y FEB 24 1919 
 
 BR 85 .L63 1917 
 
 Lodge, Oliver, 1851-1940. 
 
 Reason and belief 
 
REASON AND BELIEF 
 
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Modern Views of Electricity. 
 
 Life and Matter. 
 
 Pioneers of Science (Illustrated). 
 
 School Teaching and School Reform. 
 
 Easy Mathematics, Arithmetic, etc. 
 
 Elementary Mechanics. 
 
 Signalling without Wires. 
 
 Modern Views on Matter. 
 
 The Substance of Faith. 
 
 Electrons. 
 
 The Ether of Space. 
 
 Science and Immortality. 
 
 The Survival of Man. 
 
REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR OLIVER LODGE 
 
 V 
 
 FEB 24 1919 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 1917 
 
Copyright, 1910, by 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 New York 
 
 All Sights Reserved 
 Second Printing, January 1917 
 
 THE QUINN A BODEN CO. PRESS 
 RAHWAV, H, i. 
 
TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE 
 
 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR 
 
 PAST PRESIDENT OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION 
 
 AND ALSO OF THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 
 
 THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED BY 
 
 HIS FRIEND THE AUTHOR 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE converging influence of discoveries 
 made during tlie nineteenth century in 
 many diverse departments of knowledge has 
 of late years notably increased the uncertainty 
 which thoughtful persons have often felt about 
 the best method of utilising Old Testament 
 narratives for the education and edification of 
 children. So much has had to be modified or 
 discarded, in deference to scientific discoveries 
 which are in process of popular assimilation, 
 that a hesitating cautious attitude is not only 
 reasonable but meritorious. Nor has the diffi- 
 culty been altogether confined to the oldest 
 writings ; it cannot be maintained that general 
 conviction of the truth of the cardinal doctrines 
 of the New Testament has remained quite un- 
 shaken. 
 
 In so far, however, as my own researches have 
 led me to perceive a profound substratum of 
 truth underlying ancient doctrines, and in so 
 far as the progress of science instead of un- 
 dermining actually illustrates and illumines 
 
viii PEEFACB 
 
 some of them, I conceive it to be my duty as 
 well as my privilege to indicate to the best of 
 my ability how matters stand. 
 • Utterance on my part is excused and indeed 
 justified by the fact that in the University with 
 which I am connected a large number of 
 teachers are being trained every year for their 
 responsible office; and accordingly, acting in 
 conjunction with my friend and colleague the 
 Professor of Philosophy, J. H. Muirhead, I 
 have addressed them from time to time, and 
 have now written down part of the substance of 
 Buch discourses, in the hope that it may be use- 
 ful to others. 
 
 Part I. of this book deals with the subject 
 of incarnation in general, and ultimately leads 
 up to a brief consideration of the momentous 
 Christian doctrine — The Incarnation. 
 
 Part II. furnishes hints and suggestions for 
 the effective treating of the Old Testament in 
 the light of the doctrine of Evolution. 
 
 Part III. is of the nature of an Apologia and 
 anticipatory reply to critics. 
 
 The work is not argumentative, it is exposi- 
 tory. The arguments and facts of experience 
 on which the teaching is based, the lines on 
 
PREFACE fa 
 
 whicli I have been led to the position here in- 
 dicated and sustained, must be narrated else- 
 where ; partly in the Proceedings of a Scientific 
 Society, partly in other books. The position 
 taken in this book is the result of a lifetime of 
 scientific study; and its basis is one of fact. 
 It may be that the facts have been misinter- 
 preted : if so, then for that misinterpretation I 
 am responsible ; but I venture to hope that they 
 have led me a few steps onward in the direction 
 of the truth. It is because this is my convic- 
 tion that I have presumed to undertake the ex- 
 position, incidentally illustrating it from the 
 writings of such thinkers as have preceded me 
 in the quest, and have arrived at the same sort 
 of ideas by other paths. 
 
 For this is characteristic of truth, that it 
 may be reached by many diverse routes; and 
 although its ultimate peaks are inaccessible, yet 
 its strenuous disciples, however far apart they 
 are at the start, and however roundabout their 
 journey, may hope to meet on such interme- 
 diate and temporary summits as can be attained 
 at the present stage of earthly existence. 
 
 Oliver Lodge. 
 
 September, 1910. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I.— INCARNATION 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I Continuity and Persistence 3 
 
 II The Adventure of Existence ..... 11 
 
 III The Permanence of Personality .... 20 
 
 lY Character and Freedom 27 
 
 V The Advent of Christ 32 
 
 VI Progress and Suffering and Future Service 42 
 
 VII The Revelation of Christ 55 
 
 PART II.— THE OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCA- 
 TION 
 
 I Hints on Teaching 69 
 
 II Aspects of Truth 74 
 
 III Early History and Literature 86 
 
 IV Genesis 91 
 
 V Progressi\'e Revelation 95 
 
 VI The Problem of Evil 101 
 
 VII The Human Outlook Ill 
 
 PART III.— THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 I Aims and Limitations 119 
 
 II The Use of Hypotheses 132 
 
 III The Appeal to Literature 152 
 
 References to Quotations 156 
 
 Index 163 
 
REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 PAET I 
 INCARNATION 
 
■ oil could I tell ye surely would believe it ! 
 
 Oh could I only say what I have seen! 
 How should I tell or how can ye receive it, 
 
 How, till He bringeth you where I have been? 
 
 [Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest 
 Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny; 
 
 iYea with one voice, world, tho' thou deniest. 
 Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.' 
 
 F. W. H. Myers, St. Paul 
 
INCARNATION ' 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CONTINUITY AND PEKSISTENCE 
 
 THERE is no real end to anything in the 
 Universe, no end to any real existence ; nor 
 is there any beginning. "We can illustrate this 
 by considering the history of a rock — say a 
 sandstone rock for simplicity. It is formed of 
 compacted sand; but the sand particles are 
 fragments of a pre-existing rock, ground to 
 powder by the waves; that rock too was com- 
 posed of compacted sand, — and so on. We 
 find a continuance of the same material, scat- 
 tered and re-formed, changed in condition of 
 aggregation, yet essentially the same. Such 
 considerations clearly lead to no beginning. 
 Or consider a cloud. — It manifests itself in 
 
 1 Being the expanded substance of a Sunday afternoon ad- 
 dress to working men. 
 
 3 
 
« INCARNATION 
 
 the sky, seems to spring into existence out of 
 the blue, and presently evaporates again and 
 ceases to be, as a cloud ; but as invisible vapour 
 it continues, and as aqueous vapour it existed 
 before it condensed into minute drops of liquid 
 — i.e., before it took shape and form and be- 
 came visible. In essence it exists all the time, 
 and the persistent material can form another 
 cloud, or rain, or it can flow as a river, or can 
 enter the sea, — but only to be evaporated again 
 in due time, and go through an eternal cycle 
 of changes. 
 
 So also look at a piece of wood burning in 
 the fire. It was formed originally from sap 
 elaborated in the leaves of a tree, through the 
 chemical influence and energy of sunlight. It 
 was composed out of carbonic acid and water, 
 drunk in by the roots, taken up into the labora- 
 tory of the leaves, and there decomposed by 
 sunlight, the oxygen being separated and lib- 
 erated and expelled into the air. And now 
 that the wood is burning, its carbon and hydro- 
 gen are re-combining with oxygen, thereby be- 
 coming gaseous again, and so restoring to the 
 atmosphere the carbonic acid and water out of 
 which the tree was formed. The same identical 
 
CONTINUITY AND PERSISTENCE 5 
 
 particles of carbon and hydrogen thus escape 
 and are scattered; but presently some of them 
 will be incarnate again in visible and tangible 
 form, through a repeated operation of the same 
 agency, and may form part of some other kind 
 of plant; or other things may happen to them. 
 They may go through multifarious adventures 
 • — always retaining their identity, though not 
 their state of aggregation or grouping. 
 
 Or take the case of the earth. — But you will 
 say, the earth had a beginning and will have an 
 end. Yes, as an individual assemblage of par- 
 ticles it has a beginning and an end. So have 
 the tree and the cloud and the rock. Any in- 
 dividual rock — the Wrekin, the Matterhorn — 
 can be named and identified and its history 
 traced; and we may suppose that geologists 
 could tell us approximately not only when it 
 arose but when it will once more be submerged 
 under the sea. Every individual collocation or 
 collection of particles has a beginning and an 
 end; but only as a collection. This congrega- 
 tion, for instance, began at 3 o'clock and will 
 end at 4, but its members do not go out of exist- 
 ence when they leave, nor was their arrival the 
 beginning of their life. 
 
6 INCARNATION 
 
 So it is with a planet or a solar system; 
 they represent a present phase or manifesta- 
 tion, in a continuous unending existence. We 
 see in the sky nebulse, apparently in the act of 
 slowly forming solar systems; we also see in 
 the sky collisions, or the result of collisions, 
 such as apparently are not unlikely to recon- 
 stitute nebulffi. We see many stages in the 
 process of evolution, as was discovered by Sir 
 William Herschel a century ago, — some stars 
 bright, others dark, — suns of every age, young 
 and old, nascent, vigorous, and effete ; — we see 
 a cycle of changes, but nothing to suggest a be- 
 ginning, nor yet an end,^ except as affecting in- 
 dividual temporary assemblages. 
 
 The human race had a beginning, — the de- 
 scent of man, his ancestry and antecedents, can 
 be studied, — and at some epoch he must have 
 become what we call distinctively human; but 
 the sx)ecies must have had antecedents before 
 that. So it is also for an individual — in even 
 
 1 The law of the dissipation of energy is often appealed to 
 as necessitating a beginning and an end. I have elsewhere 
 given reasons for dissenting from that view; but inasmuch 
 as it is a moot point, the caution ought to be obtruded here, 
 — the law, properly stated, is true enough, but the deduction 
 from it is uncertain. 
 
CONTINUITY AND PERSISTENCE 7 
 
 a closer and deeper sense. Seen from the ter- 
 restrial point of view, v 
 
 ' His life is a watch or a vision 
 Between a sleep and a sleep.' 
 
 But that which now appears to us as sleep — ■ 
 sleep from which there is no waking — may 
 really he the prelude to a state of keen activity. 
 For sleep need not he dreamless; the spirit of 
 an entranced person may he, and sometimes is, 
 in an exceptional state of activity. Quiescence 
 of the hody is no guarantee of quiescence of 
 the soul ; nor does death of the body convey any 
 assurance of the soul's decease. Every physi- 
 cal analogy is against s'uch a superficial notion. 
 (See, for instance, ' Life and Matter,' where 
 the subject is further developed.) 
 
 John Smith was born a few years ago and 
 will die, but he will not go into nothingness; 
 and though as an individual he began at birth, 
 it is not likely that he, any more than any- 
 thing else, began from nothing. The com- 
 plexity of his organism, the far-reaching quality 
 of his mind, combined with what we know of the 
 leisurely processes of Nature, forbid the idea 
 of construction elaborated in such fantastic 
 
8 INCARNATION 
 
 haste. The body has been formed to a given 
 pattern, quickly enough; so may a plant grow 
 with great rapidity; but there must be some 
 entity — even though it be only a germinal 
 vesicle — which collects and arranges the par- 
 ticles to suit itself. The specific form of the 
 structure depends on this entity, not on the 
 miscellaneous sources of the particles. Some 
 kinds of material can be utilised, some can not : 
 those which have been good for food serve their 
 turn for a time and then are discarded again; 
 but it is the arranging entity for which we 
 postulate continuous existence. It is this of 
 which we may seek to trace the continuous and 
 perennial history. The discarded body looks 
 dead and dismal enough, but that is only be- 
 cause the energising spirit which constructed 
 it has gone beyond our ken : — 
 
 'He that hatli found some fledg'd bird's nest, may know 
 At first sight if the bird be flown; 
 But what fair well or grove it sings in now, 
 That is to him unknown.' 
 
 Unknown, yes, but not therefore unreal; — 
 all analogy is against the idea of disappearance 
 being synonymous with destruction. Death is 
 
CONTINUITY AND PERSISTENCE 9 
 
 change, indeed, — a sort of emigration, a 
 wrenching away from old familiar scenes, a 
 solemn and portentous fact, — but it is not anni- 
 hilation. No thoughtful person can really and 
 consistently believe that he is destined 
 
 * To drop head foremost iii the jaws 
 Of vacant nothmg, and to cease.' 
 
 Of every kind of individual existence with a 
 history — with an origin and a termination — 
 we must ask, what before? and what after? 
 For some kinds of existence we can answer 
 these questions ; for others, not. But we know 
 that beyond their manifest history there must 
 always be an infinite past and an infinite future ; 
 and hidden antecedents and sequents may in 
 time be traced. 
 
 The experience and memory of the past sur- 
 vive in our very organisation; we are the 
 product of evolution through the ages. Con- 
 scious memory may fail — does fail, — but the 
 effect of experience lasts. 
 
 And it does not follow that our conscious 
 memory will always fail ; individuality once be- 
 gun shall not again completely cease. Tenny- 
 son foresees no * re-merging in the general 
 
10 INCAENATION 
 
 Boul ' ; but rather a continuance of those essen- 
 tial characteristics by which men are known to 
 their friends, — 
 
 * Eternal form shall still divide 
 The Eternal soul from all beside; 
 And I shall know him when we meet/ 
 
 It is not indeed likely that personality will ever 
 cease, if we recollect what elements go to con- 
 stitute a personality. They are the most per- 
 manent and characteristic, the most vital and 
 essential, elements in our constitution. Indi- 
 viduality is never lost, unless it be in some 
 ultimate and far distant completion and richest 
 fruition of our being, * upon the last and sharp- 
 est height,' by evanescence and absorption into 
 Deity. Then, and only then — an infinitude be- 
 yond our present state — shall we ' lose our- 
 selves in light.' 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ADVENTUKE OF EXISTENCE 
 
 IT is a commonplace but nevertheless a valu- 
 able saying, that wliat will persist is what 
 we essentially are, not what we have, — not our 
 casual trappings and belongings. A shroud, 
 as the proverb says, has no pockets. Our pos- 
 sessions are accidental and temporary, we 
 leave them behind, they are comparatively 
 trivial : 
 
 ' I am not what I have, nor what I do ; 
 But what I was I am, I am even I.' 
 
 Ourselves — our own characters — we take 
 with us. It is all we do take with us. Char- 
 acter and Experience are our sole permanent 
 acquisitions here: these contribute to our per- 
 manent identity. Our identity lasts — lasts, 
 for better for worse, through all our adventures, 
 and is by them enlarged and enriched. With 
 it r-^ illustrated and informed by them — we 
 
 11 
 
12 INCARNATION 
 
 journey on into the unknown, whose boundary 
 ever recedes as we advance — as each to-mor- 
 row becomes to-day: 
 
 * I am a part of all that I have met ; 
 
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 
 
 Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
 
 For ever and for ever when I move.' 
 
 Existence itself is a great adventure, — a 
 series of them. Some live placid lives and 
 think to escape adventures, — at any rate will 
 not go to seek them — will try to avoid them. 
 But none can altogether escape. None can 
 escape the adventure of death. Unmistakably 
 a great adventure that ! — the entering another 
 world, encountering another condition of being, 
 facing the utterly unknown; only shielded by 
 faith in beneficence from dismay. 
 
 There are three main adventures in human 
 life — birth, death, and marriage. Compara- 
 tively few escape all three. Marriage surely is 
 an adventure: it may turn out surprisingly 
 well, it may turn out disastrously ill. Death 
 every one admits to be an adventure. But 
 birth, — few think of birth in that way; and 
 yet I think it is one — an adventure as 
 
THE ADVENTURE OF EXISTENCE 13 
 
 great as any perhaps, — the coniing to the 
 planet, the becoming an individual, attaining a 
 personality which, whether it begins then or 
 not, at any rate is to continue. At birth we 
 began a separate individual existence, but not 
 from nothing. 
 
 Children often appear to retain for a time 
 some intuition, some * shadowy recollection ' as 
 it were, of a former state of being. And even 
 adults, in certain moods, have * gleams of more 
 than mortal things,' and are perplexed at times 
 with a dim reminiscence as of previous expe- 
 riences : — 
 
 * Is it that in some brighter sphere 
 We part from friends we meet with here? 
 Or do we see the Future pass 
 Over the Present's dusky glass? 
 Or what is that that makes us seem 
 To patch up fragments of a dream, 
 Part of which comes true, and part 
 Beats and trembles round the heart ? ' 
 
 But children in especial are liable to brood 
 over the mystery of existence, in a way which is 
 little understood and which they outgrow, 
 though meanwhile their speculations lead 
 them to confuse themselves and others with 
 
14 INCARNATION 
 
 * Obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realised.' 
 
 On the full meaning of this we need not now 
 insist, but the fact is testified to by many 
 writers. Tennyson, for instance, bears wit- 
 ness — 
 
 ' For oft 
 On me, when boy, there came what then I call'd, 
 Who knew no books and no philosophies, 
 In my boy-phrase " The Passion of the Past." 
 The first grey streak of earliest summer-dawn, 
 The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom. 
 As if the late and early were but one — 
 A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower 
 Had murmurs " Lost and gone and lost and gone ! " 
 What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy 1 ' 
 
 And to the same general purport an earlier 
 poet — Henry Vaughan, in the middle of the 
 seventeenth century — bears independent testi- 
 mony thus : 
 
 ' Happy those early days, when I 
 Shin'd in my angel-infancy! 
 Before I understood this place 
 Appointed for my second race. 
 
V 
 
 THE ADVENTURE OF EXISTENCE 15 
 
 When on some gilded cloud or flower 
 My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 Some shadows of eternity. 
 
 • ....« 
 
 [And] felt through all this fleshly dress 
 Bright shoots of everlastingness.' 
 
 There is a deep meaning in that phrase of 
 Plotinus 
 
 ' Descent into generation,' 
 
 and the passage in which it occurs is thus trans- 
 lated by Myers : — 
 
 * Surely before this descent into 
 generation we existed in the intel- 
 ligible world ... as clear souls and 
 minds immixed with all existence; 
 parts of the Intelligible, nor severed 
 thence; nor are we severed evea 
 now.' 
 
 And Myers himself begins a poem * To Ten- 
 nyson ' with the same idea : — 
 
 *.When from that world ere death and birth 
 He sought the stem descending way, 
 Perfecting on our darkened earth 
 His spii'it, citizen of day,' . . . 
 
16 INCARNATION 
 
 uThese things are not said lightly, but embody 
 a lifetime of thought and inquiry. 
 
 My message is that there is some great truth 
 in the idea of pre-existence ; — not an obvioua 
 truth, nor one easy to formulate, — a truth diffi- 
 cult to express, — not to be identified with the 
 guesses of re-incarnation and transmigration, 
 which may be fanciful. We may not have been 
 individuals before, but we are chips or frag- 
 ments of a great mass of mind, of spirit, and of 
 life, — drops, as it were, taken out of a germinal 
 reservoir of life, and incubated until incarnate 
 in a material body. 
 
 This view is illustrated by Tennyson's 
 
 * Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
 From that true world within the world we see, 
 Whereof our world is but the bounding shore.' 
 
 Or again by his famous simile of a tide pour- 
 ing in from the ocean, filling the harbour with 
 a copious flood, and then ebbing whence it came. 
 
 And the teaching of ' In Memoriam ' is 
 clearly that individuality begins with the con- 
 struction of the body. It is surely true that 
 Spirit unites, while Body separates. And so 
 
THE ADVENTURE OF EXISTENCE 17 
 
 each fragment of spirit is supposed to become 
 a separate individual through incarnation : — 
 
 ' So rounds he to a separate mind 
 From whence clear memory may begin, 
 As thro' the frame that binds him in 
 Hia isolation grows defined/ 
 
 * Thia use may lie in blood and breath/ 
 
 Incarnation is the right word for conception 
 and birth ; it is an entering into i3esh, a gradual 
 incarnation, gradual accretion of terrestrial 
 matter, gradual entering into relation with 
 it. The soul may be said slowly to con- 
 struct the body, and continuously to leak in 
 and take possession of the gradually im- 
 proving conditions. Constructing the body, I 
 •ay, out of earthly particles, — particles picked 
 up in the first instance by plants and ani- 
 mals, then utilised by us, guided and arranged 
 and compacted into a body, so as to represent 
 our practical and terrestrial aspect, — that is, 
 such part of us as can be represented by what 
 Tennyson calls * the house of a brute let to the 
 soul of a man.* 
 
 For we are clearly taught by Science that 
 
18 INCARNATION 
 
 man on his bodily side must trace his ancestry 
 through the animals ; which are thus in a sense 
 his remote kindred. There was evidently a 
 long series of stages through which the physical 
 mechanism of man must pass, before human 
 faculties could efficiently utilise and manipulate 
 terrestrial matter : 
 
 ' Hints and previsions of whicli faculties, 
 Are strewn confusedly everywhere about 
 The inferior natures, and all lead up higher, 
 All shape out dimly the superior race. 
 The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false, 
 And man appears at last.' 
 
 The long period of preparation necessary, 
 before the gradually improving body became 
 tenantable by anything that could be called a 
 human soul, is most impressive. Not suddenly, 
 but through cosmic processes of evolution, was 
 this brought about; and there must have come 
 a time when a definite stage in the long history 
 could in imagination be acclaimed with delight 
 in a triumphant hymn : — ' It is finished, man is 
 made ! ' 
 
 ' Of the earth, earthy,' the primeval man was, 
 truly, but he stood erect, he felt himself to be 
 risen above the beasts ; and a splendid iDromis© 
 
THE ADVENTURE OF EXISTENCE 19 
 
 must have shone in the eyes of that nascent in- 
 telligence who in some epoch of trouble and 
 distress first on the earth uplifted hands of 
 prayer. 
 
