successfully in its place. But even 
 where war continues, its ferocity is being 
 mitigated. In early times the fate of the 
 vanquished was the wholesale butchery of 
 the men, the levelling to the ground of their 
 city, and the carrying away of the women 
 and the children into cruel slavery. The 
 brilliant leader of the Greeks, Achilles, 
 seizes the child of his rival and dashes out 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 165 
 
 his brains. In 1870 one of the bitterest 
 wars of the century was fought between 
 the French and the Germans, but not a 
 woman or child was knowingly injured on 
 either side, and the civilised world would 
 have been shocked if a single outrage, such 
 as those which were common in ancient 
 times, had been perpetrated. Personal 
 slavery, once an unquestioned condition of 
 the social state, and accepted as such by 
 philosophers, is now repudiated by the 
 conscience of all civilised peoples. Being 
 unrighteous in itself, it worked, through 
 natural causes, a retribution upon nations 
 which maintained it, and involved them in 
 evils of the social state that often, in the 
 end, hastened their downfall. Such was its 
 lesson to the value of justice in the relations 
 of mankind. The sheer force of this growing 
 enlightenment drove slavery out of the 
 United States, despite all the efforts of 
 vested interest, backed up by the opportunism 
 of time-serving politics. 
 
 Piracy and robbery, so long as they were 
 not directed against one's own clan, were not 
 
1 66 THE RELIGION OF CHAP. 
 
 regarded as dishonourable in the early ages. 
 Indeed, the sentiment of compassion for those 
 who are not connected with us, may be said 
 to have been unknown to the ancients ; but 
 now there is a common feeling among civilised 
 men, that it is their duty to care for the sick, 
 the aged, and the needy, whatever may be 
 their nationality or colour. Torture, once a 
 regular part of the penal system, is now so 
 repugnant to the feelings of men, that any 
 street mob in Europe would be ashamed of 
 it. A cruel spirit marked the excesses of 
 the French Revolution, but in their wildest 
 moments the Sans-culottes never thought of 
 torture. For the people's amusement in the 
 old days, the slaughter of men in the public 
 shows was fashionable. Events of civil 
 importance, as well as festive occasions in 
 Rome, were graced by gladiatorial shows, at 
 which the more men who were slain, the 
 better and more festive was the entertain- 
 ment considered. Now the opinion of 
 Europe frowns upon the Bull Fights of 
 backward Spain. In early times woman, 
 being the weaker, was regarded by man as 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 167 
 
 an inferior, and often as a slave. Now she 
 is recognised as an equal ; only that men 
 show her more consideration, because she is 
 weaker. Christianity has given to the world, 
 in the Virgin Mary, the holiest, purest, and 
 most touching revelation of womanhood, and 
 a large portion of the human race reverence 
 this high ideal. Its influence spreads, too, 
 over countries where its authority is not 
 directly acknowledged, and the position of 
 woman is permanently raised over the civil- 
 ised globe. Even the sufferings of animals 
 are beginning to engage men's thoughts, and 
 in most countries to-day, there are numbers 
 of thinking people who are striving to 
 mitigate those sufferings. The case of 
 slavery has been mentioned, but generally 
 also it may be said, that a retrospect of 
 history shows that the decline and fall of 
 nations can be traced to the retributive 
 effects of some national vice or wrong, some 
 violation of those eternal laws which enjoin 
 right-doing on men, and which, if obeyed, 
 foster both the happiness and the stability 
 of the race. 
 
168 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 Not only does evil tend to diminish, but 
 it is found that good shows a tendency to 
 grow out of natural conditions which do not 
 primarily demand it, and where it is not 
 necessary for their chief purpose. For 
 example, the union of the sexes, primarily 
 designed for the continuation of the race, as 
 it works out its full purpose, gives rise to the 
 highest forms of disinterested affection the 
 abiding love of husband and wife into old 
 age, and through all the trials of sickness 
 and incapacity in the beloved object; the 
 lifelong love of children by parents and 
 parents by children, only growing stronger 
 as years advance, and when the need of 
 parental devotion has long since passed 
 away. And from these natural conditions, 
 developed into moral principles, we find 
 springing the home and its morality, that 
 centre and fountain of human virtues. With 
 such far-reaching developments has the 
 Ruling Power of this world invested among 
 mankind the (at first sight) merely animal 
 instinct of the sexes. It is interesting to 
 observe that an analogous upward movement 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 169 
 
 can be discerned struggling through all organic 
 life, in a continuous bettering of its various 
 forms and rising to higher developments. 
 We must not forget, too, that much of the 
 virtue and the heroism of the race, pursues 
 its course among the lowly, whose lives are 
 unknown and who rest in unvisited graves, 
 enabling millions of men and women face 
 the ills that are allotted to them, with silent 
 heroism, and out of evil to wrest good. 
 
