WSmmBL W§MWlfflMffll W®. mm m mm r. 2. "2 3Fnmt ilje ffitbrartr nf l^qurat^i fag Ijim to % IGtbrarg nf Jlrtttrrtntt atywlngtral §>?mtnarg BL 256 .A3 1888 Ackerman, George E. Man MAN A REVELATION OF GOD, BY V Rev. G. E. ACKERMAN, A.M., M.D., D.D., Author of " Researches in Philosophy ; " Member of The American Institute of Christian Philosophy ; Associate in The Philosophical Society of Great Britain, etc., etc. NEW YORK: PHILLIPS <5r» HUNT. CI NCI NN A TI: CRANSTON b> STOWE. x888. Copyright, 1888, by PHILLIPS & HUNT, New York. TO HER WHO HAS BEEN MY GREATEST EARTHLY JOY DURING THE NINE YEARS OF PREPARATION FOR THIS VOLUME, THE WORK IS MOST AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE THE following pages were written with the earn- est desire to help the honest doubter over his difficulties. The writer is of a skeptical bent of mind, and was troubled with mental unrest even after his conversion ; and when, in his younger student days, study brought him for the first time into contact with various systems of mental philosophy and vari- ous phases of ethics, he drifted for a time like a ship without rudder or compass on the dark and horrid sea of Doubt. But after the agony of the drifting, and the horror of darkness worse than Egyptian, came the grappling of anchor "sure and steadfast," the solidification of faith, and the peace that accompanies conscious assur- ance. Because of this long mental fluctuation he has always had sympathy for men of skeptical mind, and this volume is sent forth in hope that by its perusal many young people especially — and perhaps many older men and women, who are not familiar with the language of the schools — may be helped off, or kept off, the shoals of unbelief. With this end in view the use of technical terms 6 Preface. has been, so far as possible, avoided. Writers, like preachers, too often forget the multitude for whose benefit they should write, and direct their thought exclusively toward the learned minority whose ap- plause they covet. The present writer does not pro- fess insensibility to commendation from profound thinkers, but has constantly held uppermost in his thought the average thinker, and has honestly endeav- ored to write for him. During nine busy years all the time which could be spared from daily toil, as pastor and teacher, has been given to preparation for what is now somewhat reluctantly sent forth into the great world of books. It appears to the author to be a very small result of so many years of labor, and may appear more insig- nificant to the critic. But the writer has never yet apologized for undertaking a plain duty, and what he has written he has written because he could not avoid writing it. He has sought impartially to give authorities on both sides of every question ; and, at the risk of seem- ing to quote too largely from others, has endeavored to give enough of the exact words of each author cited to do him, as well as the subject, justice. Names and titles have been given in full, either in the text or in foot-note. I acknowledge with gratitude the uniform cour- tesy of the librarians of the North-western Uni- versity, the Presbyterian College of Montreal, the Preface. ♦ McGill University, and the Buffalo Library ; and also of the owners of several valuable private libraries, who have spared no pains to lighten my task. With a sense of inexpressible gratitude to God, a full and satisfying revelation of whom, during all these years, the author of Man a Revelation of God has con- stantly found, he closes this Preface—" done before," yet always written last— and commends his book to the Master in whose service it is sent forth. George Everett Ackerman. The Manse, 448 Elk Street, Buffalo, N. Y., January, 1888. 41 The pulse of religion is thus quickened by every law or new illus- tration of law, by every fact and legitimate use which is made of the fact, iu science. While science discovers, and classifies, and names, religion looks on without fear ; for reason, which gives to science its meaning, gives to religion a shield."— Rev. R. Mitchell, in Transactions of the Victoria Institute. " For the Lord giveth wisdom : out of his mouth cometh knowl- edge and understanding." — Solomon. "What is mystery to so many men, what feeds their worship and at the same time spoils it, is that area round all great truth which is really capable of illustration, and into which every earnest mind is permitted and commanded to go with a light." — Drummond. INTRODUCTION TTTF. s ymbol of the jfinj- trentll century is the inter^ I rogation poi nt. We live in an age of inquiry. ^ The desire to lo^k into the unknown is as umver- ^ sal as the race. The savage, who gazes on the rf expanse of waters encircling his island home, won- dering what lies beyond, and sinks in the terror of superstition before the phenomena of nature; the astronomer, who with unflagging zeal watches out the night to detect some celestial wanderer; the chemist, bending intently over his crucible, or watching for some delicate reaction ; the geologist, patiently striv- ing to decipher the records of the rocks-all are moved by a common impulse : a desire to lift the veil which hides from view the unknown. It is this which has given lis all the modern appliances in art. and has placed physical science so proudly before the world. It is this which to-day impels us to do higher honor to the patient investigator of scientific phenomena than to the greatest warrior or statesman, and causes a nation's most lasting fame to come, not from political achievements, bjotjffiin_th je j^session of some m ai Jyr-niiiid in science . AUtruejsifiBSeJSJBie. The thought of the present 10 Introduction. is largely occupied with physical science, but fields of equal fruitful ness are found within. On the human mind from the earliest ages has been enstamped the image of the Divine; in it have been placed the germs of truth ; and a large share of the world's thought has been given to the study of individual man and his relations to the Infinite. In this study progress has been tardy. Mighty and permanent changes are always slowly made. Historians count not the men who fail in great enterprises ; they tell not of buried hopes. Only those who stand at the crises of events have their names sent down to pos- terity. Revolutions which seem at first thought to have been the result of a single man's planning and a single nation's executing, examined more closely, are found to have been the growth of centuries and the property of all nations. Men find a peculiar pleasure in the historic study of struggles for civic freedom, and rightly so ; for they were all of value and possess true dignity. But far above all others would 1 place the struggles of thought to hurst its fetters ; and I ask the reader's attention for a few moments in these introductory pages to a brief glance at some of these struggles. The historian tells us that there are only two great eras in the history of mental science. This is true, and these eras were separated by twenty centuries; nevertheless, no one of these intervening centuries was without its searchers after truth, its representa- Introduction. 