 * Through such fierce hours thy brute forefather won 
 Thy mounting hope, the adventure of the son; 
 Such pauis astir his glooming heart within 
 That nameless Creature wandered from his kin; 
 
 With hopes half-born, with burning tears unshed, 
 
 Bowed low his terrible and lonely head; 
 
 With arms uncouth, with knees that scarce could kneel 
 
 Upraised his speechless ultimate appeal; — 
 
 Ay, and Heaven heard, and was with him, and gave 
 
 The gift that made him master and not slave . . . 
 
 And some strange light, past knowing, past control, 
 
 Rose in his eyes, and shone, and was a soul. 
 
 Finished indeed? — no, far from finished, 
 never finished. Anticipation lies ahead, to all 
 infinity: but the evolution of the human body 
 was a momentous achievement; for thereby a 
 terrestrial existence was rendered possible for 
 beings at a comparatively advanced stage of 
 spiritual evolution. Plato and Shakespeare 
 and Newton lay then in the womb of the future. 
 
 And anticipation still forges ahead. 
 
CHAPTER in 
 
 THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITy 
 
 THE beautiful animal body, thus slowly 
 fitted for our reception, we utilise; and 
 with it we are associated, being able by its aid 
 to manifest ourselves to others, and to operate 
 and do work on the planet, for a short period 
 of some seventy years. It is our machine, our 
 instrument for manifestation, for living a prac- 
 tical and useful life, for coming into relation 
 with other people, who are likewise temporarily 
 associated with matter, and by it partly dis- 
 played and partly disguised. An infant is thus 
 apostrophised by Tennyson : — 
 
 . . . ' Oh dear Spirit half lost 
 
 In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign.' 
 
 The body is our only means of effecting phys- 
 ical movements in the realm of matter — the 
 only means we have for dealing with and alter- 
 ing the planet which is our temporary home. 
 The body is by no means a perfect engine, al- 
 
 20 
 
THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY 21 
 
 though so admirably contrived; it requires 
 much training and many repairs — though 
 some of the repairs are necessitated by our own 
 injudicious treatment of it. But anyhow, when 
 it has done its work, served its purpose, and 
 is getting worn out, the body is sloughed off 
 and left behind, and we go on without it, — no 
 longer perceptible to friends still in the body, 
 . — lost to them till they rejoin us; and rising 
 still, beyond reach of everything but love and 
 service : — 
 
 ' Souls shall climb fast their age-long way, 
 With all to conquer, all to know: 
 
 But thou, true Heart! for aye shalt keep 
 Thy loyal faith, thine ancient flame ; — 
 
 Be stilled an hour, and stir from sleep 
 Reborn, re-risen, and yet the same/ 
 
 So sang F. W. H. Myers; and, to another 
 note, and probably in another sense, Meredith 
 thus expressed the eternity of ideal exist- 
 
 ence: 
 
 * Full lasting is the song, though he, 
 The singer, passes: lasting too, 
 For souls not lent in usury, 
 
 The rapture of the forward vieir. 
 
22 INCARNATION 
 
 'With that I bear my senses fraught 
 Till what I am fast shoreward drives. 
 They are the vessel of the Thought, 
 The vessel splits, the Thought survives/ 
 
 Yes, the Thought, the human logos, survives: 
 having undergone this curious experience — 
 having passed through the interlude or episode 
 of incarnation in matter, having lived a ma- 
 terial life on this planet. 
 
 * Wlieref ore, ' as St. Paul says, * we faint not; 
 for though our outward man is decaying yet 
 our inward man is renewed day by day.' Nor 
 will the loss of our material body deprive us 
 of all means of manifestation in the wider 
 sense : ' For we know that if the earthly house 
 of our bodily frame be dissolved,' we have a 
 spiritual or resurrection body not made of 
 earthly matter — a * habitation which is from 
 heaven.' Yea, and even the discarded body it- 
 self will remain of service to living organisms 
 — its particles can contribute to the incarna- 
 tion of new creatures ' that what is mortal may 
 be swallowed up of life. ' 
 
 What happened before earth-life, we have 
 forgotten ; — if we ever knew, we have forgot- 
 ten. Our individual memory begins soon after 
 
THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY 23 
 
 birth. Before that we cannot trace identity. 
 Perhaps we had none. Either we had none or 
 we have forgotten. The latter is the more 
 poetic mode of expression. It is not new. I 
 am well aware that I am saying nothing new. 
 The doctrine is old; Plato taught it before the 
 time of Christ, Wordsworth taught it early 
 in last century, — the doctrine that when we 
 enter into flesh we leave behind all memory 
 of previous existence ; — all, except for occa- 
 sional dim and shadowy recollections which, 
 though they may be stronger in infancy, oc- 
 casionally surprise the grown man also, from 
 whose mind they usually appear to have faded. 
 Dimly he may remember the days of his in- 
 fancy. 
 
 * But he forgets the days before 
 God shut the doorways of his head. 
 
 The days have vanished, tone and tint, 
 And yet perhaps the hoarding sense 
 Gives out at times (he knows not whence) 
 
 A little flash, a mystic hint.' 
 
 The idea of some such amnesia, as it may 
 be called, a supposed dislocation or disruption 
 of memory, is suggested by the analogy of hyp- 
 
24 INCAENATION 
 
 notic trance, and by cases of multiple person- 
 ality; where in each of the lower states, or 
 strata of personality, all memory of what 
 happened in the higher has completely lapsed, 
 until the appropriate state is again entered. 
 It is true, and rather specially instructive, that 
 in one of the highest states thus accessible it 
 sometimes happens that the gaps of memory 
 are filled up, and all events are more or less 
 recollected — even those of lower states also; 
 though as a rule the memory is discontinuous, 
 and the appropriate thread is taken up again 
 on re-entering any given state. Tennyson in- 
 dicates that such a notion may apply to the 
 future condition of surviving personality : — 
 
 'As old mythologies relate, 
 Some draught of Lethe may await 
 The glipping thro' from state to state. 
 
 Ab here we find in trances, men 
 Forget the dream that happens then, 
 Until they fall in trance again. 
 So might we, if our state were such 
 Ab one before, remember much.' 
 
 And again in * In Memoriam ' he expresses 
 the same idea; for, after emphasizing our pres- 
 
THE PERMANENCE OF PERSONALITY 25 
 
 ent forgetfulness of the long past, and ac- 
 quiescing in it as conducive to practical life here 
 and now, he contrasts it with what we may an- 
 ticipate in the long future, when we have passed 
 beyond the shadow-throwing '■ growing hour ' 
 of the present, and have begun to rise into the 
 broader vista of a more luminous region. 
 
 * So be it : there no shade can last 
 In that deep dawn behind the tomb, 
 But clear from marge to marge shall bloom 
 
 The eternal landscape of the past.' 
 
 We are said to be now, comparatively speak- 
 ing, asleep, — entranced, as it were, by associa- 
 tion with matter, — an association which is 
 both an assistance and a disability; — an as- 
 sistance, indeed an essential, to our life here; 
 a temporary disability, though a needful ex- 
 perience, as seen from the life beyond. 
 
 'We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep.' 
 
 So we are led to apprehend Wordsworth's 
 immortal poem in a livelier way, as not only 
 poetically true, but as an inspired expression 
 of actual fact : — 
 
26 INCARNATION 
 
 ' Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
 The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And Cometh from afar: 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness. 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 From God, who is our home.' 
 
 Yes, fragments of the great Spirit wliich is 
 God. This has gradually dawned upon us. 
 We were at first children and took things as 
 they came ; though even then questions of great 
 magnitude and difficulty used to loom before us 
 ■ — questions we could in no wise answer. Now 
 that we are grown up, some of us are still in 
 the dark; but those who devote their lives to 
 study think that they are coming slowly and 
 partially to understand the Universe, and our 
 place in it, and what is expected of us. 
 
 These are the questions which all thought- 
 ful people are asking; these are the questions 
 whose interest brings together many an assem- 
 blage of serious and worldng men; these are 
 the questions which are being asked through- 
 out Britain, and in many of the countries of 
 Europe, at the present time : — Wliy do we 
 exist? What are we here for? What does 
 existence mean ? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 CHARACTER AND FREEDOM 
 
 WE are here to become worthy of our 
 origin, to develop a character and a 
 will, to become ripe for freedom. Freedom, 
 power of choice, — that is the dangerous gift 
 that has been bestowed upon us as man. 
 
 ' The man who man would be must rule 
 The empire of himself.' 
 
 There came a time, in the long course of 
 evolution, when man realised that he was free 
 — free to determine his own actions, — when 
 he realised that he knew good and evil, could 
 discriminate between them, could choose the 
 one and eschew the other, could feel instinct- 
 ively the difference between right and wrong, 
 and could exercise the power which was his. 
 With that power, he rose to perceive the great- 
 ness — the greatness as well as the danger — 
 of this gift of freedom, and realised for the first 
 
 27 
 
28 INCARNATION 
 
 time his kinship, biologically with the animals, 
 but psychologically with the gods. 
 
 Perception of this sublime power of conscious 
 choice — a distinctive mark of humanity — 
 must have first dawned upon some early genius 
 of the race, some incipient poet or seer, into 
 whom the vivifying Spirit was strongly breathed. 
 "Well may such a seer be called the First Man, 
 for with that divine inbreathing man became 
 a living soul. 
 
 The period which succeeded this great in- 
 spiration is called ' the Fall,' for man naturally 
 proved as yet unworthy of the insight which 
 had been vouchsafed to him; but it was the 
 result of a Eise. It was the natural conse- 
 quence of a rise in the scale of existence — a 
 step upward in the path of development. But 
 it is also called a Fall, because man tripped 
 over the upward step. Having the power of 
 doing wrong, he utilised that power, and fell. 
 Thus entered Sin, — the conscious doing of 
 what we know to be wrong. Before that, men 
 and women had been in a state of innocency, 
 like the animals, — a state of irresponsible, un- 
 knowing innocence, — out of which they must 
 emerge into light and knowledge and sorrow, 
 
CHARACTER AND FREEDOM 29 
 
 if a divine spirit were to be engrafted on the 
 animal stock, if they were to become conscious 
 of a responsible personal identity. 
 
 'And first a glimmering ease they had. 
 And creatures bound in dream benign, 
 Obscurely sentient, blindly glad, 
 Felt the dim lust of shower and shine; 
 
 Then works the unresting Power, and lo! 
 
 In subtler chain those germs combine. 
 Thro* age-long struggle shaping slow 
 
 This trembling Self, this Soul of thine.' 
 
 As man thus rose to the higher level of 
 conscious freedom, that original condition of 
 pristine innocency fell from him ; he could plead 
 it no longer. Henceforth he had full human 
 responsibility, and his destiny rested largely 
 with himself. 
 
 The severe discipline through storm and 
 temptation, thus initiated, has been felt by 
 many a saint to have been of highest value; 
 and those who wonder at the fact that sin and 
 evil have been allowed to exist are not deep 
 thinkers. Milton complains of their shallow- 
 ness thus : — 
 
30 INCARNATION 
 
 * Many there be that complain of divine Providence for 
 suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When 
 God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for 
 reason is but choosing j he had been else a mere artificial 
 Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions [puppet 
 shows]. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or 
 love, or gift, which is of force; God therefore left him 
 free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his 
 eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his 
 reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he 
 create passions within us, pleasures round about us; but 
 that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of 
 virtue? They are not skilful considerers of human things, 
 who imagine to remove sin, by removing the matter of sin.' 
 
 Few, very few, are tlie favoured individuals 
 who can receive this gift of freedom without 
 ever abusing it. To most the attainment of 
 a condition of joyful and heart-whole obedi- 
 ence to what they see to be best comes through 
 years of struggle and effort. Yet there is no 
 redemption, no real regeneration, till this con- 
 dition is attained, — till the whole being re- 
 sponds enthusiastically to the demands of the 
 highest which it is able to perceive. The con- 
 flict, the warring in the members, is then over, 
 and the reign of peace and undisturbed prog- 
 ress has begun. We shall attain it in time, 
 
CHARACTER AND FREEDOM 31 
 
 ■ — some sooner, some later ; the conflict cannot 
 be permanent, or it would ultimately destroy 
 us. The only service that can last through 
 infinity is the Service that is perfect freedom. 
 
 ' Oh ! who is he that hath his whole life long 
 Preserved, enlarged, this freedom in himself? 
 For this alone is genuine liberty : 
 Where is the favoured being who hath held 
 That course unchecked, unerring, and untired, 
 In one perpetual progress smooth and bright ?' 
 
 This is the ideal. This is what we on the 
 up track see before us as the destined goal. 
 Towards that we are intermittently, and with 
 many falls, striving. 
 
 Assisted? Yes, truly assisted, — led but not 
 forced, guided but not compelled. If we ask 
 to be helped we are helped — helped in ways 
 we can as yet hardly imagine or believe in — 
 helped by other human beings sometimes, but 
 helped also by other beings and in other ways 
 — ways which we hardly yet suspect. I be^ 
 lieve this to be literally true. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 THE ADVENT OF CHRIST 
 
 THE revelation of the Universe is always 
 before ns, but we do not see. When one 
 after another of the race catches a glimpse of 
 something beyond previous experience, it is 
 not anything really new that he perceives. It 
 is only new to us, because human senses are 
 darkened or because we are too busy to at- 
 tend. The stars were worlds and solar systems 
 all the time, though to antiquity they seemed 
 only insignificant appendages to earth. The 
 microbes of pestilence were active in the ancient 
 days, and their opponents in the blood attacked 
 them, — though the conflict was all unknown to 
 man. Eadio-activity, distintegrating atoms, 
 and all the other discoveries of physics, are only 
 a recent detection of what always existed. 
 Crowds of unsuspected things are awaiting our 
 discovery — new facts in Nature, ay, and 
 
 32 
 
THE ADVENT OF CHRIST 33 
 
 in human nature; — may we not say still 
 more in the Divine nature. 
 
 Progressive revelation is the subjective as- 
 pect of human progress. The doctrine of evo- 
 lution — evolution of capacity for knowledge 
 — is profoundly true with respect to the spirit 
 of man; there is nothing artificial about our 
 ignorance ; facts are not withheld from us, any 
 more than a picture, a statue, or an oratorio is 
 kept from the cognizance of an animal, — every- 
 thing lies before it, ready to be seen or heard, 
 • — only the perception is lacking. In the 
 divinest creation of man such creatures see 
 absolutely nothing; nothing can they appre- 
 ciate of the spirit, the idea, the inspiration, 
 incarnate in a work of genius. 
 
 And even so it must be with the most en- 
 lightened man, confronted with the creations of 
 God. 
 
 The idea of ' angels ' is usually treated as 
 fanciful. Imaginative it is, but not altogether 
 fanciful; and though the physical appearance 
 and attributes of such imaginary beings may 
 have been over-emphasized or misconceived, yet 
 facts known to me indicate that we are not 
 
34 INCARNATION 
 
 really lonely in our struggle, that our destiny 
 is not left to haphazard, that there is no such 
 thing as laissez faire in a highly organised uni- 
 yerse. Help may be rejected, but help is avail- 
 able; a ministry of benevolences surrounds us 
 ' — a cloud of witnesses — not witnesses only 
 but helpers, agents like ourselves of the im- 
 manent God. 
 
 Hidden as they are to our present senses, 
 poets can realise their presence in moments of 
 insight, can become aware of their assistance 
 in periods of dejection — dejection which else 
 would be despair. So it has been with one and 
 another of the band of poets who, stranded and 
 unknown in a great city, have felt the sting of 
 poverty; to them at times have the heavens 
 opened, the every-day surroundings have be- 
 come transfigured, — as Cheapside was, in 
 Wordsworth's poem, at the song of the thrush, 
 ■ — and, to the vision of Francis Thompson, 
 angels have ascended and descended in the very 
 streets of London : — 
 
 'But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 
 Cry; — and upon thy sore loss 
 Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 
 Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.' 
 
THE ADVENT OP CHRIST 35 
 
 And the race also has been helped. A 
 Divine Helper has actually taken flesh and dwelt 
 among us, — full of grace and truth. * The 
 second man is the Lord from heaven.' And 
 at this Advent season and Christmas time we 
 commemorate that event. We commemorate it 
 every time we date a letter ; for what does 1910 
 mean except that we are counting the years 
 since that event? The whole Christian world 
 dates its history from that momentous epoch, 
 the Incarnation. 
 
 We are all incarnations, all sons of God in 
 a sense, but at that epoch a Son of God in 
 the supremest sense took pity on the race, laid 
 aside his majesty, made himself of no reputa- 
 tion, took upon him the form of a servant, a 
 minister, entered into our flesh and lived on 
 the planet as a peasant, a teacher, a reformer, 
 a martyr. This is said to have literally 
 happened; and as a student of science I am 
 bound to say that, so far as we can under- 
 stand such an assertion, there is nothing in it 
 contrary to accepted knowledge. I am not 
 testifying to it because it is a conventional be- 
 lief, I am testifying because I have gradually 
 found that it may be true — because I have 
 
36 INCARNATION 
 
 gradually become assured of the possibility of 
 such an incarnation. The historical testimony 
 in its favour is entirely credible. The Chris- 
 tian Churches have hold of a great truth. 
 That is what I want people to realize distinctly 
 and forcibly and without any convention. 
 Freed if possible from the blinkers of custom, 
 it can be recognized as a reality. All that the 
 churches say about it need not be true — is 
 not all likely to be true ; but something is true 
 much better than they say — something which 
 they and we together are gradually rising to un- 
 derstand. It is a great subject, on which many 
 scholars have written ; and what they have said 
 is well deserving of study. We should take 
 their writings seriously, but first we should be 
 assured of the possibility of the solid fact with 
 which they are dealing, — assured that there 
 is a fundamental truth underlying the tenta- 
 tive conclusions of reverent and studious men. 
 
 Christ did not spring into existence as the 
 man Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ spirit ex- 
 isted through all eternity. At birth he became 
 incarnate. Then it was that he assumed his 
 chosen title ' Son of Man.' Before that he is 
 
THE ADVENT OF CHRIST 37 
 
 called the Companion, the Counsellor, the Word 
 of God. 
 
 The Word, or the Thought, or the Logos, the 
 Idea, the Design, the Conception, — these words 
 all help to convey some notion of what is in- 
 tended. 
 
 Everything created, even by man, is pre- 
 ceded by conception, by thought, by design ; and 
 then the thought is embodied and made a phys- 
 ical reality. 
 
 A cathedral or any other work of art exists 
 first in the mind, and is then uttered in in- 
 carnate form. 
 
 So is it with every great work, it originates 
 as a conception — conceived as we may say^ — 
 so it be magnificent enough — conceived by 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 'And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the creed of creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds 
 More strong than all poetic thought.' 
 
 On the mystery of the Incarnation we need 
 not speculate, and what he was before the In- 
 carnation we can hardly express. The best at- 
 tempt that has been made to express it conveys 
 
38 INCARNATION 
 
 the idea in mystical and very beautiful lan- 
 guage with which we are all familiar: modu- 
 lating the great creation theme — * In the begin- 
 ning God created the heaven and the earth. 
 And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of 
 the waters ' — into poetic utterance still more 
 magnificent : — 
 
 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was 
 with God, and the Word was God. All things were made 
 by him; and without him was not anything made that was 
 made. . . . 
 
 *And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, 
 and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten 
 of the Father, full of grace and truth.' 
 
 Yes, that is as near as we can get to the 
 extraordinary truth! The Great Spirit took 
 pity on the human race, which was blundering 
 along, afflicted with a terrible burden of sins, 
 with mistaken notions of worship, — bloody 
 sacrifices, burnt offerings, and all the machin- 
 ery of priestcraft, even when it did not fall 
 into idolatry. Called as it was to something 
 better and higher and purer from time to time 
 by the great prophets which arose, it was still 
 terribly mistaken, still confused by hopelessly 
 wrong ideas of the nature of God, and liable to 
 
THE ADVENT OF CHRIST 39 
 
 attribute to the Deity all manner of human 
 weaknesses and imperfections. That was the 
 condition of unregenerate man. So a Divine 
 Spirit — ' the Lord from heaven ' — became in- 
 carnate, in order to reveal to us the hidden 
 nature of God, — the love, the pity, the long- 
 suffering, the kindness — all that we had 
 missed or misconceived or that priests had de- 
 faced. He came to tell us what the Kingdom 
 of Heaven was really like. In many parables 
 he tried to make it clear to us. He found it 
 no easy task, but it was his central message, 
 his constant endeavour, to convey some sense 
 of the reality and meaning of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, and how it might be actually realized 
 on earth. .We see now that if the human will 
 could only get into harmony with the Divine 
 will, if the will of God could be done on earth 
 as it is done in heaven, the Kingdom would 
 have come; earth and heaven would have be- 
 come one, and the joy of existence would be 
 supreme. 
 
 This vision — the hope of this millennium 
 — has been the inspiration ever since of saints 
 and apostles; who with good cause have la- 
 mented the pathetic blindness of previous 
 
40 INCARNATION 
 
 generations, the determined blindness of their 
 own: — 
 
 ' Lo for the dawn, (and wherefore wouldst thou screen it?) 
 
 Lo with what eyes, how eager and alone, 
 Seers for the sight have spent themselves, nor seen it, 
 Kings for the knowledge, and they have not known.' 
 