 When, therefore, the Common Man views 
 this world and the course of man's history in 
 it, he finds a predominance of good over evil, 
 a continuous, if slow thinning out of the bad 
 element in it, together with a parallel growth 
 of the good. In order to realise the signifi- 
 cance of this latter movement, let us suppose 
 that the growth had been equally plain the 
 other way. Let us suppose that the lust for 
 war, and the cruelty of war, were ever grow- 
 ing stronger and spreading among mankind ; 
 that the principle of personal slavery was, 
 age after age, becoming better established as 
 the proper form of civil life ; that the feeling 
 which prompts the care of the sick and the 
 
1 70 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 helpless was plainly weakening and dying 
 out as the generations went on ; that ferocity 
 was more and more developing in public 
 amusements, and torture in penal systems ; 
 that women were sinking slowly back into a 
 condition of servitude, and that we had only 
 before us the appalling prospect of a long 
 drawn-out decline of the world into an 
 unknown future of decadence and evil. 
 What, then, would we have been driven to 
 think of this world and the Power that 
 controlled it ? What could we then say to 
 the Moral sense in man, and the Power who 
 inspired it ? What a retrospect and what an 
 outlook would then have been presented to 
 mankind a retrospect of waning goodness, 
 and an outlook of ever-growing vice ! 
 
 Thus then does our Common Man ponder 
 over the evil that is in the world. He can- 
 not profess to give any complete explanation 
 of it. In Creation generally he sees forces 
 of order and a set purpose, combined with a 
 general tendency towards good ; but in the 
 baffling immensity of things, and the rough 
 and ready working of vast natural laws 
 
ix THE COMMON MAN 171 
 
 operating upon free agents, evil in particular 
 cases, it seems, must needs occur. Why it 
 should be so is a matter which is outside 
 his comprehension. All that reflection and 
 inquiry can do for him, is to show him the 
 outline of some purpose which Providence 
 has infused into evil, and some compensating 
 influences that are attached to it. This world 
 of ours, presents to him the appearance of a 
 Creation which got in some way partially 
 marred in its making, so that designs 
 originally beneficent, got turned from their 
 first and direct course, and mixed up with per- 
 verting elements and evils that are alien to 
 their primary purpose. The conclusion of 
 the whole matter with him is to incline him 
 not to Atheism, but towards religion. For 
 he cannot help thinking, that to impart to 
 our present life a meaning which would be 
 intelligible to the moral sense and the 
 faculties which God has given him, there 
 must be something beyond it for us mortals, 
 which in our present state it is not given to 
 us to comprehend, though it is given to us 
 to feel its need and to look for it. Thus as 
 
172 THE RELIGION CHAP, 
 
 the purpose of the world, on the whole, points 
 to just judgment and also to beneficence in 
 the Creator, the problem of evil, baffling 
 though it be to the search for a complete 
 explanation, so far from destroying the belief 
 of the Common Man in a righteous Provi- 
 dence, tends to support it. What he sought 
 for as a shield to protect his faith, becomes 
 a sword to aid him in the contest. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 THE difficulties, then, which his inquiry brings 
 before the mind of the Common Man do not 
 prevent him from holding to his belief in 
 God ; not that he does not feel those diffi- 
 culties, but because he thinks that he must 
 face greater difficulties if he disbelieved 
 wholly, or dissolved his belief in a vague 
 abstraction, or contented himself with saying 
 that he did not know what to think, and so 
 would dismiss the subject from his thoughts 
 altogether. He is the more satisfied with 
 his conclusion, when he calls to mind that, if 
 it is not given to his intellect to explore to 
 its source, and to comprehend in its entirety, 
 the conception of Deity, no more can the 
 most learned philosopher claim to solve the 
 
 173 
 
174 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 mystery of the Universe in any one of its 
 manifestations to man. 
 
 As for the various attributes of Deity 
 which metaphysicians and theologians have 
 examined with a learning and depth of 
 thought to which the Common Man is a 
 stranger, his conviction is, that all which it 
 is necessary for him to know and to feel, is 
 involved in and follows from the existence of 
 the Power which he believes presides over 
 Creation, and is the source of the moral 
 principle which has inspired mankind. He 
 cannot, in his own mind, place limits to what 
 he conceives must be the Omnipotence and 
 Omniscience of this great First Cause, nor 
 confine His presence and His power to any 
 time or place. Milton's words express what 
 he instinctively feels : 
 
 His Omnipresence fills 
 
 Land, sea and air, and every kind that lives 
 
 Fomented by His virtual power and warned. 
 