 Our spiritual eyes are still closed, even now. 
 Life on this planet is as yet far from the re- 
 alization of the Kingdom of Heaven; the 
 misery and the inequalities of opportunity are 
 too prevailing, the man-made degradations too 
 severe. We are still barely emerged from the 
 savagery of ruthless competition ; the condition 
 of the stricken poor is too appalling. * The 
 earth is full of darkness and cruel habitations.* 
 
 But it is our own fault, it is not the fault of 
 nature, there is room and plenty for all, under 
 proper organisation; and the earth is bright 
 — as bright as any other of the heavenly 
 bodies. If it seems dark it is our own fault. 
 * Dark is the world to thee, thyself art the rea- 
 son why! ' But hope is in the air. In spite 
 of prevalent greed and selfishness — greed and 
 selfishness so stupid that they defeat their own 
 ends, and spoil life for all but the absolutely 
 
THE ADVENT OF CHRIST 41 
 
 inhuman, — thoughtful people are beginning to 
 perceive how deep has been this corporate 
 folly; more and more are they longing for a 
 brighter day. 
 
 Civilized humanity should be raised above 
 mere material animal distress ; — little more is 
 needed for its reformation; there are plenty of 
 social forces which make for good, if they had a 
 chance of acting, if they were not too heavily 
 handicapped, — humanity itself is good enough, 
 if given a chance. Real badness is excep- 
 tional; weakness, increased by hopelessness, is 
 the besetting sin. But reformers and drama- 
 tists are busy, people are waking up, there is 
 hope in the air. Even now the seers and poets 
 are preparing their songs to welcome a second 
 Advent of the Divine Spirit in the hearts of 
 men, — not in Palestine or Asia Minor, but here 
 in Europe, in Britain, in London : the time will 
 surely come when we can feel that the further 
 dream of the poet has been realised, — 
 
 'And lo, Christ walking on the water 
 Not of Gennesareth, but Thames ! ' 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 
 PEOGRESS AND SUFFERING AND FUTURE SERVICE 
 
 MUCH have we to go through before that 
 consummation, — much pain and sorrow 
 and trouble, as well as happiness and joy: 
 
 * No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man/ 
 
 Nor will it greatly matter that we ourselves 
 shall have passed on into another condition of 
 existence. However we may progress, we 
 shall not be immune from the sufferings of 
 earth. Now that we have become part of hu- 
 manity, we shall not be able — we shall not 
 wish — to leave it untended, or to ignore its 
 tears and entreaties. "We shall either continue 
 part of the redeeming agency, or we shall still 
 need redemption ourselves. Then, as now, it 
 will be true that 
 
 ' The Voices of the day 
 Are heard across the Voices of the dark' ; 
 
 then, as now, it will be true that willingness to 
 
 42 
 
PROGRESS AND SUFFERING 43 
 
 help distress is a mark, not of ' humanity ' 
 only, but of our highest conception of Divinity 
 also. 
 
 It was the inspiration of this idea that thrilled 
 through the youthful David in Browning's 
 poem ' Saul,' when in a burst of affection for 
 his afflicted master he caught a glimpse of the 
 Divine scheme of salvation — realizing that his 
 own willingness to share the pain of another 
 was a feeble echo of the love of God — and in 
 the enthusiasm of that discovery gave utterance 
 to that rapturous exclamation, the climax of the 
 poem : — 
 
 'Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou — 
 
 so wilt thou I 
 So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost 
 
 crown — 
 And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
 One spot for the creature to stand in ! It is by no breath, 
 Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 
 
 death ! 
 As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
 Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved! 
 He who did most, shall bear most ; the strongest shall stand 
 
 the most weak. 
 'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, 
 
 that I seek 
 
44 INCARNATION 
 
 In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. Saul, it shall 
 
 be 
 A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me, 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like 
 
 this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the 
 
 Christ stand ! ' 
 
 This mighty idea of suffering borne by the 
 Divine Being for the sake and the help of 
 humanity thrilled through Browning himself, as 
 he thus gave dramatic expression to it; for in 
 the immediately following stanzas he describes 
 the drop back into ordinary life, as of one who 
 has wakened from an unearthly vision; — a 
 feeling well known to all who have ever been on 
 the heights of thought. 
 
 People often appear to think, or at any rate 
 to sing, that they will get through all their pain 
 and exertion here, and hereafter will be sur- 
 feited with idleness and enjoyment. True it is 
 that for the over-worked and harassed multi- 
 tudes some rest is profoundly needful. Sea- 
 sonable rest and peace and leisure are essential 
 to the fair development of the soul; they are 
 necessary conditions for thought, for discovery, 
 for meditation, for the fruits of genius, for 
 
PROGRESS AND SUFFERING 45 
 
 many of the higher attributes of man. Too 
 little of these good things are enjoyed here; 
 even holidays, for the multitude, are a crowded 
 and good-natured effort at wearisome festivity. 
 But rest and peace and leisure are very dif- 
 ferent from idleness. 
 
 And hereafter, idleness would be absurd. 
 After a few thousand years the monotony 
 would be unendurable; in any condition of be- 
 ing, stagnation must be deadly, the soul must 
 continue to rise, to advance, to exert herself. 
 For instance, we may have noticed how the 
 instinct for study and enlightenment continues 
 into old age, in the assurance, apparently, that 
 work so expended involves no waste of time. 
 * Every hour is saved ... a bringer of 
 new things ' ; 
 
 'And this gray spirit yearning in desire 
 To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.* 
 
 Let no complaint be made that anticipation of 
 future exertion is painful. Work done against 
 the grain, or under compulsion, is dreary; but 
 work undertaken with enthusiasm is a delight. 
 Everything depends on the conditions and the 
 
46 INCARNATION 
 
 motive. The work of a galley-slave at the oar 
 must have been intolerable ; but that of an ath- 
 lete in a boat-race is voluntarily undertaken. 
 Twenty minutes on the treadmill, I have been 
 told, is a sort of torture; but to a youth on a 
 bicycle the labour becomes enjoyment. Nor is 
 there any permanent happiness to be obtained 
 without work and service of some kind. The 
 noble and passionate soul can be no more satis- 
 fied with luxury than with sloth — 
 
 ' Nay, but she aims not at glory, no lover of glory shs : 
 Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.* 
 
 ' She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
 To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky: 
 Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.* 
 
 Such is the demand of every vigorous nature ; 
 its own force urges it on 
 
 ' To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' 
 
 Under the figure of a weapon, Ulysses is pic- 
 tured by Tennyson as lamenting the inactivity 
 of old age — 
 
 ' How dull it is to pause, to make an end. 
 To rust unbumish'd, not to shine in use ! * 
 
PROGRESS AND SUFFERING 47 
 
 And just as the strenuous healthy man, here 
 and now, asks for danger and privation — is 
 ready to face severe privation, as in Antarctic 
 exploration, rather than inertia, — so is it with 
 the amhition and petition of the soul : — 
 
 ' Oh roughly, strongly, work her bold increase I 
 Leave her not stagnant in a painless peace! 
 Nor let her, lulled in howso heavenly air, 
 Fold her brave pinions and forget to dare ! * 
 
 So it has always been ; — grief and pain have 
 been essential ingredients in the constitution of 
 humanity, from the earliest dawn of sentient 
 things : — 
 
 * Before the beginning of years 
 There came to the making of man, 
 Time with a gift of tears, 
 Grief with a glass that ran. 
 Pleasure with pain for leaven, 
 Summer with flowers that fell. 
 Remembrance fallen from heaven, 
 And madness risen from hell.' 
 
 Ay, human nature is a full and complex thing, 
 of a vast potentiality, — seamed and furrowed 
 from the past, but with sensibilities indicative 
 of a mighty future. 
 
 'Already the Artist, the Poet, and the Thinker, 
 
48 INCARNATION 
 
 devoting themselves whole-heartedly to work, 
 and embodying such beatific glimpses as they 
 catch in moments of inspiration, are able to 
 produce works which are veritable creations: 
 being rightly so called, inasmuch as structure 
 and order and beauty are made to arise out of a 
 material chaos. Their spirits do in truth brood 
 over matter without form and voidj till they 
 coerce it to their design and incarnate in it 
 their thought. Such work, at the highest level, 
 contains in itself an exceeding great reward; 
 even though it may involve the creator in trou- 
 ble and conflict with the obstruction and ugli- 
 ness around. 
 
 Thus we are justified in speculating beyond 
 actual experience, and in assuming, with good 
 reason, that creative work — with all that it 
 may entail — will ultimately form part of the 
 highest joy; and that lofty spirits, inspired by 
 a supernal Vision, and refreshed by periods of 
 sabbatical calm, will enter upon their task with 
 sublime devotion. 
 
 * Such devotion,' says Myers, * may find its 
 flower in no vain self-martyrdom, no cloistered 
 resignation, but rather in such pervading ec- 
 gtasj' as already the elect have known; the 
 
PROGRESS AND SUFFERING 49 
 
 Vision which dissolves for a moment the cor- 
 poreal prison-house; " the flight of the One to 
 the One." ' 
 
 And, with this phrase of the inspired Ploti- 
 nus, he goes on to quote the eloquent and mem- 
 orable passage which I venture here also to 
 transcribe for its own sake : — 
 
 * So let the soul that is not unworthy of that Vision con- 
 template the Great Soul; freed from deceit and every 
 witchery, and collected into calm. Calmed be the body 
 for her in that hour, and the tumult of the flesh; ay, all 
 that is about her, calm; calm be the earth, the sea, the air, 
 and let Heaven itself be still. Then let her feel how into 
 that silent heaven the Great Soul floweth in . . . And so 
 may man's soul be sure of Vision, when suddenly she is 
 filled with light. . . . And how may this thing be for usf 
 Let all else go.' 
 
 The atmosphere of calm and peace, both 
 mental and physical, thus beautifully described, 
 furnishes by universal consent the opportunity 
 or condition for the highest vision, this is the 
 condition to which we hurried and time-driven 
 mortals so seldom attain — this the state in 
 which inspirations come. 
 
 ' They haunt the silence of the breast, 
 'Imaginations calm and fail-, 
 
50 INCARNATION 
 
 The memory like a cloudless air, 
 The conscience as a sea at rest/ 
 
 The uproar of physical life is upon us and 
 deafens us ; calm is necessary for revelation ; — 
 not till the earthquake and the fire have sub- 
 sided can we hear the still small voice. 
 
 Nor perhaps would it be good for us too fre- 
 quently to indulge in retrospect, nor too con- 
 stantly to dwell in anticipation of the future; 
 we have duties to perform, we must learn to 
 overcome anxiety, but to overcome obstacles 
 also, and to do each his heaven-sent work. 
 
 '> 
 
 * The path we came by, thorn and flower, 
 Is shadowed by the growing hour, 
 Lest life should fail in looking back.' 
 
 So both past and future are dimly known, 
 and our lives are not suffused with peace. In 
 times of refreshment some foretaste of the 
 peace of God may envelop us for a moment, 
 and with it may come inspiration, but only to 
 arouse in us fresh energy, more devoted service. 
 Truly the peace of God passes all understand- 
 ing; it is not a thing easily attained, it is very 
 different from mere rest; it is restfulness, but 
 it is not rest. Nor can it ever be a folding of 
 
PROGRESS AND SUFFERING 51 
 
 the hands in satisfaction with what has been 
 accomplished. Still may we be called upon ' to 
 fill up what is behind ' ; always there will be 
 something still to be done, and not solely to be 
 enjoyed. 
 
 We shall find, then, as we rise in the scale of 
 existence, that not only calm will come to us, 
 but work too, and sometimes pain ; we shall find 
 ourselves — strange to say — sometimes actu- 
 ally choosing pain and trouble rather than com- 
 fort and ease. The highest kind of pain is 
 voluntary — it is suffered for a ' cause,' or for 
 the sake of others. 
 
 This condition, the possibility of this sum- 
 mons, will not cease ; we shall always be liable, 
 even at the highest, to choose vicarious suffer- 
 ing; we shall willingly sacrifice our pleasures 
 for a good cause. 
 
 The most ideal joy is found in service. It 
 is the keynote of existence, — • service both now 
 and hereafter, service in the highest, — this is 
 what is meant by * the Joy of the Lord. ' The 
 fact comes out clearly in the parable of the 
 Talents. Those who had done well with what 
 was entrusted to them, who had utilized their 
 opportunities for useful service, were told, — 
 
52 INCAENATION 
 
 what? Not that they are to rest from their 
 labours, not that ' now the labourer's task is 
 o'er ' ; no, they were told that having been 
 faithful in a few things they would be made 
 rulers over many things — rulers, in one ver- 
 sion ' over ten cities ' (as an expansion from 
 a trusteeship of ' ten pounds ') — and so be per- 
 mitted to enter into ' the joy of their lord.' 
 This is the Kingdom prepared for them ' from 
 the foundation of the world.' No mere peace 
 for them in that, but strenuous exertion. 
 
 Something of the spirit of the worker must 
 enter into and permeate the work, if it is to 
 be noble and worthy. Nothing worth doing is 
 accomplished without trouble and * taking 
 pains.' Up to the Highest this is so. How 
 comes it that the Deity has made all these 
 worlds, and filled some of them with self-willed 
 people, if he only needs rest and peace? The 
 complications of existence must surely entail 
 trouble — trouble and actual sacrifice and real 
 pain. All creation had surely been 
 
 'A beauty with defect — till that which knows, 
 And is not known, but felt thro' what we feel 
 Within ourselves is highest, shall descend 
 
PROGRESS AND SUFFERING 53 
 
 On this half-deed, and shape it at the last 
 According to the Highest in the Highest.* 
 
 Let us never think that existence is a placid 
 stream down which we may glide without ad- 
 ventures. For a time we may, while character 
 is maturing, while opportunity for thought and 
 for development is needed ; but there will come 
 a time when sacrifice is demanded, when some 
 urgent call is made upon our nature, and when 
 a man feels that he has to respond. This is 
 the case with all heroes, — witness the launching 
 of a lifeboat in a storm, witness the rescue 
 party in a colliery disaster, a fireman saving 
 life at the expense of his own, physicians and 
 nurses in times of plague or war. At all times 
 of stress men and noble women respond to the 
 call, or feel degraded. Danger has to be faced, 
 and our manhood rises to it. And this liability 
 may surely continue throughout eternity. 
 
 * Say, could aught else content thee ? which were best, 
 After so brief a battle an endless rest, 
 Or the ancient conflict rather to renew, 
 By the old deeds strengthened mightier deeds to do, 
 Till all thou art, nay, all thou hast dreamed to be 
 Proves thy mere root or embryon germ of thee ; — 
 
54 INCARNATION 
 
 Wherefrom thy great life passionately springs, 
 Rocked by strange blasts and stormy tempestings, 
 Yet still from shock and storm more steadfast grown, 
 More one with other souls, yet more thine own. 
 Nay, thro' those sufferings called and chosen then 
 A very Demiurge of unborn men, — 
 A very Saviour, bending half divine 
 To souls who feel such woes as once were thine; — ■ 
 For these, perchance, some utmost fear to brave, 
 Teach with thy truth, and with thy sorrows save.' 
 
CHAPTER Vn 
 
 THE BEVELATION OF CHRIST 
 
 THE possibility that an opportunity for 
 painful service will be liable to test our 
 allegiance and claim our voluntary submission 
 hereafter, no matter bow high we may 
 rise in the scale of existence, is a solem- 
 nizing, may be an alarming thought, but it is 
 proven by our highest example — it is the very 
 spirit of Christ. He at his lofty altitude saw 
 an opportunity for helping the human race. 
 He doubtless foresaw the consequences, the re- 
 jection, the scorn, the suffering, yea, the 
 scourging and the death ; but he did not shrink. 
 He too, if we may say so, rose to the occasion 
 (yes, even to him it is an added glory), and he 
 became incarnate. He lived the life of a peas- 
 ant, with all the disabilities of a working man, 
 and he suffered death by torture. The life was 
 lived out fair to the bitter end, — to the appar- 
 
 55 
 
66 INCARNATION 
 
 ent defeat, down to the last despairing cry * My 
 God, why hast thou forsaken me I ' 
 
 A quotation? Yes, but an adopted quota- 
 tion, and in its new significance quite the most 
 awful utterance of man. 
 
 * Nay but thou knewest us, Lord Christ thou knowest, 
 
 Well thou rememberest our feeble frame, 
 Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest, 
 Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame.' 
 
 * This hath he done and shall we not adore himf 
 
 This shall he do and can we still despair? 
 Come let us quickly fling ourselves before him, 
 Cast at his feet the burthen of our care.' 
 
 While incarnate he too had in some real sensei 
 partially forgotten previous existence. Yet of 
 him pre-eminently it may be said that not in 
 entire forgetfulness, but trailing clouds of glory 
 did he come, from God who was his home. 
 
 We can see that his divine ancestry must 
 have become intermittently plain, to one after 
 another of those with whom he came into con- 
 tact as he walked the earth in Syria. An ex- 
 traordinary influence, an effulgence of the 
 spirit, shone through the earthly covering and 
 inspired profound wonder, enthusiasm, and de- 
 
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST 57 
 
 votion. The healing influence of the hem of his 
 garment is not beyond what we know may 
 occur. And the Transfiguration itself, when 
 even his peasant garments shared for a moment 
 in the blaze of glory, was but a special mani- 
 festation, to the few who were susceptible, of 
 what was more obscurely there all the time. 
 
 Such luminosity as we possess is effectually 
 hidden in ' earthen vessels,' but the light that 
 then shone out of darkness gave what St. Paul 
 calls ' the illumination of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. ' 
 
 * Oh to have watched thee thro' the vmeyards wander, 
 Pluck the ripe ears, and into evening roam ! — 
 Followed, and known that in the twilight yonder 
 Legions of angels shone about thy home ! ' 
 
 He remembered more than we do, and he 
 told us. Reminiscences must have come over 
 him from time to time, — must have flooded his 
 spirit, — as in a minor degree is the experience 
 of men of genius. Inspirations came to him 
 from time to time throughout his ministry, — 
 * All things that I have heard of my Father I 
 have made known unto you.' He told us more 
 than we could then receive. He that had ears 
 to hear had then a chance of hearing. 
 
58 INCARNATION 
 
 ' God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake 
 in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in 
 these last days spoken unto us by his Son.' 
 
 So it is to-day. A record — sliort it is true, 
 but a sufficient record — has been preserved, 
 has been made available to us here in modern 
 England through the loving labours of scholars ; 
 and it rests with us whether we can under- 
 stand it. 
 
 From the record it appears that the memory, 
 the consciousness, of what he was and why he 
 had come, what was the meaning of his life and 
 what was expected of him, or rather what he 
 himself had determined to do, seemed gradually 
 to dawn upon him. 
 
 His insight grew with maturity; he spent 
 thirty years in quiet village existence; he went 
 through much study, through long silent 
 .thought and periods of strange stress, before 
 he fully realized his mission — the mission 
 which in another state he had solemnly under- 
 taken. And at the climax of this period, after 
 his baptism by John, he spent forty days in the 
 wilderness — a time of silent brooding. And 
 here it was that he went through that mysteri- 
 ous experience which he called being tempted 
 
THE KEVELATION OF CHRIST 59 
 
 of the devil — an experience of which he must 
 have told something to some of his disciples, 
 and which they doubtless only half, or less than 
 half, understood. He studied the Scriptures 
 also. He found many passages in the Hebrew 
 Scriptures — notably in the great prophet 
 Isaiah — which he adopted as applying to him- 
 self and his mission. And at last he emerged 
 from obscurity, and in his own native place 
 stood up in the church and announced that 
 hereafter he was no longer the village carpen- 
 ter, the mere son of Joseph, the man with whom 
 they were familiar, but a Prophet, a Messiah, 
 the visible incarnation of a Being of magnitude 
 far higher than they had ever known : one who 
 should succour humanity, should help those in 
 distress, should show men how to succour each 
 other, — a Being full of inspiration and insight, 
 who should take of the things of God and reveal 
 them unto man. 
 
 A dramatic episode this, when he read that 
 verse from Isaiah in the church of his native 
 village, stopping sort in the middle of a sen- 
 tence, — not completing it, because he had not 
 come to proclaim God's ' day of vengeance.' 
 That might lie in the future. That, as it hung 
 
60 INCARNATION 
 
 over Jerusalem, he, later on, foresaw. But now 
 his mission, his special God-anointed mission, 
 was * to heal the broken-hearted, to preach de- 
 liverance to the captives, and recovering of 
 sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that 
 are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of 
 the Lord.' Now was the accepted time, now 
 the day of salvation. 
 
 * And he closed the book, and gave it again 
 to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes 
 of all them that were in the synagogue were 
 fastened upon him.* No wonder! They knew 
 the Scriptures well enough. They were struck 
 with the sudden cessation, the breaking off in 
 the middle of a sentence — astonished at the 
 inspired and authoritative manner of the young 
 man, — still more when he spoke again, saying, 
 * This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your 
 ears.' 
 
 They said one to another, * Is not this Jo- 
 seph's son? ' Is not this the neighbour we all 
 know? How comes it then he has this wisdom? 
 
 The sermon as it went on not only surprised 
 them, it ran counter to their prejudices, it of- 
 fended their national pride and exasperated 
 them. The Messiah he was expounding was 
 
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST 61 
 
 very different to tlieir conception — was very 
 far from a national deliverer ; already the claim 
 of all humanity was recognized, and not that of 
 Israel alone. 
 
 So they were filled with wrath, and sought 
 to hurl the young preacher over the nearest 
 precipice. He escaped ; but if he had had any 
 illusion as to the speedy reception of his mes- 
 sage, this incident must have promptly dissi- 
 pated any such hope. Henceforth he was more 
 reserved in his utterance. 
 
 That Jesus recognized himself as the Mes- 
 siah, with his own interpretation as to the mean- 
 ing of the phrase, is manifest from that unfor- 
 gettable conversation which he held with the 
 woman of Samaria ; — testing as it were first 
 his own power of clairvoyance, explaining to 
 her more explicitly than usual what he had 
 come to do, and at length openly declaring in 
 plain words, ' I that speak unto thee am he.' 
 
 Later, while talking confidentially to his dis- 
 ciples, he gave them further indications of his 
 thoughts concerning the prophecies of the Old 
 Testament. In them, beside their plain and 
 temporary significance, he discerned some fore- 
 cast of the period in which they were living, 
 
62 INCARNATION , 
 
 some anticiption of the exceptional nature 
 which he felt to be his, some prognostication 
 of his birth. 
 
 Do you think that such prophetic anticipa- 
 tion is impossible? Do you think it absurd to 
 suppose that such an event as the Incarnation 
 was foreseen and heralded, in some fashion 
 more or less distinct? If you think so it is not 
 to be wondered at, for the possibility of such 
 foresight into futurity is a strange one. But 
 I believe you are wrong if you think so, never- 
 theless. Facts are beginning to be known to 
 me, still obscure and incomplete, which tend to 
 show that even the birth of a human child, of 
 ordinary parents, a child only remarkable for 
 the fullness and richness of its nature and for 
 the destiny soon to overtake it, was predicted, 
 was shadowed forth in ways obscure but sub- 
 sequently unmistakable, more than a year be- 
 fore birth. It is not a subject on which 
 dogmatism is appropriate; but the conclusion 
 at which I am gradually arriving is that future 
 events are planned, and are not haphazard and 
 unforeseen; that arrangement is possible in 
 other spheres than ours, just as design and 
 foresight are possible among human beings, — 
 
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST 63 
 
 anticipation and heraldings of a kind far above 
 our present power, it is true, but of the same 
 general character. 
 
 Nor is the idea of some kind of, perhaps auto- 
 matic, perhaps semi-conscious, choice, concern- 
 ing our earthly destiny, foreign to the concep- 
 tion of inspired and informed philosophers and 
 poets; for the parable in the tenth book of 
 Plato's ' Republic ' is well known, and percep- 
 tion of some real truth underlying it is the basis 
 of the following apostrophe addressed to an 
 ordinary human being : — ■ 
 
 * Soul, that in some high world hast made 
 Pre-natal imbewailing choice, 
 Thro' earth's perplexities of shade 
 Sternly to suffer and rejoice.' 
 
 But however it may be with the individual 
 himself in ordinary cases, it is practically cer- 
 tain, in my mind, that anticipation in such mat- 
 ters is possible, and that inspired writers may 
 express far more than they know. 
 
 So I have been led to perceive that the de- 
 scription given of those other utterances — 
 Christ's posthumous utterances at the end of 
 Luke's Gospel — may be essentially true, and 
 that some of the prophecies are genuinely and 
 
64 INCARNATION 
 
 properly interpretable in ways of which the 
 writers had barely a suspicion: — 
 
 'Behoved it not the Christ to suffer these things and to 
 enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the 
 prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures 
 the things concerning himself.' 
 
 And while still living, he was imbued with 
 the same idea; for did he not say to a Jewish 
 audience, at a moment of danger and inspira- 
 tion, 
 
 * Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he 
 saw it and was glad.' 
 
 Through the vista of a thousand years the 
 coming of the Messiah had been dimly foreseen 
 by the great patriarchs at inspired moments. 
 
 Then it was that in answer to their easy 
 self-satisfied, sarcastic retort, * Thou art not 
 yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abra- 
 ham? ' he made that portentous utterance, an- 
 nouncing his pre-existence — his eternity ; — 
 then it was that he made the claim which they 
 took for blasphemy — * Verily, verily, I say 
 unto you. Before Abraham was, I Am. ' 
 That statement is clear and unmistakable — it 
 
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST 65 
 
 was clear even to them — so clear that they 
 could only reply with stones. 
 
 The present, the past, and the future, all in 
 some strange sense indistinguishable. — Exist- 
 ence one continuous chain, manifested now, hid- 
 den then, but real always. — Before them in 
 flesh stood the earthly representation or incar- 
 nation of a Being who henceforth would be 
 acclaimed by all Christendom as Eternal, Om- 
 nipresent, Divine I * In the beginning was the 
 iWord, and the Word was with God, and the 
 Word was God.' 
 
REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 PART II 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
THE OLD TESTAMENT IN 
 EDUCATION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HINTS ON TEACHING 
 
 THE proper utilization of the Old Testa- 
 ment in teaching is a problem of consid- 
 erable difficulty, made none the easier by re- 
 ligious controversies and disputes; and I per- 
 ceive that it is still partially overshrouded by 
 a darkness due to superficial methods of inter- 
 pretation — methods which are foreign to all 
 canons of literary criticism — methods which, 
 though they used to be called orthodox, are 
 hopelessly unscientific and fundamentally mis- 
 taken. 
 
 Our whole outlook on the Universe has been 
 so enlarged, and in some respects changed, 
 during the recent century, — it is no wonder 
 that many adults feel a difficulty in understand- 
 ing ancient documents, written under very dif- 
 
 69 
 
70 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 ferent conditions, and adapted to a much earlier 
 period in the history of the human race. 
 
 The difficulty, from the controversial point 
 of view, may be considerable, but I think it is 
 quite possible to exaggerate the difficulty so 
 far as the immediate dealing with children is 
 concerned. I suggest that the early parts of 
 the Bible are better adapted to children than 
 to adults, and have a better chance of being 
 effectively understood by children. For it is 
 well known that in youth an organism passes 
 in rapid and partial fashion through the stages 
 of its ancestry — each individual rapidly re- 
 tracing the history of its Eace, — hence a child 
 may be sympathetic and appreciative concern- 
 ing the literature and history of early people, 
 and whatever was suited to the childhood of 
 the world may be appropriate to an individual 
 child at a certain stage of development. 
 
 For instance, you have not to argue a child 
 into a belief in God, — the belief is natural and 
 is there. So likewise the Old Testament seems 
 to consider it quite unnecessary to prove or 
 argue that God exists : it feels on familiar terms 
 with him, as a child does. And when we speak 
 of childish views of the Deity, we need not be 
 
HINTS ON TEACHING 71' 
 
 understood as implying a term of reproach. 
 None of our views, in such a matter, can be 
 much better than childish ; and we have reason 
 for thinking that in some cases they may be 
 worse. It is not unreasonable to hold that in 
 some respects children may be nearer the King- 
 dom of Heaven than we are, and may feel a 
 greater kinship of spirit with it than we do. ♦ 
 
 Hence I feel strongly that many of the diffi- 
 culties which controversialists and Denomina- 
 tionalists make for themselves are unfelt when 
 you come to deal with the children themselves. 
 
 I would not, however, pretend that the child- 
 ish stage is higher than the adult stage, any] 
 more than the Old Testament is higher than the 
 New. Adults who have really risen to the New 
 Testament stage are above criticism, but I fear 
 that the majority have not yet reached it. Nor 
 can children be expected to have reached it, they 
 may reasonably be regarded as more in the Old 
 Testament stage — the stage at which the 
 stories related, and the points of view there 
 taken, seem natural and interesting. 
 
 For teaching purposes the Bible itself is bet- 
 ter than Commentaries, Creeds, and Cate- 
 chisms. These belong to a later date — a later 
 
72 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 stage of evolution — not necessarily a higher 
 one. Some of such statements are indeed defi- 
 nitely intended as controversial documents, to 
 differentiate one sect from another. Few 
 things are more unchildlike than that. 
 
 And in dealing with people at a lower grade 
 of civilisation, I should assume that much of 
 what is true for children applies to them also, 
 and that a missionary who tries to train Church 
 converts on the basis of Thirty-Nine Articles, 
 or a Westminster Confession, or any such local 
 and temporary document, must be but little 
 qualified for his work. 
 
 As a rule, therefore, in teaching the Bible, we 
 may teach it to children quite simply. Their 
 questions will be interesting, but are hardly 
 likely to be critical. Nor is it necessary to 
 select only what commends itself to you, though 
 certainly such parts may be emphasized. But 
 the inferior and unessential stories are part 
 of the documents too : they aU belong to litera- 
 ture, and should be known by educated persons ; 
 otherwise, when reference is made to them in 
 ordinary human intercourse, there is a blank. 
 
 Take such an entirely unimportant matter 
 as the ages of the Patriarchs before the Deluge, 
 
HINTS ON TEACHING 73 
 
 for instance; it is easy to criticize a teacher 
 who asks a class about the traditional age of 
 Methuselah. There is no sense in emphasizing 
 it, but there is no reason why it should not be 
 known. If children have been reading it, there 
 appears to be no reason why they should not 
 be asked about it ; though whether the 969 repre- 
 sents years or months may be discussed among 
 students of folk-lore. These legendary ages 
 are part of early tradition, and are among the 
 easy and interesting parts over which children 
 feel no difficulty and some interest. They must 
 be known, even if they are only to be explained 
 away. 
 
 Similarly a book like Judges is interesting 
 to children, but it is not a book to labour at or 
 to emphasize unduly. The early treatment of 
 these portions can be superficial and rapid: to 
 treat them ethically demands an historic sense. 
 
 But the question will be raised as to how 
 far they are * true ' ; and this brings us to the 
 first important consideration, as to the meaning 
 and comprehensiveness of Truth. 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 ASPECTS OF TEUTH 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING, in A SouVs Trag- 
 edy, Act II., says that a philosoplier dis- 
 covers that of the half dozen truths known in 
 childhood one is a lie as the world states it in 
 set terms; and then after many years he per- 
 ceives that it is a truth again, as he newly con- 
 siders it and views it in relation with others. 
 
 That represents, in a sort of parable, thei 
 kind of experience of many thoughtful persons. 
 
 Truth has many aspects, and a statement 
 which is objectively and literally false or mean- 
 ingless may have a subjective truth of its own 
 — a truth depending more on the percipient 
 than on a form of words. Lest this last sen- 
 tence be misunderstood and objected to as mis- 
 leading, I must instance an example of a poeti- 
 cally beautiful expression of fact, which 
 nevertheless is not, and never pretended to be, 
 literally true. Shakespeare's description of 
 
 74 
 
ASPECTS OF TRUTH 75 
 
 the dawn, which he puts into the month of 
 Romeo, occurs to me : — 
 
 'Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
 Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.' 
 
 Eegarded as a scientific statement it is non- 
 sense; and yet who can fail to recognize its 
 subjective truth and splendid appropriateness. 
 In this age of Science, objective truth is our 
 end and aim. But in order to achieve this end 
 the aim has necessarily to be narrow. The hu- 
 man mind must take Truth by stages: it can- 
 not grasp everything at once; nor can any 
 formula cover the whole truth. There is a truth 
 of Science and there is a truth of Literature. 
 To a narrow view they appear to conflict, but 
 they are all parts of a larger whole. And if 
 there is anything to choose between them, from 
 the point of view of perennial acceptance and 
 understanding, the advantage lies with litera- 
 ture and poetry. True to human nature — 
 that is what a work of Art or any great drama 
 necessarily is ; but what does it matter whether 
 Hamlet, Othello, or Lear actually lived? Ques- 
 tions of this kind are not appropriate, and 
 need not be asked concerning Art. Literature, 
 
76 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 if true at all, is true for all time, and will ap- 
 peal to all people who possess tlie faculties 
 necessary for sympatlietic comprehension. 
 
 The statement, sometimes made, that scien- 
 tific textbooks must sooner or later pass out 
 of date is by no means false, but it may easily 
 be misunderstood. Most of the assertions in 
 good text books are true enough, but they will 
 be superseded by other and better modes of 
 statement hereafter. The great landmarks 
 stand, and the long established details remain 
 true, but familiar and recognised forms of 
 statement are likely to vary and improve as 
 time goes on ; hence old text books become anti- 
 quated and superseded. Whereas of poetry, 
 at least of great poetry, we may say, what was 
 somewhat paradoxically said by F. W. H. 
 Myers in his Classical Essays (p. 21), ' Poetry 
 is the only thing which every age is certain to 
 recognise as truth.' 
 
 Contrast our own attitudes, to ancient science 
 on the one hand, and to ancient art and poetry 
 on the other. The science of the amcients is 
 merely curious : their art and poetry and drama 
 we cannot excel. These, in their unapproach- 
 able beauty, represent a kind of truth which 
 
ASPECTS OF TRUTH 77 
 
 is eternal. In so far as a thing is perfectly 
 beautiful, it represents an ideal in the mind of 
 the Creator. Beauty is the apotheosis of 
 Truth. 
 
 The truths of science are admirable and quite 
 real, but there is nothing ultimate about them. 
 They are stages on the road towards achieve- 
 ment — a difficult and infinite road. Science 
 aims at Eeality: it is an ambitious quest, for 
 absolute Eeality can hardly be knowable by 
 us ; but we aim at it and get towards it by steps. 
 The intermediate steps, however, are likely to 
 be imperfect, and at the best they are but steps. 
 They may in themselves be less satisfactory 
 than the stages or landings from which they 
 lead up. 
 
 There is a superficial and materialistic criti- 
 cism which lays undue stress upon these inter- 
 mediate steps, urging them into the foreground 
 and concentrating attention upon them as if 
 they were the complete and absolute Truth; 
 whereas the whole of truth is unattainable by 
 us. People used to over-emphasize the sub- 
 jective aspect, and neglect objective truth, but 
 it is now becoming possible to do the converse ; 
 and the neglect or under-estimation of the hu- 
 
78 OLD TESTAMENT iN EDUCATION 
 
 man aspect is one of the dangers of this age. 
 Materialistic sceptics are abroad who see and 
 emphasize only one side of things, and deny 
 other sides. Their assertions may be true ; 
 their denials are often absurd. There may be 
 a world of emotion in what physically is very 
 simple or insignificant. For, with Father Wag- 
 gett, we may imagine this kind of materialistic 
 critic saying to an audience at a concert, — 
 * What are you crying about, with your Wagner 
 and your Brahms? It is only horsehair scrap- 
 ing on catgut. ' 
 
 Yes, from a narrow physical point of view 
 that is what it is. It can all be represented 
 by vibrations in the air : all, that is, except the 
 soul. The soul of the music is in humanity. 
 It is an affair of perception, and without a per- 
 cipient it is non-existent or meaningless. To 
 some human beings, as to all animals, an ora- 
 torio or a painting is non-existent ; it acts physic- 
 ally on their sense-organs, but it conveys no 
 meaning whatever. And surely we are all 
 blind and deaf to much that would appeal 
 to higher beings. A dog in a picture gallery, 
 interested in smells and corners, may repre- 
 
ASPECTS OF TRUTH 79 
 
 sent, as in a parable, much of our own attitude 
 to the Universe. 
 
 Then again, take such an object as the Moon. 
 iTo ordinary popular science the Moon is a 
 dead inert mass of volcanic rocks, without 
 atmosphere, without life, without interest — a 
 severe dead monotony. But what has the 
 Moon not been to poets'? And even the legen- 
 dary 'man in the moon,' with his dog and his 
 thornbush, has at least some humanity about 
 him. Eemember also Shelley's description — 
 
 * That orbed maiden, with white fire laden. 
 Whom mortals call the Moon.'— 
 
 Dead volcanic rocks are poor competitors with 
 that. 
 
 Nevertheless it is true that there is a higher 
 science of all these things, — a higher science 
 of harmony which may explain the reason of 
 the emotions felt in music, a higher science re- 
 lating to the birth of the Moon, its past history 
 as an offspring of the earth, its tidal influences, 
 its future destiny — yea a higher science of 
 matter itself, wherein deadness and inertness 
 are preposterous notions; — all which, when 
 
80 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 known and used by a poet, will eclipse in value 
 the legends based on ignorance. For the full- 
 ness of fact must be full of human interest 
 likewise. 
 
 ' Meanwhile this higher Science is not gen- 
 erally known, and therefore cannot at present 
 be utilized for artistic purposes. Its use lies 
 in the future. What we can be quite sure of 
 is that human feelings are more ancient than 
 any knowledge ; and that the instinct for Wor- 
 ship is ancient and powerful too. Witness the 
 feelings induced by some of the ordinary proc- 
 esses of nature, — a sunrise, for instance, 
 as described by that mystical artist and poet 
 William Blake, 
 
 * What when the sun rises do you see ? A round disc 
 of fire, something like a guinea ? ' 
 
 * Oh, no no, I see an innumerable company of the 
 heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God 
 Almighty.' 
 
 In this spirit the Old Testament has to be 
 interpreted and understood. This was the 
 kind of mood in which much of it was written. 
 The great parts of it are manifestly inspired. 
 I tell you that Inspiration is a reality, though 
 
ASPECTS OF TRUTH 81 
 
 its definition is at present vague. No au- 
 thoritative definition has yet been given by any 
 conclave or any Church; and it is fortunate 
 that it is so, that our conception of Inspira- 
 tion may enlarge and become more definite as 
 our knowledge grows. 
 
 But I want to say that whatever Inspira- 
 tion means, it does not mean infallibility. We 
 have access to no infallible information con- 
 cerning matter of fact. Our knowledge, as ex- 
 pressed by even the highest Science, is neces- 
 sarily partial and incomplete; it only deals 
 with aspects, else it could not deal with things 
 at all. It is the outcome of our faculty of 
 abstraction, our power of attending to one part 
 at a time, our power of dividing and classi- 
 fying and ignoring. Divisions and classifica- 
 tions are arbitrary, — they are human con- 
 veniences, — but Truth itself is continuous. 
 There are no absolute boundaries in Nature, 
 there is continuity. In complete knowledge 
 things are unified — everything must be united 
 with everything else. Not material things 
 alone, but thought and feeling and emotion and 
 substance and meaning and all manner of 
 
82 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 attributes ; and all related to the human and to 
 the Divine. To inspired insight, from time to 
 time, everything has been felt to be permeated 
 through and through with Deity, — 
 
 * and every common bush afire with God.' 
 
 Take that well-known stanza of Tennyson — * 
 so well known that I need hardly quote it:— ^ 
 
 * Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is.' 
 
 But if that be so, how can we study Botany 
 or any other science 1 We could not, if we had 
 in every case to contemplate the whole Uni- 
 verse with which it is linked. We must make 
 abstraction, we must attend to such aspects as 
 strike us in our present condition, and deal 
 with the cold facts accessible to our senses. 
 For it is through our senses that we become 
 aware of the Universe : it is those which give us 
 information; but it is those also which limit 
 and determine the kind of information that 
 
ASPECTS OF TRUTH 83 
 
 we can receive. We do not always recognise 
 this. If we had other senses the Universe 
 would look quite different. 
 
 Our senses tell us about matter. We can 
 imagine beings whose senses tell them about 
 the Ether and ignore matter. Their point of 
 view would be quite different to ours, their 
 statements discordant and inconsistent with 
 ours — apparently inconsistent, and yet both 
 true — true each of them as far as they go. 
 That is the essence of all human knowledge, 
 that it shall be true as far as it goes. It never 
 goes all the way; error creeps in when we 
 think it does. Even in mathematics this is 
 so; over-precise statements have frequently 
 had to be generalised and supplemented. Mis- 
 takes arise chiefly, in ordinary theories of life, 
 when the narrow limitations necessary for 
 practical purposes are extended and supposed 
 to represent the whole truth of things, when 
 not only positive assertions are made, but 
 negative ones too. 
 
 To deny is much more dangerous than to 
 assert. In Goethe's drama the spirit that con- 
 stantly denies, wer stets verneint, is Mephis- 
 to]3heles. An assertion may have some insight 
 
84 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 underlying it; an enthusiastic assertion is 
 nearly always the outcome of a mustard seed of 
 truth, however overlaid with error it may be. 
 But a denial may only signify a mental dis- 
 location, a failure to understand, a lack of 
 sympathy, a failure to appreciate a point of 
 view, an absorption in some other mode of re- 
 garding truth. To deny rightly usually de- 
 mands much completer knowledge than to 
 assert. An assertion may be specific and 
 minute — the result of a perception of a single 
 instance. A denial, to be effective, may have 
 to be large and comprehensive. And the 
 larger its field, the more ambitious its scope, 
 the more anxious should its promulgator be. 
 
 For instance, to say that a certain word 
 or certain sentiment occurs in Shakespeare 
 may be easy. To say that it does not occur, or 
 that there is no such idea in the whole of 
 literature, is what very few would have the 
 hardihood to maintain. 
 
 So much for general principles. Now apply 
 them to Hebrew history.^ 
 
 1 1ncidentally I may here mention certain books which may 
 be found useful. It is not necessary to refer serious students 
 to the works of Scholars, such as Professor Driver, Principal 
 George Adam Smith, and others; but Mx. C. G. Montefiore's 
 
ASPECTS OF TRUTH 85 
 
 " Bible for Home Keading," is an instructive though rather 
 large book; and mention may be made of a few smaller 
 •works: — 
 
 History of the Eebreivs, by Professor Ottley, published by 
 the Cambridge University Press. An excellent treatise, 
 not adapted to children but very helpful to teachers, 
 and always taking a reasonable point of view. 
 A recently published volume by the Rev. B. H. Alford 
 (Longmans) also deals with the historical portions of 
 the Old Testament, and with its Literature. 
 Then there is a book of lectures by Dr. Marcus Dods, de- 
 livered in America, published by Scribner under the 
 title, The Bible, its Origin and Nature. 
 A little book by Father Waggett, published by Longmans, 
 called The Scientifio Temper in Religion, is one in 
 which I am sure many people would be interested. 
 Two or three other books I might mention, one specifically 
 addressed to teachers by an expert teacher himself (at one 
 time Master of Method at University College, Liverpool). 
 How to Teach the Bible, by the Rev. A. F. Mitchell (Wil- 
 liams & Norgate). 
 A quite recent and very thoughtful book about some modern 
 difficulties in Christian Doctrine, called The Faith and 
 Modern Thought, by the Rev. W. Temple (Macmillan). 
 "A book of some learning, called Early Chapters in Gen- 
 esis, by Bishop Ryle of Winchester. 
 And then there is a collection of Bible Readings by Mrs. 
 Romanes, published by Mowbray, definitely intended for chil- 
 dren, concerning which I only lack experience to estimate 
 whether it is of value or not, for that purpose, from the trained 
 teacher's point of view; though I feel sure that some parenta 
 would find it helpful. 
 