 If there be a God, it seems impossible to 
 the Common Man to hold that He takes no 
 notice of, and has provided no directing 
 principles for His Creation, animate, and 
 
THE COMMON MAN 175 
 
 inanimate, and that His influence remains 
 unmingled with its wide expanse. The 
 fancy of one of the ancients that the gods 
 did indeed exist, but only for themselves, 
 that they regarded the course of the world 
 with indifference, and, as for poor mankind, 
 took no heed of them at all, this seems to 
 the Common Man to be wholly unworthy 
 of any reasonable conception of the Deity. 
 It gets rid, indeed, of the difficulty of deny- 
 ing the conclusion which we naturally draw 
 from the observation of Creation and its 
 working, that there is a God ; but it robs 
 such a conclusion of significance by banishing 
 the Deity from all concern in its affairs. If 
 you hold that there is an intelligent Power 
 which presides over Nature, and by various 
 agencies directs its course, you assert an 
 intelligible position. Or if you hold that 
 there is no such power, but that things are 
 impelled along by some inherent influence, 
 by unconscious streams of tendency, or in 
 some other unknown way, you at least assert 
 a position which is not contradictory with 
 itself. But if you say that there is an 
 
1 76 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 intelligent Power above Creation, the source 
 of our souls as well as of our bodies, but that 
 He does not care about the work of His 
 own hands, and notices it not, unless it be, 
 according to that ancient flippant fancy, to 
 be diverted by the struggles and perplexities 
 of his creatures, if you say this, you seem 
 to the Common Man to announce a specula- 
 tion, which is the most unreasonable and the 
 most repulsive to the human conscience, of 
 the many theories which have been pro- 
 pounded to solve the enigma of the Universe. 
 It ascribes to the All Father, a character 
 which humanity would condemn as disgraceful 
 in the meanest parent upon the earth. And 
 if there is a conscious Ruler of the Universe, 
 the Common Man instinctively arrives at the 
 conclusion which Locke declared long ago : 
 " Every one, that hath a true idea of God 
 and worship, will assent to this proposition, 
 ' that God is to be worshipped.' ' 
 
 Such is the religion of our Common Man. 
 It is based upon a reasonable foundation, 
 but he admits that it is not capable of 
 demonstration to its full extent, as a matter 
 
THE COMMON MAN 177 
 
 of logical proof. As far as his intellect is 
 concerned, he accepts the conclusion which 
 appears to him to be true. He acts upon 
 strong probability in this, as in other grave 
 affairs of life. He may have heard that high 
 authority has condemned such a course, 
 upon the ground that, while you are justi- 
 fied in acting upon probability in the affairs 
 of the world, because in them you must 
 act in some way, there is no need to have 
 recourse to probability to guide our footsteps 
 in matters of faith, because in them there is 
 no need to act at all. But he denies this 
 distinction. He affirms that he has as much 
 need to arrive at some conclusion about 
 religion, as he has to walk wisely in the 
 affairs of this world. In this case as well as 
 in that, if you do not act, you must pay the 
 penalty of not acting. If you settle down to 
 not believing in the Creator, you must accept 
 the void which such a blank in human needs 
 and aspirations entails. And it is not that 
 the Common Man is possessed by the selfish 
 anxiety to make himself safe in another life. 
 It is that human nature imperatively demands 
 
 N 
 
1 78 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 now and here, in this present state, the light 
 and support of some form of communion 
 with its Maker, and that in the result, human 
 nature is proved to be the better and the 
 stronger for it. The voice of the race 
 demands nothing less than this ; in imperfect 
 stammering tones, at times perhaps, it speaks, 
 but still it demands it. 
 
 You cannot, then, get rid of this question 
 by saying that you will arrive at no conclusion 
 at all upon it, and leave your mind a blank 
 with regard to it. From its nature, it does 
 not admit of being shelved in this way. The 
 negative develops into a positive. Not to 
 believe is to believe. When a man says that 
 he does not believe in the intelligent creation 
 and direction of the Universe, then, since the 
 Universe is there and goes on its even way, in 
 reality he affirms that it is kept going without 
 intelligent direction. And though he may 
 claim to say this because he does not know, 
 yet all the while he is acting as if he did 
 know did know that there was nothing in 
 it. He takes his stand upon a negation, but 
 he never thinks of proving that negation. 
 
x THE COMMON MAN 179 
 
 And further, when he tells you that you have 
 nothing to believe, he in effect bids you 
 live as if you had nothing to believe. The 
 Common Man considers that this is quite as 
 difficult a position as his own. Is he then, 
 indeed, to look upon all earthly existence as 
 the result of heedless powers of Nature, a 
 blind yet fateful evolution, with no purpose 
 here or hereafter, but the whole turbid crowd 
 of life, matter, and events rolling aimlessly 
 about, like a dust cloud in the desert ? 
 