 So also they may find useful a simple and unpretentious 
 though not small volume by Miss Davidson (T. Werner 
 Laurie) called The Old Testament Story told to the Yovrng. 
 Likewise tha Biblium Innooentiuni of Professor Mackail. 
 
CHAPTER in 
 
 EAELY HISTORY AND LITEEATURE 
 
 IN the Old Testament we have the History 
 and Literature of the race from whom 
 Messiah was to be born. We have a record of 
 the development of the Soul of a people ; or, in- 
 asmuch as they were the leaders of the human 
 race at that time, we may call it the develop- 
 ment of the Soul of the human race. 
 
 From early times the Hebrews had a pre- 
 sentiment of the greatness in store for them 
 — they felt that in their seed all nations of 
 the earth were to be blessed. I wish to assure 
 you that such veridical presentiments are pos- 
 sible. To them it was given to kindle and up- 
 hold the torch of religion through the dark and 
 nascent stages of history. Through evil 
 times and good times they were to keep it 
 alight, till their destiny was accomplished. It 
 was a terrible responsibility, but on the whole 
 they were faithful to their trust. Low though 
 
 86 
 
EARLY HISTORY AND LITERATURE 87 
 
 they fell sometimes, other nations fell lower; 
 and the Hebrew genius for Theology, their 
 instinct for tracing Divine activity in every- 
 thing, is manifest throughout their literature. 
 Some of their conceptions of Deity in early 
 ages are no doubt childish. Jehovah, for in- 
 stance, is said to walk in a garden in the cool 
 of the day, as Zeus walked in the garden of 
 the Hesperides, — where likewise bloomed well- 
 guarded apples. But these things are childish 
 in the good sense: they are poetical modes 
 of expression for a reality. Surely from a 
 beautiful garden the Deity is not absent; or, 
 as T. E. Brown the Manx poet says, ' 'Tis very 
 sure God walks in mine. ' But the whole poem 
 is short and worth quoting, — 
 
 *A garden is a lovcsome thing God wot, 
 Rose plot, 
 Fringed pool, 
 Fem'd grot, 
 The veriest school 
 Of peace; and yet the fool 
 
 Contends that God is not. — 
 Not God ! in gardens ! when the eve is cool ! 
 Nay but I have a sign ; 
 'Tis very sure God walks in mine.' 
 
88 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 Parenthetically we may observe that the 
 mere form which some of the legends take is 
 instructive. In the garden of the Hesperides, 
 the apples were protected by a sleepless dragon, 
 who physically prevented any attempt at 
 gathering them. In the Hebrew legend the 
 obstacle is of a very different kind, — not 
 physical at all, but moral. Nothing prevents 
 the plucking of the fruit save a command; the 
 apples are easily accessible, and the serpent, so 
 far from protecting them, extols their merits 
 and encourages disobedience. The change, 
 from physical force to moral suasion, whether 
 it be towards good or towards evil, is character- 
 istic. 
 
 But in the Old Testament you will recall 
 cases, too numerous indeed, when in the mouths 
 of priests representations of Deity fell far be- 
 low any reasonable standard of mercy and 
 justice, and when acts of cruelty and deceit 
 were perpetrated in the Divine name. Quite 
 true! At such times man's notions of God 
 were degraded, — records of priestcraft are 
 often painful reading; but at other times, and 
 in the mouths of some of the prophets, the 
 
EARLY HISTORY AND LITERATURE 89 
 
 Hebrew scriptures rise to a magnificence of 
 utterance which no other nation can paralleL 
 
 A literature is not all on one level, different 
 parts are naturally of very different values. 
 A history again is not all on one level of ex- 
 cellence, it is full of ups and downs, of failures 
 and successes, of glories and defeats. Heroes 
 of the race are sporadic, — they seem to ar- 
 rive in groups — and there are intermediate 
 times of spiritual dearth or famine. 
 
 Historical documents are often very human, 
 very imperfect, very much influenced by the 
 grade of enlightenment and by the standards 
 of conduct appropriate to the time. If we read 
 them with our eyes on the twentieth century A. 
 D., we shall hopelessly misread. Such an atti- 
 tude shows a lack of culture, as well as deficient 
 sympathy and curbed imagination. The way 
 to understand history and literature is to place 
 one's self in imagination in the times when it 
 was composed ; to know something not only of 
 the people whose history is given, but of the 
 other peoples among whom they lived, and of 
 the hostile influences they had to bear up 
 against and, if it might be, overcome. 
 
90 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 Much can we see to blame, much to cause 
 surprise, in the action of ' a chosen people ' at 
 a date three thousand years ago. 
 
 Are our own hands then so clean? Imagine 
 posterity three thousand years hence reading 
 our history, our newspapers, our politics; — 
 what will they think of us 1 They will not place 
 us very high; they may prefer, in some re- 
 spects, the records of the early Plebrews. 
 
 And yet we too are a chosen people. It were 
 blasphemy to deny our birthright and responsi- 
 bility. Our destiny in the world is no small 
 one ; we are peopling great tracts of the earth, 
 and carrying thither our language and our, 
 customs. The migration of that primitive 
 tribe, from Ur of the Chaldees, under the 
 leadership of the splendid old chief, Abram, 
 into a land of promise, was an event fraught 
 in the long run with stupendous results for the 
 human race. And are we not migrating to the 
 ends of the earth now, and increasing and 
 multiplying in the promised lands, towards 
 which the tide of civilisation — a civilisation 
 better and happier and holier than ours, I 
 trust — is slowly but surely flooding in? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 GENESIS 
 
 THE history of the Hebrews proper be- 
 gins with the patriarch Abraham; and in 
 recording it the writers earnestly emphasized 
 every example of Divine guidance and inter- 
 vention, as they perceived it. They also, with 
 the interest of children and all early people 
 for origins, collected such information as was 
 available concerning events long antecedent to 
 Abraham, and tried to reconstruct the origin of 
 man, and indeed the origin of all things. 
 
 An ambitious attempt ! — appropriate to the 
 childhood of the world. Modern science knows 
 nothing of ultimate origins. It never asks 
 the question. It starts with matter in motion ; 
 it traces its past, and to some extent its future. 
 It may look backward and forward for millions 
 of years; but to every past, however ancient, 
 there is an antecedent past ; and nothing points 
 to a beginning nor to an end. At every point 
 
 91 
 
92 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 we can ask: 'And what before! or, What 
 after? 
 
 But a beginning for this terrestial globe, the 
 earth, can be imagined: and at a time when 
 the earth and the universe were practically 
 identical, the beginning of the earth would seem 
 like the beginning of all things. And so a 
 poetic account of the Creation is handed down. 
 It is a representation of certain truths; — 
 that there was gradual development of life on 
 the earth — lower forms first, higher later ; that 
 everything depended on the energizing and 
 brooding power of a pre-existent and eternal 
 Divine Spirit; that matter is amenable to 
 thought, design, conception; that everything is 
 controlled by a purpose; that things in them- 
 selves, and save as marred by men, are on the 
 whole ' good.' 
 
 But then yon will say that having accounted 
 for the origin of everything, including a com- 
 plete human race, a second legend begins, 
 about the infusing of the Divine Spirit into 
 Adam, and the fall. Yes, quite true. On a 
 different level, and with a different purpose, 
 this second, the so-called Prophetic narrative, 
 has a notable meaning of its own ; and we may 
 
GENESIS 93 
 
 be grateful to the ancient compilers of Scrip- 
 ture that they preserved both these beautiful 
 documents, and left it for us to understand, 
 and as far as necessary to harmonize them. 
 Both have a truth of their own, both are in- 
 spired, and only to a shallow Sciolism are they 
 inconsistent. Neither by itself is complete — 
 they supplement each other — and certainly 
 neither is to be taken as a statement of cold- 
 blooded scientific fact. 
 
 Science did not exist in those days. Science 
 as we understand it is a modern growth. 
 Through Science we learn of the Else of man 
 — a most hopeful doctrine. In Genesis is de- 
 picted a Fall, — 'the beginning of a conscious- 
 ness of free will, the entrance of sin. 
 
 The two are by no means inconsistent; a 
 fall often follows a rise — sometimes as a 
 natural consequence. We have already em- 
 phasised this aspect of things in Part I, but 
 a few words of repetition need not here be 
 avoided. It is not difficult to interpret the 
 legend of * ' Adam. ' ' A knowledge of good and 
 evil, a recognition of responsibility — per- 
 ception of a iDower of choice — must have 
 dawned upon some early genius of the race, 
 
94 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 into whom entered the Divine breath of in- 
 spiration; that was the period when * man be- 
 came a living soul.* 
 
 Until such knowledge and consciousness ex- 
 isted there was no sin — for the essence of sin 
 is error in the light of knowledge, — the state 
 of the nascent human race must have been one 
 of innocency, like the animals. 
 
 ' For the time 
 Was Maytime, and as yet no sin was dreamed.' 
 
 The whole parable is very consistent with evo- 
 lutionary science. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PEOGKESSIVE REVELATION 
 
 SCIENCE, as many people understand it, is 
 very far from exhausting the whole truth 
 of things. True as far as it goes, and con- 
 tinually trying to go farther, — that is the atti- 
 tude of Science. It aims at nothing less than a 
 knowledge of reality. Reality is truly an am- 
 bitious quest — not likely to be reached in its 
 fullness by the labours of a century or two; 
 only to be approximated to by the slow and 
 laborious methods of science. Let the ground 
 be made secure and positions acquired duly 
 registered; but bear in mind that Reality is 
 necessarily infinite, and that therefore an infi- 
 nite scope for discovery and for a larger view of 
 things always lies ahead. 
 
 The study of Things, as such, is still in its 
 infancy. In Scottish universities the pro- 
 fessorship which deals with the study of 
 classics and pagan literature is called the 
 
 95 
 
96 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 Chair of ' Humanity ' ; in contra-distinction, I 
 presume, to the Chair of ' Divinity.' And 
 now to these great branches of knowledge we 
 have added a third — the study of things, of 
 matter and Ether and motion, which may be 
 called ' Eeality ' or Science. 
 
 There can be no permissible opposition be- 
 tween the aspects of this trinity of knowledge. 
 Eeality in its fullness must include not Things 
 alone, but Humanity and Divinity too. 
 
 Everything has a real aspect, so only we 
 could grasp it; our best efforts fall how far 
 short! Everything has a human aspect; and 
 that is the largest and oldest mode of regard- 
 ing things there can be, for us. Everything 
 has a Divine aspect; and in the Hebrew litera- 
 ture an attempt is made to present things from 
 that point of view. 
 
 And in it we recognize a gradual Eevelation. 
 Gradual, not for the sake of delay or secrecy, 
 but because of the limitation of human facul- 
 ties. Eevelation is as rapid as the race can 
 receive it. There is no artificial withholding 
 of information, but every expression must 
 necessarily be in terms of what can be under- 
 istood. For instance,— our most recondite 
 
PROGRESSIVE REVELATION 97 
 
 modern conception of the physical Universe is 
 expressible in terms of Ether and Motion. 
 Suppose that a statement in such terms — 
 appropriate to Lord Kelvin let us say — had 
 been made to nomad tribes wandering like 
 Arabs in the desert, while they were going 
 through the effort to found a civilized race 
 among barbarous nations. What mockery it 
 would have been! Would it even have been 
 truth? No, not to them; something much 
 more human was necessary. 
 
 So it will always be, — if we are to appre- 
 hend God at all, it must be through something 
 anthropomorphic, it must be through some 
 form of Incarnation; must be through the 
 saints and pinnacles of the race. 
 
 But this is not all that can be said. The 
 expression of the most advanced modern 
 science is in terms of Ether and Motion. That 
 appears to us to be nearest the truth, and we 
 may suppose that more and more will our pres- 
 ent mode of expression improve and become 
 clearer and more definite. But even so will it 
 represent the whole truth? No. It will be 
 our mode of formulating things. It is an ad- 
 yance, a great advance, but it ia only one as- 
 
98 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 pect after all. Absolute truth is always be- 
 yond us. Any one who objects to Genesis, or 
 to any other inspired work, as not containing 
 the whole truth, is talking nonsense. Of course 
 it does not! Let us admit that ideas of 
 Godhead, as held by children and early races, 
 are imperfect and partial: what then? What 
 else have we now? How can ideas of God be 
 anything but imperfect and partial? What 
 will posterity think of our ideas? We have 
 progressed, I hope, but the finite cannot grasp 
 the infinite, and the science of Theology, can 
 only mean such conception of Deity as the hu- 
 man race has attained to. One conception is 
 higher than another — none is perfect. Early 
 ideas were very imperfect. Very well, but some 
 were lofty, some magnificent. Here we have 
 recorded the ideas of the nation with the great- 
 est genius for theology; and their character 
 varies from time to time. Some are low; yes, 
 but if we also had recorded the theological 
 ideas of the Hivite, the Hittite, and the Jebu- 
 site, among whom they lived, what should we 
 think of them? 
 
 And it was not theoretical knowledge only 
 that they were imbued with; their task was to 
 
PROGRESSIVE REVELATION 99 
 
 infuse practical conduct with religious emo- 
 tion, — to weld the two together; — and in the 
 infancy of the race that was no light task. 
 
 'We are so accustomed to think of religion 
 and morality together — or even as one — that 
 we may fail to grasp the fact that there was 
 a time when they were quite separate. Wor- 
 ship is common to man, but worship may be 
 very far from moral. It usually involves 
 sacrifice and ceremonies and a priesthood, but 
 it may be associated with terrible cruelty and 
 with the most disgusting orgies. The temples 
 of some of the heathen were unspeakable. 
 
 To the Israelites it was given, under the 
 guidance of their great leader Moses, to as- 
 sociate together Eeligion and Morality for all 
 time; and the Ten Commandments are a per- 
 manent record of their clear perception of the 
 primary duties of a holy nation. The clauses 
 cover — 
 
 Loyalty to Jehovah as the one God; 
 
 A pure and non-idolatrous worship ; 
 
 Reverence for his holy Name and ordi- 
 nances ; 
 
 Filial Piety; Purity; 
 
 Honesty; Fair Dealing; 
 
100 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 Eestraint of Greed. 
 
 Have we got very far beyond them, even 
 now! 
 
 The Law of Sinai declared (says Professor 
 Ottley), in an age when the notion was wholly 
 new and unfamiliar, that religion and morality, 
 truth and righteousness, are vitally and in- 
 dissolubly connected. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 
 
 TAKE the Old Testament as a whole. First 
 we have an attempt to solve the problem of 
 existence — the ancient and insoluble problem, 
 how do things come to be. Why is it that any- 
 thing at all exists? 
 
 Existence is attributed to the Word of God, 
 the Logos. God spake. It is represented as 
 the outcome of reason, design, and purpose; 
 and, whether we take it in the first of Genesis 
 or the first of John, we cannot get beyond that 
 even now. 
 
 Next it deals with the growth of enlighten- 
 ment and the entrance of sin — the legend of 
 man's first disobedience, that is of conscious 
 disobedience. Sin appears as the result of 
 knowledge, the result of a rise in development, 
 the perception of good and evil, the conscious- 
 ness of a power of choice. Nothing more was 
 necessary than the attainment of that stage: 
 
 101 
 
102 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 for when that stage was reached, by a being as 
 yet imperfect, sin necessarily followed. Sin 
 is a heavy price to pay for human progress, 
 but it was inevitable, unless the aim was mere 
 mechanical compulsory perfection. The aim 
 is higher than that ; and the conscious effort of 
 humanity, then begun, stiR continues. We have 
 to learn to do right because we ivill, not because 
 we must. We are free agents. We can choose. 
 We know good from e\^l. 
 
 The spirit of the legend is, as we have seen, 
 entirely consistent with the doctrine of evolu- 
 tion; we see the same thing happening in an 
 individual life. A baby scratches the eye of its 
 brother — it does many things disgraceful to 
 adults — it is not held responsible. An age of 
 innocence is far from a state of perfection. 
 The nascent soul, like the nascent race, must 
 pass through a period of struggle and conscious 
 effort; it must develop its own will, and grow 
 into the region of light and Imowledge. But 
 with that development the early innocence in- 
 evitably ceases, and the possibility of sin enters 
 — sin, which is seeing the better and choosing 
 the worse. 
 
 There is nothing that can be called an in- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 103 
 
 tellectual * problem ' about sin, it is a definite 
 and positive reality. Given the possibility of 
 evil, sin is easy to understand, and in so far as 
 there is a problem, it is a problem in Humanity ; 
 humannm est errare. There is a problem of 
 evil, which is quite a different thing ; — that is 
 a problem in Divinity, not in Humanity. The 
 book of Genesis does not deal with that. It 
 is a problem of later date, it is the subject of 
 the poem which we know as the book of Job, 
 and it is often referred to by the prophets. 
 The problem of evil ; — why was evil per- 
 mitted to exist 1 why is there pain and suffering 
 and death? what is meant by ' the far-off in- 
 terest of tears '"? — I do not know if children 
 ask these questions, I think they belong to a 
 more adult stage, but with certain persons the 
 difficulty so raised is acute ; and it has contrib- 
 uted before now to a kind of atheism, or, what 
 is much the same thing, to pessimism. 
 
 Yet by a little clear thinking the difficulty 
 disappears. The very fact that it is asked is 
 a sign of latent optimism. In a truly pessim- 
 istic Universe there would be no problem of 
 evil, there would be a problem of good, — no 
 problem of sorrow, but a problem of joy. If 
 
104 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 everything is as bad as it can be, how comes 
 it that any happiness exists? What is the 
 meaning of beauty, and love, and mutual help, 
 and other forms of goodness? Are these 
 things mere instruments of disguised torment? 
 Are they not essentially good in themselves? 
 
 But these questions are not asked. These 
 are not the difficulties that oppress humanity. 
 "VVe ask why is suffering permitted, and thereby 
 imply that joy is the natural condition of life; 
 the opposite is felt to be unnatural, or at least 
 to require explanation. 
 
 An explanation is contained in the relativity 
 of all existence; every existence must have its 
 boundary and its negation, contrast and change 
 are of the essence of our perceptions. Up 
 would have no meaning if there were no down ; 
 Good would be unintelligible if there were no 
 evil ; Force would be unnecessary if there were 
 no inertia. 
 
 Here is a point which demands and is worthy 
 of some elaboration. To seize the meaning 
 fully will require some effort. Exertion of 
 force implies a reaction, it does not necessarily 
 imply a resistance. The two are frequently 
 confused, and hence has arisen Manichoeism 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 105 
 
 and many another outcome of confused 
 thought. Action and Eeaction are always 
 equal and opposite, but the reaction may be 
 caused in very different ways. A rope may be 
 pulled because it is attached to a massive truck 
 or canal barge, in order to make it advance. A 
 rope may also be pulled because something 
 animate is pulling in the opposite direction. 
 In the latter case there is active resistance, com- 
 petition, opposing force, obstruction. In the 
 former case there need be no obstruction — • 
 nothing but inertia. The pull is just as hard, 
 but there is no organized opposition; the re- 
 action is dependent on the rate of advance, it is 
 directly proportional to the acceleration. It is 
 a sign of progress : it is dynamic, not static. 
 
 There are, therefore, two kinds of conflict — 
 the active and the passive kind. Conflict 
 against wilful opposition, on the one hand ; con- 
 flict against inevitable and inherent difficulties, 
 on the other. 
 
 There is a conflict of activity with sluggish- 
 ness, for instance; and of this character is 
 much Divine expenditure of energy ; but it may 
 be mistaken for a conflict with some opposing 
 activity. I do not say that there are no op- 
 
106 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 posing activities in the Universe — we know 
 there are. Human beings are not only sluggish 
 and inert, but at times are actively wicked. 
 This is one of the dire privileges of free will. 
 As free beings we have the power to oppose 
 the purposes of the Creator, to retard progress, 
 and to deface his work. 
 
 But apart from all such active opposition, 
 effort is still necessary. Progress is not easy. 
 It were blasphemy to say that it is easy. Evo- 
 lution is not carried on without effort. Much 
 of the effort may be frequently described as a 
 struggle of positive good with negative evil. 
 A struggle as of force against inertia. A con- 
 flict as of Heat with Cold, of Light with Dark- 
 ness. The analogy is suggested in the Old 
 Testament — 
 
 'I form the light, and create darkness; 
 I make peace, and create evil.' 
 
 But yet darkness is not really positive, it 
 is not a thing in itself — it is merely the ab- 
 sence of light. Moreover, in its proper place 
 it is a necessity, we could not know of light 
 were there not grades of it ; and grades of light 
 are relative darkness. Degrees of darkness 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 107 
 
 there must be: all high light, and where were 
 the picture? There must be light and shade. 
 No one asks why parts of an engraving are 
 darker than the rest, it is felt to be inevitable 
 and right. May we not similarly say that with- 
 out evil the Universe would be all high light, 
 a meaningless blank monotony. 
 