 True, faith, though founded upon reason, 
 is only the assurance of things not to be 
 grasped by the senses. The Common Man, 
 as has been said, admits that the ultimate 
 postulate upon which his faith rests is in- 
 soluble by mere reason. And if the other 
 mysteries of Nature, if the problems of science, 
 were capable of clear intellectual definition, 
 the Common Man confesses that it would be 
 an argument against his faith, that it alone 
 was, in the last resort, faced by an enigma. 
 But in every science, as well as in religion, you 
 come to a point where you can only stop and 
 wonder. In all you meet the boundary line, 
 
i8o THE RELIGION OF 
 
 which it is not given to the human intellect 
 to pass. This ignorance does not prevent 
 the man of science from dealing with its 
 problems as far as he can, and to the extent 
 of such intelligence as he possesses in regard 
 to them. After he reaches that point he is 
 blocked as a matter of knowledge ; but up to 
 that point, he draws such conclusions as he 
 can and acts upon them, at times threading 
 his way by speculation only. Often in his 
 investigations he proceeds upon the assump- 
 tion that certain facts are so, though he has 
 only reason to think it probable, and could 
 not prove it. Afterwards, perhaps, he finds 
 out in some unexpected way that they really 
 are so. But he never proposes to throw 
 over science because a great deal of it is to 
 him a riddle, nor because he has at times to 
 assume things in his search after truth. 
 
 Neither, then, is the Common Man 
 prepared to throw up his religion because 
 part of it is inexplicable to him ; but he, too, 
 goes on prosecuting his inquiries in it as 
 far as he can go. When he remembers the 
 limitations of human knowledge, he is little 
 
THE COMMON MAN 181 
 
 affected by all the criticisms with which 
 the principle of faith has been assailed. 
 Indeed, when he regards the imposing fabric 
 of the religious principle in man, as it has 
 stood through all the ages, and amid all 
 the changes of different civilisations, he is 
 struck by the fact, of how little its founda- 
 tions have been shaken by forty centuries 
 of criticism. It reminds him of what 
 travellers tell us of some of the Pyramids 
 of Egypt, which have been partly despoiled 
 by rude hands in later ages. When you 
 look upon one of these and see the stones 
 and debris that are strewn about, you think 
 how much must have been torn down ; 
 but when you turn to the everlasting 
 Pyramid itself, it seems as if nothing had 
 been taken away. 
 
 There remains a further consideration by 
 which the Common Man is impressed. In 
 secular science man can only do his best 
 with his mental faculties, and go as far as 
 they will carry him, groping on a little further, 
 perhaps, where speculation may give him 
 a helping but uncertain lead. But in regard 
 
182 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 to religious faith, when the reasoning powers 
 of man direct him towards Deity, he finds 
 his nature gifted with natural impulses, 
 inherent instincts, all ready to catch up and 
 respond to the conclusion which his intellect 
 was pointing to. While the spiritual power 
 would be imperfect without the intellectual 
 basis, the intellectual process is completed 
 and made effective by the spiritual capacity 
 with which man is naturally gifted, and 
 which he finds ready, and adapted >to follow 
 the lead which his intellect gives. We have 
 therefore a better justification for the con- 
 clusions of our intellect in religion, and more 
 reason to trust them than we have in general 
 science. The astronomer, when from his 
 calculations he is convinced that there is 
 a new world at a point which he can indicate 
 in space, does not hesitate to hold to his 
 belief that it is there, though it has never 
 been seen, and though man's direct vision 
 scans, in the search, the awful abyss in vain. 
 Even so, and not less so, does the Common 
 Man hold to his belief in the Unseen God. 
 The question remains to us, Is the 
 
THE COMMON MAN 183 
 
 Common Man right ? Is he acting in a 
 reasonable manner? Would he be wiser 
 if he resigned himself to unbelief, and, giving 
 up the struggle, was satisfied to look for 
 such satisfaction from this present life as 
 it is able to afford him ? 
 
 This is the old question, the question of 
 all time. The human heart has ceaselessly 
 asked it, and will ask it till the last heart 
 beats in the last man. It was considered 
 in a touching manner by Job, seven centuries 
 before Christ. But the " wiser " type of 
 men, using that word in its ancient sense, 
 will ever incline to answer it in the one way. 
 We may illustrate this view by taking the 
 summary of the problem which is given in 
 the Wisdom of Solomon. From this book 
 we learn, that the conflicts of thought and 
 moral principles, which its author mused 
 over in his Eastern home more than two 
 thousand years ago, were the same as 
 challenge us now, and were resolved by him 
 in the same way as thinking men generally 
 resolve them to-day. He considers in differ- 
 ent parts of his meditations the imperfection 
 
1 84 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 of human knowledge, and its inability to grasp 
 the methods of the Almighty. We give the 
 substance of his speculations, omitting some 
 portions which are not necessary to the 
 present argument, and transposing some 
 passages from different parts of the writing, 
 so as to better illustrate the text. 
 
 He asks: "What man is he that can 
 know the counsel of God? The earthly 
 tabernacle weigheth down the soul, and the 
 mind that museth upon many things. And 
 hardly do we guess aright the things that 
 are upon the earth, and with labour do we 
 find the things that are before us. But 
 the things that are in Heaven who hath 
 searched out ? And Thy counsel who hath 
 known, except Thou give wisdom." 
 
 He complains of thoughtless people that 
 they knew not their Maker who "had 
 breathed into them a living spirit," but 
 that they counted life as a pastime and 
 "our time here as a market for gain." He 
 reproaches some thinkers of his age, because 
 they ascribed the government of the world 
 to this natural force or that, and to any 
 
THE COMMON MAN 185 
 
 thing, but what he terms the " Mighty 
 Maker." He exclaims : " Surely vain are 
 all men by nature who are ignorant of God, 
 and cannot out of the good things that are 
 seen know Him that is, neither by con- 
 sidering the works, did they acknowledge 
 the Workmaster. But deemed either fire, 
 or wind, or the circle of the stars, or the 
 Lights of Heaven, to be the gods which 
 govern the world. But if they were 
 astonished at their power and virtue, let 
 them understand by them, how much 
 mightier is He that made them." And for 
 his part he says, that wisdom, " heavenly 
 wisdom hath taught him : for in her is an 
 understanding spirit, holy, loving the thing 
 that is good, ready to do good, kind to man, 
 stedfast, overseeing all things. For she is 
 the breath of the power of God and a pure 
 influence flowing from the glory of the 
 Almighty : the brightness of the everlasting 
 light, the unspotted mirror of the power 
 of God, and the image of His goodness." 
 
 Finally his conclusion is : "By the great- 
 ness and beauty of the creatures, proportion- 
 
186 THE RELIGION OF 
 
 ally, the Maker of them is seen. And to 
 know Thee O God is perfect righteousness, 
 yea, to know Thy power is the root of im- 
 mortality." 
 
 In the opening portion of his book he 
 summarises the conclusions at which he had 
 already in his own mind arrived. The 
 learned say that it is doubtful who this 
 wise man was, though his wisdom was 
 ascribed to Solomon. But most readers 
 will agree that, when the following meditation 
 on the mystery of our life, and its true 
 solution, was breathed into the soul of 
 mortal man, a wisdom as great as that of 
 Solomon was there. 
 
 THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON ON THE 
 PROBLEM OF LIFE 
 
 Those who are without God said, reasoning with them- 
 selves, but not aright : Our life is short and tedious, 
 and in the death of man there is no remedy : neither 
 was there any man known to have returned from the 
 grave. 
 
 For we are all born at an adventure : and we shall 
 be hereafter as though we had never been : for the 
 breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark 
 
x THE COMMON MAN 187 
 
 in the moving of our heart. Which being extinguished, 
 our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit 
 shall vanish as the soft air, and our life shall pass 
 away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed 
 as a mist, that is driven away with the beams of the 
 sun, and overcome with the heat thereof. Come on 
 therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present, 
 and let us speedily use the creatures like as in youth. 
 Let no flower of spring pass us by. Let us crown 
 ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered. 
 
 Such things they did imagine and were deceived. 
 As for the mysteries of God they knew them not, 
 neither hoped for the wages of righteousness, nor dis- 
 cerned a reward for blameless souls. For God created 
 man to be immortal, and made him to be an image 
 of His own eternity. And the souls of the righteous 
 are in the hand of God : No torment shall touch 
 them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to 
 die, and their departure is taken for misery, and their 
 going from us to be utter destruction. 
 
 But they are in peace ! 
 
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