 Why then do we think of evil as evil? A 
 definite and easily answered question. For 
 perpetual darkness, too, is an evil — to crea- 
 tures endowed with sight an intolerable evil, — 
 so is any kind of negation or annihilation. 
 Nothingness is appalling to a creature, but it is 
 because of high organisation that it is so: not 
 because nothingness is a positive existence or 
 anything in itself. So it is with darkness. 
 Without eyes we should know nothing of it. 
 It is the height of our development that makes 
 it dreadful. 
 
 Cold, again, is the absence of heat. The most 
 excessive cold is nothing in itself. Heat is the 
 positive thing, Cold is mere molecular quies- 
 cence, stagnation, negation of atomic movement. 
 Yet, to a highly organized being, excessive cold 
 is a dreadful evil, from which we shrink; but 
 again it is the height of our organisation which 
 
108 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 makes it evil : it is no evil to stocks and stones. 
 
 Are all evils of this negative character I No, 
 they are sometimes positive goods got out of 
 control and out of place, like fire or flood. Dis- 
 ease is of this nature. There is a conflict of 
 disease with health, and disease is to us an 
 unmitigated evil. But what is it in itself? It 
 is not a negation, as cold and darkness are, it is 
 something quite positive — like pain. What we 
 call disease is the growth of a low form of life 
 at the expense of a higher ; it is the flourishing 
 of micro-organisms in the blood; it is quite 
 analogous to weeds in a garden, or to parasite 
 and blight. Every form of life, in itself and in 
 its own place, must be evidently good. Anyone 
 who could construct the lowest living organism, 
 a single living cell of animal or plant, would 
 have achieved a miracle. The damaging power 
 of such cells, the reason they are stigmatized 
 as disease-germs, depends on the existence of a 
 higher organism and on their interference with 
 it. They are relatively evil, therefore, when 
 they come into competition with other life. 
 Competition is often evil. 
 
 Weeds are plants, and have a beauty and 
 fitness of their own: it is only when they take 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 109 
 
 the place of something better that they become 
 noxious. Ivy is beautiful enough, but it may 
 strangle an oak. It is things out of place that 
 are bad, not things in themselves. All evil is 
 relative, and its relation is with higher forms 
 of goodness. 
 
 To contend that disease is a nonentity and 
 merely imaginary, as some do, is absurd; it 
 is positively and thoroughly bad ; but to say that 
 the life of any organization in itself is bad must 
 be untrue. Out of control, however, it may be 
 as dangerous as a tiger. Fire is clearly good 
 in itself — a most beneficent discovery of some 
 early Prometheus of the race, — but fire out of 
 place is deadly and destructive. 
 
 And here I shall interpolate for a moment a 
 controversial note. 
 
 Any one who wrests this reasonable conten- 
 tion and exposition as to the nature of evil, and 
 says that it is a minimising or condoning of sin 
 < — thus confusing a problem in Divinity with a 
 problem in Humanity — is either ignorantly on 
 purposely misleading his hearers. Misstate- 
 ments of this kind are not absent from religious 
 periodical literature and from the utterance 
 of militant critics : they should be received with 
 
110 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 silence, were it not that such, misrepresenta- 
 tions do harm. They are not a fair weapon of 
 controversy. 
 
 Sin is man-made and unnecessary evil. It 
 is the planting of tares instead of wheat. It 
 is the act of an enemy. Because we claim 
 that evil is a necessary ingredient in a develop- 
 ing Universe, we admit no condonation or jus- 
 tification for evils which are man-made. Ours 
 is the power to cure, and our conscious freedom 
 has given us fuU responsibility for whatever 
 is in our control. For this distinction between 
 evil in itself and evil due to wilful wrong-doing 
 we have high authority : — 
 
 ' It must needs be that offences come, but woe be to that 
 man by whom they come.' 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE HUMAN OUTLOOK 
 
 THEOLOGIANS tell ns that human nature 
 is intrinsically bad. But human nature 
 necessarily begins in childhood, and in that we 
 are told there is a goodness like that of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. How much of the sup- 
 posed evil of human nature is due to artificial 
 and unnecessary conditions? Surely we can 
 see that much of human sin is due to bad con- 
 ditions and hampering environment ; and nearly 
 all of this is man-made. The wretchedness of 
 poverty is no Divine institution, it is the out- 
 come of devil worship. Life as it is, is utterly 
 different from life as it might be. It is de- 
 faced by mammon and greed. The hope is that 
 we are still in the morning of the times. The 
 human race is a recent growth upon the earth, 
 and its palmy days lie in the future. But an 
 immense amount of work has to be done. The 
 better future of the race will not arrive auto- 
 Ill 
 
112 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 matically, it must be worked for. But the good 
 is there all the time, it is hidden and choked 
 and stunted and fruitless. It is for us to help 
 it to grow. 
 
 We cannot bring non-existent good to birth, 
 any more than we can make dead things grow. 
 The germ must be in the things themselves: 
 and higher influences must be at work, too. 
 Plants grow, not because of the gardener, but by 
 their own nature, with the aid of sunshine and 
 air. Without these higher influences we are 
 helpless to make either vegetation or humanity 
 flourish; but we can perform the task of the 
 gardener, we can keep the soil clean, and let 
 in the sunshine and air, we can give all Divine 
 agencies a chance to do their beneficent work. 
 Whatever is beyond our power we must leave; 
 for that we are not responsible. 
 
 But here a personal caution ! As to our own 
 souls, we are fully responsible. We can at least 
 control them. Let us not seize explanations 
 that can be given for the failures of the race 
 and apply them to our own undoing. We who 
 have attained the gifts of thought, of percep- 
 tion, of clarity of vision, — we are not to be at 
 the mercy of surroundings, however deleter!- 
 
THE HUMAN OUTLOOK 113 
 
 ous their influence may be, and however much 
 they may be pleaded in mitigation of judgment 
 on behalf of the average of mankind. We can 
 be free, not enslaved. '■ Give me the man that 
 is not passion's slave,' says Hamlet, ' and I will 
 wear him in my heart, yea, in my heart of 
 hearts.' That is the true dignity of man. Ex- 
 cuses which can be made for the race and for 
 the ignorant herd are no excuse for the en- 
 lightened individual, — not for the individual 
 who sees and knows, not for him who realises 
 the talents and the task entrusted to him, and 
 who feels what is ex^^ected of him. 
 
 ^Man is his own star, and the soul that can 
 Render an honest and a perfect man, 
 Commands all light, all influence, all fate; 
 Nothing to him falls early or too late; 
 Our acts our angels are, or good or ill. 
 Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.' 
 
 The race has a long struggle before it, and 
 the struggle began long ago. The Old Testa- 
 ment records its early stages, and strangely low 
 at times it seemed to fall. But then, how high 
 it rose ! The average land is slowly rising, but 
 the peaks stand out far above it. 
 
114 OLD TESTAMENT IN EDUCATION 
 
 The potentiality of tlie race is sliown by what 
 has been already achieved. This also is re- 
 corded. In the documents bound together as 
 our Bible is traced the growth of the race from 
 early beginnings to the loftiest Personality we 
 have yet seen. He also is of our race: let no 
 theological subtleties deprive us of that great 
 encouragement. 
 
 Here is the record the long pathetic ac- 
 count of the struggle upward of the human 
 race, especially of its strivings toward religious 
 and moral development : up till it culminates in 
 the measure of the fullness of the stature of 
 Christ. 
 
 Seen in the light of evolution, the early im- 
 perfections, the manifold sins and wickedness, 
 out of which we have emerged, are an encour- 
 agement and a hope. These are in our past, 
 not our future. Seeing what we have been, and 
 what we may be, does not indeed reconcile us 
 with what we are, but it gives us hope and en- 
 couragement and strength to progress. 
 
 Having risen thus far, we may hope to rise 
 further, and to overcome in the course of a few 
 more generations some of the avoidable, the 
 man-made^ the terrible evils which now exist — 
 
THE HUMAN OUTLOOK 115 
 
 the slums, the destitution, the workhouses, the 
 prisons, — the unnatural squalor which is the 
 parent of so much of modern evil and sin; all 
 these should gradually cease their tormenting 
 hold upon us. 
 
 Effort there must always be, but human effort 
 should be other and higher and nobler than this 
 squalid struggle. That must surely cease ; and 
 in the light of the Gospel, by the energies of 
 the brave men and women of the present and 
 the future, our improving condition shall some 
 day develop into an earthly paradise, where 
 the Divine Kingdom shall have really come, and 
 where, by a finer and healthier and happier hu- 
 manity, the will of God shall be really done on 
 earth as it is done in heaven. 
 
REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 PART III 
 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 
 
 THE term Science may be used in a narrow 
 or in a broad signification. Sometimes 
 the one is convenient, but always the other 
 is permissible; and if the use of the term in 
 the narrow sense tends to obscure its larger 
 significance, then in that connexion such use 
 must be deprecated. 
 
 It is rather commonly supposed that the re- 
 gion amenable to strictly scientific study is a 
 narrow one, and that it by no means embraces, 
 nor will ever embrace, the whole of possible 
 knowledge. A boundary is often drawn be- 
 tween the scientific arena, on the one hand, and 
 the literary, the philosophic, the religious do- 
 mains on the other. But in truth no such 
 boundary can be drawn; there are no absolute 
 
 11^ 
 
120 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 barriers or discontinuities in nature. Every 
 subject merges into, and has more or less con- 
 nexion with, every other. It is true that sub- 
 jects are in very different stages of maturity; 
 more exact and precise knowledge is attainable 
 in some of them than in others. Those subjects 
 which, in a given epoch of the world's history, 
 are susceptible of exact and demonstrative 
 treatment — especially those which are amen- 
 able to the alternate analysis and synthesis of 
 the Newtonian method — constitute the citadel 
 of the scientific domain. But there are also 
 sciences which as yet are almost wholly in the 
 stages of observation and classification, and 
 any one of these may develop sooner or later 
 into something more like the deductive stage; 
 as chemistry has within the last century — the 
 discovery not only of new compounds but even 
 of new elements being predicted, — and as bi- 
 ology has begun to show signs of doing under 
 the stimulus supplied by the genius of Darwin 
 and of Mendel. 
 
 There can be no doubt that this tendency 
 towards advance from the vague to the definite 
 is a constantly progressive one, and that depart- 
 
AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 121 
 
 ments of human experience now apparently be- 
 yond treatment by rigorous methods, will grad- 
 ually be incorporated and fused in the con- 
 quered and explored territory. 
 
 Meanwhile they are not shut off from human 
 scrutiny merely because rigid treatment is not 
 yet applicable. They must be treated by 
 methods appropriate to the stage to which our 
 minds have risen with respect to them. No 
 contempt for such methods should be felt, ex- 
 cept when they are applied in departments 
 wherein they have already been superseded. 
 
 Truth has many channels for entering the 
 mind, and conviction of truth can be attained 
 during moods not of active inquiry only, but 
 of passive receptivity also. Insight is possible, 
 not so much through mental effort as through 
 a wise acquiescence in those intuitions of genius 
 which may rightly be called faith. 
 
 Thus does Wordsworth express this experi- 
 ence of direct inspiration — 
 
 Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our muids impress; 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness.' 
 
122 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 * Thiiik you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 Of things for ever speaking, 
 That nothing of itself will comei 
 But we must still be seeking I ' 
 
 Some tliere are who regard the scientific ad- 
 vance, or, as they call it, encroachment, upon 
 wild and unexplored territory with dislike, 
 thinking that the process will be death to mys- 
 tery and will reduce all nature to matter-of- 
 fact and commonplace. In geography it must 
 to some extent be so, since the surface of the 
 earth is limited. But those who realise the 
 infinitude of complexity in the simplest exist- 
 ence, and the way in which the whole of creation 
 is bound together without barriers or bounda- 
 ries or limitations, forming one continuous and 
 infinite whole, will have no such fear; nor will 
 they think it inappropriate for a scientific man 
 to cast his eyes around, from time to time, to 
 see what new departments of knowledge may be 
 coming within his ken. Indeed they will not 
 hesitate to welcome such advances, and reach 
 out a hand to catch, as best they may, some an- 
 ticipation of the interest that must thus legiti- 
 ro'ately accrue to the accumulated wealth of 
 kriowledge now within our grasp. 
 
AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 123 
 
 The narrow specializing attitude is useful, 
 and has performed yeoman service — the work 
 of the delver and digger is of the utmost value ; 
 — but they must not, through use and wont, 
 gradually acquire the notion that their 's is the 
 only method of value, or that the work of the 
 humanist, the inspiration of the poet, the guides 
 available through the intuition and instincts 
 of humanity, are deceitful will-o'-the-wisps 
 which lead to nothing. 
 
 There is room for every class of worker ; and 
 the men of science themselves may in certain 
 moods raise themselves out of their groove 
 of steady work and look around, as one 
 and another have always done, and tell the 
 world what it is that they see from their point 
 of vantage, — wherever that point of vantage 
 may be, whether on elevated peak or in subter- 
 ranean cavern. For however it may be re- 
 garded by others, still it is their point of view, 
 the place they have attained through severe 
 toil; and it is not only their right but their 
 duty to tell such other workers as will listen 
 what it is that thence they see. 
 
 There is nothing new in this contention, it 
 has been urged upon us by one and another of 
 
124 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 the leaders of the race ; though never frequently, 
 nor with any iteration. It is latent, however, 
 in much of the feeling which is current about 
 the privileges and the limitations of the scien- 
 tific explorer. Sometimes he is listened to over 
 much, sometimes he is not listened to at all; 
 seldom do his words receive that moderate and 
 reasonable attention which the circumstances 
 demand. And for some of the misapprehen- 
 sion, we must admit that scientific workers 
 themselves have been partly to blame. 
 
 As an example of the wholesome adjurations 
 thrown out to them from the department of 
 Letters and Humane learning, I shall take the 
 utterances of Wordsworth, who in Book IV. of 
 The Excursion emphasizes the privilege of the 
 man called to exact research — the man en- 
 dowed with the power and the opportunity for 
 scientific investigation, thus : — 
 
 * Happy is he who lives to understand, 
 Not human nature only, but explores 
 All natures — to the end that he may find 
 The law that governs each; and where begins 
 The union, the partition where, that makes 
 Kind and degree, among all visible Beuags; 
 The constitutions, powers, and faculties. 
 
AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 125 
 
 Which they inherit, — cannot step beyond, — 
 And cannot fall beneath; that do assign 
 To every class its station and its office, 
 Through all the mighty commonwealth of things; 
 Up from the creeping plant to sovereign Man.' 
 
 But he strongly deprecates the narrowing ten- 
 dency which such specialised studies may have 
 upon the intelligence, if pursued undeviatingly 
 through a lifetime without any wider and more 
 comprehensive purview. Scientific men, more 
 than others, should keep their mind and senses 
 open to a broader outlook, and to the reception 
 of all that can display itself, or that can by 
 any means be discerned, in the great amphi- 
 theatre of truth. It is piteous when higher 
 faculties suffer atrophe through over-speciali- 
 sation, or when the worker, by dint of too 
 concentrated service, is reduced below his pat- 
 ent of nobility. 
 
 * Shall men for whom our age 
 Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared, 
 To explore the world without and world within, 
 Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious spirits — 
 Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced 
 To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh 
 The planets in the hollow of their hand; 
 
126 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains 
 Have solved the elements, or analysed 
 The thualdng principle — shall they in fact 
 Prove a degraded Race ■? ' 
 
 Shall they not rather detect in the phe- 
 nomena of nature more fullness of meaning 
 than can be perceived by others? Shall they 
 not at times read an infinite message even in 
 the stones beneath their feet! Shall not they 
 who ' come forth into the light of things,' and 
 * let Nature be their teacher,' be stimulated 
 to large perception by the enthusiasm of a dis- 
 covery, even as others are made receptive of 
 higher truth by a work of art or of music, or 
 as a child may have its imagination kindled 
 and its thought aroused by listening to the 
 murmur of a shell. 
 
 It were indeed desperate if the scientific in- 
 stinct and reasoning habit cut off the connexion 
 between sense and soul, and made the deeper 
 insight impossible : — 
 
 * The estate of man would be indeed forlorn 
 If false conclusions of the reasoning power 
 Made the eye blind, and closed the passages 
 Through which the ear converses with the heart,* 
 
AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 127 
 
 And Wordsworth goes on to press the ques- 
 tion upon each individual, and to ask whether 
 there have not been periods during which a 
 flash of inspiration has been experienced. 
 (Incidentally the emphasis here laid on ' calm- 
 ness ' as a condition for the reception of in- 
 spired thoughts — in unison with Plotinus and 
 iTennyson — is noteworthy) : — 
 
 ' Has not the soul, the being of your life> 
 Received a shock of awful consciousness, 
 In some calm season.' 
 
 If that experience has ever been felt, then al- 
 though it is true that ' the spirit bloweth as it 
 listeth,' and true likewise that ' in mystery the 
 soul abides,' yet it behoves the scientific man 
 to try to comprehend whence the inspiration 
 comes, and to formulate if he can the laws of 
 its being. 
 
 But there is still more that can be said in 
 this direction, and still more emphasis to be 
 laid on the value of intuition and spontaneous 
 thoughts. 
 
 It is sometimes surprising to a scientific man, 
 or at least to a youth in the full flush of ardour 
 
128 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 for scientific knowledge, how the antique 
 studies of the humanists, and the apparently 
 fantastic utterances of imaginative writers, can 
 possibly conduce to progress or in the long run 
 elevate humanity. 
 
 I must confess — even though it sound dis- 
 graceful — that long ago I had a sort of inner 
 conviction that devotion to art and letters was 
 a waste of time, that even natural beauty was a 
 distraction, that nothing was worthy of serious 
 attention that did not add to positive knowl- 
 edge. Fortunately I outgrew this green phase, 
 though I am far from regretting the concen- 
 trated enthusiasm which was its origin ; it was 
 not altogether a bad phase to pass through, 
 provided it were passed through, for it certainly 
 was not an unproductive or ineffective period: 
 it led to an extraordinary amount of hard work, 
 and strangled for the time any tendency to 
 distraction and multifarious interests. 
 
 It is not impertinent to mention this little 
 fact of autobiography, because I realize that 
 at all times a few people are liable to be in 
 that stage — though not perhaps to so pro- 
 nounced a degree. These are they who pursue 
 knowledge for its own sake and are able to 
 
AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 129 
 
 regard it as an end in itself, just as others 
 pursue and deify Art. Theirs is an instructive 
 and energizing and strenuous belief, which has 
 practical results and is not by any means to be 
 despised — as some who profess a broader view 
 are liable to despise it, — and yet it is not a 
 permanently satisfying attitude, nor one that 
 will stand the test of time or the stress of 
 trouble. 
 
 A motive power such belief is: not a firm 
 foundation. For maturer reason cannot but 
 show that the welfare and progress of man must 
 be the real end and aim of knowledge, as of 
 everything else with which we are concerned, — 
 however little such welfare is obviously pro- 
 moted by any given fact, and however ad- 
 mittedly crude and useless it is to worry the 
 discoverer or the explorer with the question 
 cui bono. This is a question to which neither 
 he nor any one else can reply, and which 
 ought not to be asked. He is right to trust 
 his instinct and pursue the truth wherever it 
 may lead. 
 
 Nevertheless it must be maintained that 
 human welfare is the ultimate end and aim 
 of everything with which we have to do; and 
 
130 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 that such welfare, in the highest sense, may be 
 promoted by many things beside intellectual 
 study of Nature. "We do not live by scientific 
 bread alone ; ' we live by admiration, hope, and 
 love.' 
 
 ' So if a poet tells us that a vision of beauty 
 or some simple everyday occurrence, even so 
 simple la thing as the unpremeditated song of 
 a bird, has the power of raising the human 
 heart to the perception of Divine things, — if 
 he asserts that such things are of more value 
 to some natures than the profoundest re- 
 searches, and perhaps that in such natures they 
 accomplish more than any intellectual striving 
 or brilliant discovery can achieve in any per- 
 son whatever, — it is open to experience of life 
 to demonstrate or to disprove the truth of such 
 a statement. 
 
 Not in me, indeed, is the sensitiveness to 
 such influence developed; yet by sympathy I 
 can partially understand, and I would call 
 , other scientific students to understand and 
 admit, first, that the uplifting of the spirit of 
 man is the highest claim that can be made for 
 any study, any action, any emotion, — while 
 the fact that it achieves such uplifting is its 
 
I AIMS AND LIMITATIONS 131 
 
 bighest tribute, its perfect justification; and 
 secondly, that for others — though perhaps 
 not for themselves — channels of Divine grace 
 may be dependent upon refined feeling rather 
 than upon recondite knowledge, and that a mes- 
 sage such as that conveyed to Keats by the 
 song of a thrush — however little it appeals 
 to them, and however wise they may be in pur- 
 suing the path dictated by their own God-im- 
 planted instincts — yet may represent a worthy 
 and a fruitful mood. 
 
 ' Oh fret not after knowledge. I have none, 
 And yet my song comes native vsdth the warmth. 
 Oh fret not after knowledge! I have none, 
 And yet the Evening listens.' 
 
CHAPTER n 
 
 THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 
 
 IN the preceding chapter I have addressed 
 my colleagues in science, but I have some- 
 thing to say to men of letters also. A question 
 has from time to time been raised as to the 
 legitimacy of certain methods in scientific pro- 
 cedure, especially as to the legitimacy of hy- 
 pothesis, i. e., of theory suggested and supported 
 though not yet fully established by fact ; and it 
 has even been suggested that in some cases 
 the personal predilections of an explorer have 
 been a more efficient guide than legitimate in- 
 dications. There are in fact literary critics 
 who either have objected, or who show signs 
 of being ready to object, to the use of working 
 hypotheses as unscientific ; — not apparently 
 being aware of the ordinary procedure of a 
 scientific investigator in a new field. Such hy- 
 potheses, — set forth to be scrutinised severely 
 from all sides, retained only in so far as they 
 
 132 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 133 
 
 survive the early tests, and discarded as soon 
 as facts are forthcoming which seriously and 
 not merely superficially discredit them, — are 
 the necessary thread on which facts are linked, 
 the connecting mechanism by which they are 
 treated as a coherent whole instead of a loose 
 and incomprehensible jumble. Such hypothe- 
 ses are part of our working tools, and when 
 one of them has shown itself superior to all 
 others, it is put forth as a tentative theory, to 
 be enlarged and modified as experience pro- 
 ceeds. 
 
 For instance, when dealing with the history 
 of the physical aspect of the Atomic Theory 
 in Chemistry, the Lucasian Professor of Mathe- 
 matics in the University of Cambridge ^ writes 
 thus concerning the theory of Dalton : — 
 
 " In all fundamental advances, the result attained is not 
 BO much the vindication of any inflexible experimental 
 fact, as the introduction of an abstract guiding principle 
 into the science, fortified of course by expeiimental sup- 
 port." 
 
 And after developing this in some detail he 
 continues in general and weighty terms : — 
 
 iPj.ofessor Sir Joseph Larmor in his Wilde Lecture at Man- 
 chester, 1908. 
 
134 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 "While theory is aimless and impotent without experi- 
 mental check, experiment is dead without some theory pass- 
 ing beyond the limits of ascertained knowledge to control 
 it. Here, as in all parts of natural knowledge, the im- 
 mediate presumption is strongly in favour of the simplest 
 hypothesis J 'the main support, the unfailing clue, of 
 physical science is the principle that, nature being a ra- 
 tional cosmos, phenomena are related on the whole ia, the 
 manner that reason would anticipate." 
 
 Such a pronouncement supports the claim, in- 
 evitably though often tacitly made, that the 
 coherent anticipations — the inspirations and 
 even the surmises — of men of genius are 
 of value to an explorer, and are among the 
 phenomena of nature which he will be well ad- 
 vised not wholly to ignore. Indeed he is justi- 
 fied in attempting to utilise them in whatever 
 way is suggested by his own instinct. 
 
 And having adopted a working hypothesis as 
 a clue it must be pertinaciously followed up and 
 tested in every possible way. To give up a view 
 too lightly, and at the bidding of every super- 
 ficially hostile fact, would be childish. Every 
 such fact must be scrutinised and its value as- 
 certained, no such fact must be burked oe 
 slurred over. If it is weak and valueless, scru- 
 tiny will reveal the weakness, — will reveal ver^ 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 135 
 
 likely that what at first looked hostile is really 
 in favour of the tested hypothesis, when prop- 
 erly understood. 
 
 So it has been, often and often, in the history 
 of science some small perturbation or outstand- 
 ing error — let us say in the motion of the 
 moon — has seemed before now to throw sus- 
 picion on the accuracy of the law of gravitation, 
 and to discredit predictions based on that law; 
 but by taking into account another perturbing 
 circumstance, or some terms in a mathematical 
 series which had been too hastily ignored, or 
 some other neglected fact which did not lie 
 on the surface, — facts which it took some pains 
 and penetration to bring to light, and of which 
 the critical objectors were ignorant, — the law 
 has been confirmed, even by the facts which at 
 first seemed hostile ; — and so, in the long run, 
 after passing through the gauntlet of criticism 
 it has been established almost beyond cavil. A 
 philosopher who had stuck to his working hy- 
 pothesis for years, in face of the outstanding 
 difficulty, because he felt that all the major 
 arguments were on his side, — that they outbal- 
 anced the minor objections, and therefore that 
 he could bide his time and hold his judgment in 
 
136 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 suspense concerning the hostile facts until they 
 had been thoroughly explored, — that philoso- 
 pher would in the end be abundantly justified. 
 Hypotheses before now have been abandoned 
 prematurely, and have had to be returned to 
 by another generation. There are hard and 
 difficult cases in science, and sometimes what 
 seems like obstinacy is justifiable; though a 
 more pliant mind is usually a safer, and always 
 a pleasanter and more popular, attitude. 
 
 But to say that a scientific man puts forth 
 a theory, and supports it and adheres to it, not 
 because he thinks it true but because he wishes 
 it to be true, is the same thing as saying that 
 he is not a seeker after truth at all, and is 
 therefore a traitor to his profession. It is (as 
 I have said elsewhere) equivalent to accusing 
 a Judge of prejudice or a Trustee of peculation. 
 It may be lamentably necessary to make such 
 an accusation sometimes, but it should be made 
 in a serious and responsible manner and not in 
 the ordinary spirit of miscellaneous journalism 
 or casual conversation. 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 137 
 
 ILLUSTEATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 
 
 The popular prejudice concerning scientific 
 method is that bare facts alone are to be 
 scrutinised, without any clue or guide, until the 
 true theory appears. "Whether such a pro- 
 cedure is desirable or not is hardly worth dis- 
 cussing, for in a matter of any complexity it 
 is impossible; in fact it is probably really and 
 essentially impossible even in the simplest case. 
 No hypothesis is really a part of the facts; 
 each has first to be invented, and then critically 
 examined.^ 
 
 1 The following sentence accidentally catches my eye in aia 
 article by a writer on Radium. The particular subject is un- 
 important for present purposes. Suffice it to say that it con- 
 cerns the identity of the immediate " Parent of Radium," aa 
 well as the already partially known remoter ancestry, and the 
 better known descendants, of that important substance; which 
 is itself an intermediate element in a notable series of trans- 
 mutations or disintegrations. Uranium is probably, though 
 not yet certainly, its great-grandparent. Actinium is possibly 
 its grandparent, while its immediate parent — not yet named 
 or securely identified — might easily have been mistaken for 
 Thorium, because to chemical tests it is very like that sub- 
 stance; but a theoretical clue pointed away from that identifi- 
 cation — Thorium seems to belong to a different family, — and 
 consequently the experiments were scrutinised severely and the 
 error avoided. Had it not been so, Mr. Soddy says, 
 
 " A serious error would have thus crept into the subject 
 and might possibly have caused endless confusion before 
 
138 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 But even when hypotheses are ' given ' ready- 
 made, or are obvious so that no invention is 
 necessary, tentative discrimination between al- 
 ternative plausibilities is necessary to progress. 
 How is anyone to choose between two alter- 
 native roads — literal roads — except by first 
 speculatively deciding that one of them is most 
 probably right, and then putting it to the test! 
 A few steps along it may show that the guess 
 was wrong, and in that case the steps will be 
 retraced; but unless something is done, the 
 traveller may stand at the fork of the roads 
 for hours, in sheer helplessness. 
 
 It is evidently thought that to put one hy- 
 pothesis forward as the most likely, and to fol- 
 low it for a time to see where it will lead, is to 
 give it an unfair advantage and to show repre- 
 hensible credulity. But that is not so. To put 
 a hypothesis forward is to subject it to attack, 
 while the others lurk in the rear, screened for 
 
 being put right. As [it was] however . . . this error 
 was fortunately avoided. This furnishes an argument for 
 the advantages of having a theory to guide the investi- 
 gator. The disintegration theory indicated a genetic con- 
 nection between uranium and radium but none between 
 thorium and radium. Sometimes of course the argument 
 is the other way; it is useful occasionally to discard the 
 blinkers of theory and to look round fancy-free." 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 139 
 
 a time from criticism and making stronger their 
 position, in case the adventurous pioneer, find- 
 ing himself baffled, returns to his base, — 
 thereby leaving the once prominent but now 
 discarded hypothesis to the mercy of the foe. 
 
 People seem to think that when a working 
 hypothesis is being tested, every argument in 
 its favour will receive undue weight, while 
 everything that can tell against it will be 
 shirked. Human nature is fallible, and occas- 
 ional weakness or partiality may have to be ad- 
 mitted in some cases for a time, — ^*' sometimes 
 one may err on the side of partiality sometimes 
 on the side of impartiality,'* as an apocryphal 
 civic magnate is reported to have said, — but 
 there exists no real seeker after truth who 
 would not admit that an attitude of unreason- 
 ing prejudice, if really persisted in the face of 
 facts, is folly, as well as treason to truth. 
 
 Truth seems to be looming ahead only when 
 every new fact, every turn in the road, seems 
 to bear in the right direction, seems to lead 
 nearer the goal. Then the explorer proceeds, 
 encouraged, and in his forward march may 
 sometimes be rightly deaf to the warnings of 
 followers from behind, who, not having travelled 
 
140 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 so far along his road, cannot see so much of 
 the way, and are more enamoured of some of 
 the other routes to which friends are calling 
 them. 
 
 To say that in a difficult enquiry hypotheses 
 are not to be made, or not to be tested, — to say 
 that no one hypothesis is to be put forward and 
 subjected to the scathing fire of criticism, — 
 is as stupid as it would be to expect any one 
 to solve a dissected puzzle by merely looking at 
 the jumble of pieces laid out plainly for inspec- 
 tion, without handling and trying to fit them 
 into supposed places. A bundle of discon- 
 nected facts is only the raw material for an in- 
 yestigation: their mere collection is the very 
 earliest stage in the process; and even while 
 collecting them there is nearly always some 
 system, some plan, some idea under trial. The 
 puzzles set us by nature are not sorted out 
 neatly into boxes, each guaranteed complete in 
 itself; but the contents of several boxes may 
 be mixed. 
 
 In selecting a working hypothesis we must 
 proceed by trial and error. To try one clue 
 obstinately, to be blind to every other, to listen 
 to no reason, is akin to lunacy. To try several, 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 141 
 
 and at last to perceive the probabilities in 
 favour of one of them, to pursue that one into 
 all its consequences and ramifications till it is 
 either verified or discredited, — that is scientific 
 procedure. Let no one suppose that this ex- 
 hausts scientific procedure. It is the right 
 procedure in a new and unknown field; it was 
 the method of Kepler, and it served as the 
 foundation on which a rigorous demonstration 
 could be subsequently built. It is the right 
 method for a science at an early stage in its 
 history, it is not the method appropriate to 
 deduction from known laws, nor is it the method 
 of analysis and subsequent synthesis initiated 
 by Newton. There are subjects in a stage at 
 which this latter process is applicable; and 
 there are subjects not yet ripe for that kind 
 of treatment. These last have to be treated by 
 hypothesis based upon and tested by experi- 
 ment. The Newtonian era in psychical science 
 has not yet dawned. 
 
 It is sometimes thought that Newton never 
 employed any method but that of analysis and 
 synthesis, or induction and deduction. These 
 were indeed his favourite tools, for he was work- 
 ing at the foundation of Natural Philosophy, 
 
142 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 and the subject was tractable in this way by 
 his astounding genius, — but he by no means 
 disdained the aid of other methods when the 
 first were inapplicable; and the other method 
 he regarded as preparing the ground for subse- 
 quent treatment by more rigorous processes, — 
 as shall be evidenced by quotation. 
 
 I select the following illustrative sentences 
 from the third book of the Principia; begin- 
 ning with a surmise about the internal heat of 
 the earth. 
 
 "The hieat (calor) of boiling water is about 3 limes 
 greater than the heat which dry earth acquires from the 
 Bummer-sun, as I have tried; and the heat of red hot iron 
 (if my conjecture is right, si reete conjector) is about three 
 or four times greater than the heat of boiling water." 
 
 ^ (Parenthetically we may notice that the latter 
 statement, based on conjecture, is — ■ if the word 
 calor be translated ** absolute temperature," a 
 phrase that could not have been used in New- 
 ton's day^ — much nearer the truth than the 
 statement preceding it, which is supposed to 
 have been ascertained by observation.) 
 
 After speaking of the cooling of sundry 
 moderate sized iron globes^ he continueSj,^« 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 143 
 
 'A globe of red hot iron equal to our earth, that is, 
 about 40,000,000 feet in diameter, would scarcely cool in 
 . . . above 50,000 years. But I suspect (suspicor 
 tamen) that the duration of the heat may, on account of 
 some latent causes, increase in a yet less proportion than 
 that of the diameter; and I should be glad that the true 
 proportion was investigated by experiments.' 
 
 The meaning is obscure, but it seems to point 
 to a suspicion that something other than mere 
 conduction of heat may control the cooling of 
 the earth — a suspicion, if it existed, which 
 modern discovery has strangely justified. 
 
 The phenomena of comets' tails, so well de- 
 scribed and illustrated by diagrams in the Prin- 
 cipia, was a very appropriate subject for hy- 
 pothesis : — so, after adducing those of Kepler 
 and others he indicates his own surmise that the 
 ascent of the tails of comets from their heads 
 proceeds from the rarefaction of the matter of 
 the comets' tails, like the rise of smoke from a 
 chimney. And then he goes on to a very curi- 
 ous speculation that the tails of comets may 
 supply the earth's atmosphere with some in- 
 gredient which is important and which would 
 otherwise be lacking. We cannot say for cer- 
 tain that there is no sort of truth in this, even 
 
144 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 now ; though the ingredient is certainly not what 
 we now call oxygen, and though the necessary 
 recuperation of the atmosphere damaged by 
 animal life was proved later, by Joseph 
 Priestly, to be effected by vegetation and sun- 
 light. 
 
 This is what Newton says, — < 
 
 'It seems reasonable {rationi consentaneunt videtur) 
 that the vapour [of comets' tails], thus perpetually rare- 
 fied and dilated, may be at last dissipated and scattered 
 through the whole heavens, and be gradually attracted 
 towards the planets by its gravity, and mixed with their 
 atmosphere; for as the seas are absolutely necessary to 
 the constitution of our earth ... so for the con- 
 Bervation of the seas and fluids of the planets comets 
 seem to be required. ^ . .. I suspect, moreover, that 
 it is chiefly from comets that that spirit comes which is 
 indeed the smallest but the most subtle and useful part 
 of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of 
 all things with us.* 
 
 So, clearly, whenever hypothesis were ap- 
 propriate Newton did not hesitate to make them. 
 Indeed gravitation itself was originally an 
 hypothesis — a guess, a flash of insight, in his 
 mind; though the fact that an attracting force 
 of some kind, varying as the inverse square of 
 the distance from the sun, was acting on all 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 145 
 
 the planets, could be demonstrated quite easily 
 by Kepler's third law. (The same deduction 
 for any one planet, from the first law or shape 
 of its orbit, is not so simple; nor is it so 
 general. The deduction from the second law 
 about equable description of areas, that they are 
 acted on by a force directed to the sun, is easy 
 and rigorous.) 
 
 A pure Mathematician has told me, what I 
 should certainly have expected, that even purely 
 mathematical theorems are not arrived at in 
 the first instance by a method of demonstra- 
 tion. They arise in the mind as a flash, an 
 idea, an inspiration; and much subsequent 
 labour may be necessary before they are es- 
 tablished and rigorously proved. Sometimes 
 indeed the attainment of a complete proof is the 
 work of generations. 
 
 Newton had an extraordinary faculty for 
 guessing correctly, sometimes with no apparent 
 data, — as for instance his intuition that the 
 mean density of the earth was probably between 
 5 and 6 times that of water ; while we now know 
 it is really about 5i/^, — and he concludes his 
 *' Optics " with a whole string of sagacious 
 Queries, every one of which is an untested or 
 
146 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 incompletely tested hypothesis or speculation. 
 Some of these were sheer guesses, such as were 
 not likely for a long time to be put to the test 
 of experiment, — many of them indeed not so 
 tested even yet. 
 
 Qu. 5. Do not Bodies and Light act mutually upon one 
 another; that is to say, Bodies upon Light, in emitting, re- 
 flecting, refracting and inflecting it; and Light upon 
 Bodies, for heating them, and putting their hearts into a 
 vibrating motion wherein heat consists'? 
 
 Qu. 29. Are not the Rays of Light very small Bodies 
 emitted from shining Substances? For such Bodies will 
 pass through uniform Mediums in right Lines without 
 bending into the Shadow, which is the Nature of the 
 Rays of Light. . . . 
 
 Qu. 31. Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain 
 Powers, Virtues, or Forces, by which they act at a dis- 
 tance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, re- 
 fracting and inflecting them, but also upon one another for 
 producing a great Part of the Phenomena of Nature! 
 
 • • • 
 
 But because the method by speculation had 
 been needlessly prominent in the past, even in 
 Natural Philosophy, and because he now per- 
 ceived that in such comparatively simple or 
 well-worn subjects as the Foundation of Me- 
 chanics and the motion of the heavenly bodies 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 147 
 
 there was a more excellent way, he deeply re- 
 sented the idea that in his beautiful mathe- 
 matical inductions and deductions he was merely 
 making haphazard guesses, with the idea of 
 subsequently confirming them. He considered 
 his theory absolutely established by fact, and 
 he deduced from his theory more fact, which 
 likewise he considered absolutely established; 
 subject only to the risk of error or oversight. 
 He would probably have admitted that by rea- 
 son of this risk they still needed to be 
 thoroughly tested and confirmed by detailed ex- 
 perience, — like all other results of human 
 reasoning. 
 
 In the course of this work, or rather at the 
 conclusion of its more rigorous and mathe- 
 matical portion, he interjected that much mis- 
 understood and misapplied sentence, *' Hypo- 
 theses non fingo; '* — a sentence which is often 
 interpreted as implying that he denied to him- 
 self the right of making hypotheses. As if he 
 had said '' Hypotheses I do not make," or " I 
 never make." 
 
 If he had said this, it would have been a 
 transparent falsehood, too absurd for such a 
 misconception of his meaning to be even sus- 
 
148 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 pected by him. What he meant and what he 
 said was ** I am not making hypotheses " — 
 meaning that they would be out of place then 
 and in that connexion — I am deducing theo- 
 rems by logically accurate and severe methods, 
 — we may imagine him saying — and expound- 
 ing them in strict synthetic form. Do not run 
 away with the notion that these are guesses. 
 I am laying down the Principles of Natural 
 Philosophy in mathematical and exact fashion, 
 welding things together into one coherent 
 whole, making an exact mechanical scheme 
 which I will shortly apply in my concluding 
 volume to " The System of the World." 
 Hypotheses, in what I am now doing, would be 
 unnecessary and out of place; and in a more 
 perfect state of knowledge they may cease to 
 be necessary altogether. 
 
 *' For all the difficulty of philosophy seems 
 to consist in this — from the phenomena of 
 motions to investigate the forces of nature, and 
 from these forces to demonstrate other pheno- 
 mena; "... and I would that it were 
 possible to deal with all other parts of Nature 
 in the same way, and to derive all other phenom- 
 ena by reasoning from mechanical principles; 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 149 
 
 ** for I am induced by many reasons to suspect 
 that they may all depend upon certain forces 
 by which the particles of bodies, by some causes 
 hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled 
 together so as to cohere in regular figures or 
 are repelled and driven apart "... 
 
 This is an expansion of Newton's phrase 
 Hypotheses non fingo, interpreted in the light 
 of other parts of his work. 
 
 And as a further illustration of some of the 
 hypotheses which we find, even in the Principia 
 itself, concerning things which could not at that 
 time be demonstrated or dealt with by mathe- 
 matical methods, I will instance two, — one con- 
 cerning the Ether of Space, and one concern- 
 ing God. 
 
 Concerning the Ether, his statement runs in 
 this style : — 
 
 *And now we might add something concerning a cer- 
 tain most subtle Spirit which pervades and lies hid in 
 all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit 
 the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at 
 near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric 
 bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as 
 attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emit- 
 ted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and 
 
150 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies 
 move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibra- 
 tions of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid 
 filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense 
 to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But 
 these are thmgs that cannot be explained in few words, 
 nor are we furnished with that sufficiency of experiments 
 which is required to an accurate determination and dem- 
 onstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic 
 Spirit operates.* 
 
 Finally, his statement concerning tlie Deity; 
 runs thus : — 
 
 'And from his true dominion it follows that the true 
 God is a living, intelligent and powerful Being; and, from 
 his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. 
 He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient j 
 that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; 
 his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, 
 and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not 
 eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not dura- 
 tion or space, but he endures and is present. He endures 
 for ever, and is every where present; and by existing al- 
 ways and every where, he constitutes duration and space. 
 Since every particle of space is always, and every indi- 
 visible moment of duration is every where, certainly the 
 Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no 
 where. Every soul that has perception is, though in dif- 
 ferent times and in different organs of sense and mo- 
 
THE USE OF HYPOTHESES 151 
 
 tion, still the same indivisible person. There are given 
 successive parts in duration, co-existent parts in space, 
 but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, 
 or his thinking principle; and much less can they be 
 found in the thinking substance of God. Eveiy man, 
 so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the 
 same man during his whole life, in all and each of his 
 organs of sense. God is the same God, always and every 
 where.* 
 
 Hence as a Physicist, justifying his pro- 
 cedure as far as may be by the example of 
 Newton, I think it not inappropriate to reach 
 beyond the range of the physical and demon- 
 strable, to a region where experience gained in 
 those departments of knowledge may be genu- 
 inely serviceable. And although strict and posi- 
 tive certainty is as yet unattainable, and pos- 
 sibly may remain unattainable for centuries in 
 the future as it has already been through the 
 ages of the past, yet some approximation to 
 the truth may be gradually made by utilising 
 every indication and stretching our human 
 faculties to the utmost. 
 
CHAPTER in 
 
 THE APPEAL TO LITEEATURE 
 
 REVIEWERS may admit the right of a 
 student of Science to survey the facts 
 which have come under his scrutiny, and from 
 their contemplation to formulate a theory 
 which to him appears most likely to be true; 
 they may also allow him the right to state 
 it in such a way that it can be understood, 
 without at the same time constantly protrud- 
 ing technical details, — which are best left to 
 be studied in the publications of scientific 
 societies. All this they might admit, and yet 
 contend that he had no right to quote poets 
 or men of letters in support of his hypothesis. 
 * You may hold an atomic theory ' — such 
 critics might be supposed to say — ' but you 
 must not quote Lucretius. You may hold a 
 view concerning Oracles, but must not quote 
 Virgil. Or an opinion about Immortality, but 
 must not quote Tennyson or Wordsworth.' 
 
 152 
 
THE APPEAL TO LITERATURE 153 
 
 If that contention is ever urged, I demur to 
 the conclusion, though not to the spirit in which 
 it is conceived. 
 
 What is true is that the utterances of poets 
 are not part of the facts that can be appealed 
 to in support of a thesis, — except in so far 
 as their evident reasonableness carries with 
 them a conviction of truth. Nevertheless the 
 intuitions of genius must not be ignored. 
 There are facts relating to human nature, and 
 to the relation between man and the rest of the 
 Universe, concerning which poets and prophets 
 — humanists, in fact, in the widest sense — 
 are the best and indeed almost the only 
 guides. To them seem to come whisperings 
 which have been likened to the murmur of a 
 shell held to the ear of a child, — reverbera- 
 tions and intensifications of sounds too faint 
 for the unaided ear. 
 
 * Even such a shell the universe itself 
 Is to the ear of faith; and there are times 
 I doubt not, when to you it doth impart 
 Authentic tidings of invisible things.' 
 
 The sanction for their statements and de- 
 ductions is to be found in the hearer's own 
 experience and consciousness; and the perfect 
 
154 THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 
 
 form in which their utterances are enshrined is 
 of the utmost value in securing or arousing gen- 
 eral attention. 
 
 Moreover, however much or little intrinsic 
 yalue their opinions may possess, they at least 
 represent the views of previous explorers in 
 the domain of humanity. And, surely, if it be 
 found that previous workers were on the right 
 track, and have given utterance to statements 
 which you subsequently find to be confirmed 
 by your own quite different and independent 
 investigations, it is only seemly to call atten- 
 tion to their rightness and inspiration. In- 
 deed, it would be less than moral to refrain 
 from doing so. 
 
 If it be urged that seers are not scientific 
 workers, — that they employ alien methods, — 
 I agree that their methods are different, but 
 not that they are alien. Science, in a narrow 
 sense, is by no means the only way of arriv- 
 ing at truth — especially not at truth con- 
 cerning human nature. To decline to be in- 
 formed by the great seers and prophets of 
 the past, and to depend solely on a limited 
 class of workers such as have been bred chiefly 
 within the last century or two, would savour 
 
THE APPEAL TO LITERATURE 155 
 
 of a pitiful narrowness, and would be truly 
 and in the largest sense unscientific. 
 
 The insight of great men is of the highest 
 yalue; and though selection must undoubtedly 
 be made, and though only those are quoted 
 which agree with the thoughts of the quoter, 
 yet that is exactly what is done with the work 
 of all pioneers. Those who are supposed to 
 have gone wrong are eliminated and ignored; 
 those who appear to have gone right are 
 selected and acclaimed. Little merit there is 
 in that procedure, nor any shame. Truth is 
 large, and can be explored by many avenues. 
 All honour to those who, with insufficient ex- 
 perience but with the inspiration of genius, 
 caught glimpses of a larger and higher truth 
 than was known to the age in which they lived, 
 and who had the felicity of recording their 
 inspirations in musical and immortal words; 
 ! — words such as the worker in science has not 
 at his command — words at which he rejoices 
 when he encounters them, and which he quotes 
 because they have given him pleasure. 
 
 Let this serve as excuse and sufficient justi- 
 fication for the large number of quotations 
 already utilized. 
 
EEFEEENCES TO QUOTATIONS 
 
 The following references may be convenient 
 to a few readers, but I must apologise for the 
 obviousness of some of them. In a previous 
 book, The Substance of Faith, wherein I gave 
 a page of similar references, I abstained from 
 specifically mentioning quotations from the 
 New Testament, — which in that book happened 
 to be numerous, — thinking that they were too 
 well known. In these days, however, it ap- 
 pears that no such assumption is safe; and 
 several reviewers asserted, what presumably 
 appeared to them to be a fact, that while pagan 
 writers and the Old Testament were freely 
 quoted, the New Testament was never referred 
 to. So I have tried to guard against that mis- 
 apprehension. 
 
EEFERENCE TO QUOTATIONS 
 
 Page 
 
 7. ' His life is a watch.' Swinburne, Atalanta in Caly- 
 
 don. ^ 
 
 8. 'He that hath found.' Vaughan (1621-1695)', Be- 
 
 yond the Veil (quoted in 
 Dr. Ward's English Poets, 
 vol. ii.). 
 
 9. 'To drop head foremost.' Tennyson, In Memorial, 
 
 xxxiv. 
 
 10. 'Eternal form shall still Tennyson, InMemoriam,xlyu. 
 divide.' 
 
 10. ' We lose ourselves in " " 
 
 light.' 
 
 11. * I am not what I have.' Christina Eossetti, The 
 
 Thread of Life. 
 
 12. *I am a part of all that Tennyson, Ulysses. 
 
 1 have met.' 
 
 13. ' Some have gleams.' Tennyson, Ancient Sage. 
 
 13. ' Is it that in some bright Shelley, Fragment. 
 
 sphere.' 
 
 14. 'Obstinate questionings.' Wordsworth, Immortality. 
 
 14. ' For oft on me when Tennyson, Ancient Sage. 
 boy.' 
 
 14. * Happy those early days.' Henry Vaughan, The Retreat. 
 
 15. * Surely before this de- Myers, Hum. Pers., ii. 289. 
 
 scent.' 
 
 15. * When from that world.' Myers, Fragments of Pros9 
 
 and Poetry. 
 
 157 
 
158 
 
 REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 Page 
 
 16. 'Out of tlie deep.' 
 
 17. * So rounds he.' 
 
 17. 'The house of a brute.' 
 
 18. 'Hints and previsions.' 
 
 18. ' It is finished, man is 
 
 made.' 
 
 19. 'Through such fierce 
 
 hours.' 
 
 20. *0h dear Spirit.' 
 
 21. ' Souls shall climb fast' 
 
 21. 'Full lasting is the song.' 
 
 22. 'Earthly house.' 
 
 23. • But he forgets the days.' 
 
 24. 'As old mythologies.' 
 
 25. 'So be it: there no 
 
 shade! ' 
 
 25. * We are such stuff.' 
 
 26. ' Our birth is but a sleep.' 
 
 27. ' The man who man would 
 
 be.' 
 
 29. 'And first a glimmering.' 
 
 30. ' Many there be.' 
 
 31. 'Oh who is he.' 
 
 34. ' But when, so sad. 
 
 35. 'The second man.' 
 
 37. ' And so. the Word.' 
 
 38. 'In the beginning.' 
 
 Tennyson, De Profundis. 
 
 Tennyson, In Memoriam, xlv. 
 
 Tennyson, By an Evolution- 
 ist. 
 
 Browning, Paracelsus. 
 
 Tennyson, The Making of 
 Man, 
 
 Myers, Fragments. 
 
 Tennyson, De Profundis. 
 
 Myers, To Tennyson. 
 
 Meredith, The Thrush in Feb- 
 ruary. 
 
 2 Cor. V. I. 
 
 Tennyson, In Memoriam, xliv. 
 
 Tennyson, Two Voices. 
 
 Tennyson, In Memoriam, gdvi. 
 
 Shakespeare, Tempest. 
 Wordsworth, Immortality. 
 
 Shelley. 
 
 Myers, Fragments. 
 Milton, Areopagitica. 
 Wordsworth, The Prelude. 
 
 Francis Thompson, In 2^0 
 
 Strange Land. 
 1 Corinthians xv. 47. 
 In Memoriam, gcxyvi. 
 Genesis i.; John, i. 
 
REFERENCE TO QUOTATIONS 159 
 
 Page 
 
 40. ' Lo for the dawn.' 
 
 40. 'The earth is full of 
 darkness. 
 
 40. 'Dark is the world to 
 
 thee.' 
 
 41. ' And lo, Christ walking 
 
 on the water.' 
 
 42. *No sudden heaven.' 
 
 42. * The voices of the day.' 
 
 43. ' Would I suffer.' 
 
 45. ' And this gray spirit.' 
 
 46. ' Nay but she aims not at 
 
 glory.' 
 
 46. ' To strive, to seek, to 
 find.' 
 
 46. 'How dull it is to pause.' 
 
 47. ' Oh roughly strongly.' 
 
 47. * Before the beginning of 
 
 years.' 
 
 48. ' Such devotion.* 
 
 49. ' Imaginations calm and 
 
 fair.' 
 
 60. 'The path we came by.' 
 
 51. 'To fill up what is be- 
 
 hind.' 
 
 52. ' The joy of their lord.' 
 
 52. * The kingdom prepared 
 for you.' 
 
 52. *A beauty with defect.' 
 
 53. 'Say could aught else.* 
 
 Myers, St. Paul. 
 
 Psalm Ixxiv. (Anglican 
 Prayer Book). 
 
 Tennyson, The Higher Pan- 
 theism. 
 
 Francis Thompson, In No 
 Strange Land. 
 
 Tennyson, The Ring. 
 
 te <c 
 
 Browning, Saul. 
 Tennyson, Ulysses, 
 Tennyson, Wages. 
 
 Tennyson, Ulysses. 
 
 tc te 
 
 Myers, Renewal of Youth. 
 
 Swinburne, Atalanta in Culy- 
 don. 
 
 Myers, Human Personality, 
 ii. 291. 
 
 In Memoriam xciv. 
 
 xlvi. 
 Col. i. 24. 
 
 Matthevy xxv. 21. 
 Matthew xxv. 34. 
 
 Tennyson, Ancient Sage. 
 Myers, The Renewal of Youth. 
 
160 REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 Page 
 
 56. ' Eloi Eloi.' Psalm xxii. 
 
 56. 'Nay but thou knewest Myers, St. PoaiI. 
 
 us.' 
 
 57. 'Earthen vessels.' 2 Cor. iv. 7; Judges vii. 16. 
 
 57. 'Oh to have watched Myers, St. Paul. 
 thee.' 
 
 57. 'All things that I have John Sev. 15. 
 
 heard.' 
 
 58. 'God who at sundry Hebrews i. 
 
 times.' 
 
 60. * The acceptable year of Isaiah Ixi. 
 the Lord.' 
 
 60. ' This day is this Scrip- Luke iv. 
 
 ture.' 
 61.' * I that speak unto thee.' John iv. 
 
 63. ' Soul that in some high Myers, Fragments. 
 
 world.' 
 
 64. ' Behoved it not.' Luke xxiv. 
 64. ' Your father Abraham.' John viii. 
 
 79. 'That orb^d maiden.' Shelley, The Cloud. 
 
 80. ' What when the sun William Blake. 
 
 rises.' 
 
 82. ' Every common bush.' E. B. Browning. 
 
 87. ' A garden is a lovesome T. E. Brown, My Garden. 
 
 thing.' 
 94. ' For the time was May- Tennyson, Idylls. 
 
 time.' 
 103. ' The far off interest of Tennyson, In Memoriam. 
 tears.' 
 
 106. 'I form the light.' Isaiah xlv. 7. 
 
 110. 'It must needs be.' Luke xvii. 1; Matt, xviii. 7. 
 
REFERENCE TO QUOTATIONS 161 
 
 Page 
 
 113. 'Man is his own star.' 
 
 121. ' Nor less I deem.' 
 
 124. ' Happy is he.' 
 
 125. * Shall men for whom.' 
 
 126. ' The estate of man.' 
 
 127. 'Has not the soul.' 
 
 127. ' In mystery the soul 
 abides.' 
 
 130. ' We live by admiration, 
 
 hope and love.' 
 
 131. 'Oh fret not after knowl- 
 
 edge.' 
 153. 'Even such a shell.' 
 
 Fletcher (1579-1625). 
 
 Wordsworth, Expostulation 
 and Reply. 
 
 Wordsworth, Excursion IV. 
 
 M. Arnold, Morality. 
 Wordsworth, Excursion. 
 Keats, Fragment in a letter. 
 Wordsworth, Excursion IV. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abstraction, 81, 82. 
 Accusations, 136. 
 Adam, 30, 92. 
 Advent, 35. 
 
 Second, 41. 
 
 Amnesia, 23, 56. 
 
 Ancient art and drama, 7( 
 
 Angela, 33. 
 
 Animal ancestry, 17. 
 
 'perception, 33, 78. 
 
 Annihilation, 9, 107. 
 Antarctic exploration, 47. 
 Anthropomorphism, 97. 
 Anticipation, 62, 63. 
 Apples, 87. 
 Art, Ancient, 76. 
 Assistance, 31, 34, 35. 
 Atrophe, 125. 
 
 Beauty, 77, 130. 
 Beginning or end, 6. 
 Bicycle, 46. 
 Birds' nest, 8. 
 Birth, 12, 17, 26 
 Blake, 80. 
 Body, 8, 16-21, 22. 
 Body, Spiritual, 23. 
 Boundaries, 120. 
 Bro\vning, 74. 
 
 Calm, 49, 50, 61, 127. 
 Cathedral, 37. 
 
 Chaos, 48. 
 
 Character, 53. 
 
 Child nature. 111. 
 
 Childhood, 25. 
 
 Childish views, 70, 98. 
 
 Choice, 27, 63. 
 
 Choice of pain, 53, 55. 
 
 Chosen people, 90. 
 
 Christ, 36, 114. 
 
 Christmas, 35. 
 
 Civilisation, 41. 
 
 Clairvoyance, 61. 
 
 Cloud, 4. 
 
 Cold and heat, 106, 107. 
 
 Comets' tails, 143. 
 
 Competition, 40, 108. 
 
 Conceived by the Holy 
 
 Ghost, 37. 
 Conception, 36. 
 Confirmation of law, 135. 
 Conflict, 30, 48. 
 Constructing the body, 17. 
 Contrast, 104. 
 Cooling of earth, 142. 
 Creation, 37, 38, 48, 92. 
 Crossing the bar, 16. ' 
 
 Danger, 53. 
 
 Darkness and light, 106. 
 
 Darwin, 120. 
 
 Dates, 35. 
 
 Death, 7, 8, 12. 
 
 163 
 
164 
 
 EEASON AND BELIEF 
 
 Deductions, 146. 
 Denials, 84. 
 Design, 37. 
 Destiny, 90. 
 Discipline, 29. 
 Disease, 108, 109. 
 Dissected puzzle, 140. 
 Dissipation of energy, 6. 
 Divine will, 39. 
 Divinity, 96. 
 
 Dog in picture gallery, 78. 
 Drama, Ancient, 76. 
 
 Earth a heavenly body, 40. 
 
 Earthen vessels, 56. 
 
 Ecstasy, 49. 
 
 Eden, Garden of, 87. 
 
 Engraving, 107. 
 
 Ether and matter, 83. 
 
 and motion, 97. 
 
 Ethics, 99. 
 
 Evil and good, 106. 
 
 Problem of, 103. 
 
 Evolution, 18. 
 Exertion, 45. 
 Existence, 101. 
 
 Faix, 28, 92. 
 
 Fire, 109. 
 
 First man, 19, 28, 93. 
 
 Force and inertia, 105. 
 
 Foresight, 62. 
 
 Francis Thompson, 34, 53. 
 
 Freedom, 27, 29, 92, 102, 113. 
 
 Perfect, 30. 
 
 Garden of Hespeeides, 87. 
 
 Gardener, 112. 
 
 Good and evil^ 27, 106. 
 
 Gradual revelation, 96. 
 Guesses, 145. 
 
 Heat and cold, 106. 
 Heroes of the race, 89. 
 Herschel, 6. 
 
 Hesperides, Garden of, 87. 
 Holidays, 45. 
 Holy Ghost, 37. 
 Human ancestry, 28. 
 
 -nature, 48. 
 
 Humanity, 95. 
 Hypotheses, 147, 148. 
 
 Idleness, 45. 
 Immunity, 42. 
 Incarnation, 17, 35-37, 87, 
 
 97. 
 Individual assemblage, 6. 
 Individuality, 9, 10, 12, 18. 
 Inequalities, 40. 
 Inertia and force, 105. 
 Innocence, 28, 94, 103. 
 Inspiration, 57, 64, 80, 121. 
 Intuitions, 121, 128, 146, 154. 
 
 Jesus, 56, 57. 
 
 Joy and suffering, 104, 105. 
 
 of the Lord, 51. 
 
 Judges, 73. 
 
 Keats, 148. 
 Kelvin, Lord, 97. 
 Kepler, 141, 144. 
 Kingdom of Heaven, 40, 41, 
 110. 
 
 Larmob, Sir Joseph, 133. 
 Lethe, 24. 
 
INDEX 
 
 1G5 
 
 Light and darkness, 106. 
 Logos, 22, 37, 101. 
 
 Manich^ism, 104. 
 Materialism, 78. 
 Matter and ether, 84. 
 Memory, 9, 24, 25. 
 Mendel, 120. 
 
 Messiah, 57, 58, 86, 108. 
 Methuselah, 64. 
 Migration, 90. 
 Millennium, 40. 
 Milton, 29. 
 Missionary work, 63. 
 Moon, 79. 
 Morality, 100. 
 Multiple personality, 124. 
 Music, 78. 
 
 Myers' poems quoted, 2, 15, 
 20, 21, 29, 40, 47, 57, 64. 
 
 Nebxji^, 6. 
 New'ton, 144-160, 
 Newtonian method, 120. 
 Night's candles, 75. 
 
 Old age, 45. 
 Optimism, 102. 
 Origins, 92. 
 Ottley, Professor, 100. 
 
 Fain, 51. 
 
 Choice of, 53, 54. 
 
 Pains, Taking, 52. 
 
 Pantheism, 82. 
 
 Parable of the Talents, 51. 
 
 Peace of God, 50. 
 
 Perception, 33. 
 
 Perfect freedom, 31. 
 
 Personality, 10, 12, 114. 
 
 Strata of, 24. 
 
 Pessimism, 102. 
 
 Picture gallery, 78. 
 
 Plants, 112. 
 
 Plato, 23. 
 
 Plotinus, 15, 49, 127. 
 
 Poetry, Truth of, 76. 
 
 Possessions, 11. 
 
 Potentiality of the race, 114. 
 
 Poverty, 112. 
 
 Pre-existence, 14, 16, 23. 
 
 Prevision, 63, 64, 65. 
 
 Priestcraft, 88. 
 
 Priestley, 144. 
 
 Primeval man, 18. 
 
 Principia, 143. 
 
 Privation, 47. 
 
 Problem of evil, 104. 
 
 Progress, 115. 
 
 Prometlieus, 109. 
 
 Puzzle, Dissected, 142. 
 
 Quotations, 156. 
 
 RAoruM, 137. 
 
 Reaction and resistance, 104. 
 
 Reality, 77, 92. 
 
 Receptivity, 121, 128. 
 
 Redeeming agency, 43. 
 
 Redemption, 43. 
 
 Reform, 41. 
 
 Reminiscence, 13, 14, 58, 59. 
 
 Resistance and reaction, 104. 
 
 Responsibility, 110. 
 
 Rest, 50. 
 
 Revelation, 32. 
 
 Gradual, 96. 
 
 Rock, 3, 5. 
 
166 REASON AND BELIEF 
 
 Komeo, 75. 
 
 
 
 Taking Pains, 62. 
 
 Ten Commandments, 99. 
 
 Sabbath, 48. 
 
 
 
 Testing of hypotheses, 147, 
 
 Sacrifice, 52, 53. 
 
 
 
 148. 
 
 St. Paul, 22. 
 
 
 
 Theology, 97. 
 
 Salvation, 43, 44. 
 
 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 34, 41. 
 
 Sandstone, 3. 
 
 
 
 Thought, 36. 
 
 Saul, 43. 
 
 
 
 Thrush, 148. 
 
 Scientific explorers 
 
 , 124 
 
 [, 125, 
 
 Trance, 24, 25. 
 
 126. 
 
 
 
 Transfiguration, 57. 
 
 Scientific method, 
 
 137, 
 
 144. 
 
 Treadmill, 46. 
 
 Second Advent, 41. 
 
 
 
 Truth of literature, 74, 75. 
 
 Selection, 143. 
 
 
 
 
 Service, 31, 44, 52, 
 
 111, 
 
 115. 
 
 Ulysses, 46. 
 
 Shell, Murmur of, 
 
 126, 
 
 153. 
 
 
 Sin, 28, 93, 99, 104. 
 
 
 Vaughan, 9, 14. 
 
 Sleep, 7. 
 
 
 
 Vicarious suffering, 51, 63, 54. 
 
 Slums, 115. 
 
 
 
 Vision, 48, 50. 
 
 Soul, 29. 
 
 
 
 
 Spiritual body, 22. 
 
 
 
 Weeds, 110. 
 
 Stagnation, 45. 
 
 
 
 Wood, 4. 
 
 Still small voice, 50, 
 
 
 Word, 37, 38, 65. 
 
 Substance of faith 
 
 154 
 
 . 
 
 Wordsworth, 23, 34. 
 
 Suffering, 44. 
 
 
 
 Working hypotheses, 134, 
 
 -Vicarious, 51, 
 
 53. 
 
 54. 
 
 135, 140. 
 
 SuJirise, 80. 
 
 
 
 Worship, 80, 96. 
 
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