11 tive minds, peering through the darkness. There may have been but little accomplished in all that time of a purely philosophical character, but much was done toward the emancipation of mind, toward preparing the world for the advent of those master- souls of the seventeenth century, Bacon and Descartes, who gave a new impulse to philosophical study, strik- ing boldly out into paths hitherto untrodden, and in- viting all men to examine for themselves. The former did little with pure philosophy, as such, but who can measure the influence he exerted upon its methods? It is because Bacon lived and questioned the old methods, because he denied the absolute power of logic and protested against the lack of observation, that so many eager inquirers have ever since been patiently interrogating Nature, and in a thousand ways seeking to elicit answers to the problems which constantly force themselves upon us. Even hostile critics are compelled to acknowledge the worth of his labors, but they tell us that he led the thinking world far into sensationalism ; as if that bore down and blackened this noble spirit of sound wisdom which labored so earnestly to remove obstructions and go on to ultimate truth. We grant that to some extent these criticisms are just. The theories of Hobbes, both political and moral, which, as Hallam says, "sear / up the heart and take away the sense of wrong," were the outgrowth of the inductive philosopher's meth- od ; nevertheless, his great heart beat responsive to 12 Introduction. truth, and for its advancement his life was given. Then, too, perhaps we owe the Essay on the Human Understanding to the impulse given by this great man to free inquiry. As one opens the immortal work of John Locke he is at once impressed with its quaint vigor and rugged boldness. He had a plan of his own, based all upon the phenomen a^p f mind , and, 9 pushing fearlessly out, gave to the world a treatise which influenced thought beyond all calculation ; in- fluenced it for evil to a great extent in calling into the field such works as those of Priestley in England, and Condillac in France, and helping to build up a system which finally went a long way toward degrad- ing morality and dethroning God, unsettling govern- ments and breeding pestilential social vagaries. But who will presume to strike the balance in the long account? To Descartes we owe even more than to Bacon. He it was who, with vigorous mental independence, built up an ideal philosophy, the fundamental prin- ciples of which have not yet suffered removal. But, as is the fate of many a leading mind, he under- took, by a single general method, to solve all prob- lems, and led his followers into pure objective ideal- 18m, as may be seen in the works of Spinoza. But the writings of Descartes more than atoned for all tiiis in bringing out such men as Butler and Clarke, t<> do valiant service in the armies of truth. It was upon German soil, however, that Idealism Introduction. 13 had its most vigorous growth. Here its foremost representative was Leibnitz, a man of profound mind and great learning, who devoted himself with unflag- ging zeal and broad liberality to the analysis of the systems of Descartes and Locke and the advance- ment of philosophical culture. There seemed, some- thing almost divine in the masterful grasp with which the great geometer's giant intellect held a subject and analyzed it. Idealism in more modern times has given to the world such men as Stuart, Mackintosh, and Hamilton in Scotland ; as Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling in Ger- many, who, with their great leader, Immanuel Kant, have won for their country immortal fame as the land of ideal philosophy. While Sensationalism has furnished Mill, Lewes, and Bentham in England ; Tracy, Yolney, and Comte in France — men who have made for themselves great popularity, but some of whom have pursued a cherished theory far into the maze of unreason and folly. I know it is the fashion in some circles to shrink ■ with a sort of holy horror from whatever looks like unfaithfulness to the old creeds, and to cast out with ig- nominy the names of all skeptical leaders. But, witl^ all my love for the generally accepted doctrines of our holy Christianity, I regard as of profound interest the study of the growth and influence of rationalism in all its forms ; and instead of shrinking in disgust and dread from such men as Rousseau, Mill, Huxley, and 14 Introduction. Spencer, I welcome them as in God's providence doing a work which needs to be accomplished in the onward march of Christian civilization. There are heaven-born questions as well as earth-born doubts. It is only the failure to distinguish between the two that produces trouble. There are two classes of people, and only two, who would have us believe that there exists a deadly con- flict between Christianity and science. The one is composed of those enthusiasts in religion who have made but the slightest advance in scientific or theol- ogical inquiry, and yet absurdly assume that they are set to guard the sacred portals against the inroads of what to them seems godless science ; the other consists of men who, with shallow brains, but apt speech, have succeeded in catching the public ear, and are making a mock of both religion and science in the name of " liberality." Both are enemies to mankind ; the former because they claim to possess the whole of truth (and it is this spirit which in all history lias given rise to persecution) ; the latter because they are hypocrites of the deepest dye. Professing to be lov- ers of truth, these men are merely lovers of self ; professing to be reasoners, they are only scoffers ; pro- fessing to have personally discovered the facts, they take every thing at ''second-hand,'" and at the best can offer nothing but negations. They have not the faintest resemblance to the genuine searcher after truth. Introduction. 15 The conflict in which we are now engaged was in- evitable ; and why may we not rejoice in it, if it but strike off the fetters which stifle conscience and de- fraud it of its freedom, and give us a religion strong in the strength of its own inherent virtue? From the remotest corners of creation, and from the recesses of man's own soul, are being brought the rich results of persevering search. No longer chained, the human mind hesitates not to venture the boldest inquiries. Girded with the power of an all-conquering faith in the harmony between nature and nature's God, lovers of truth, rather than lovers of antiquity and self, are at work — some on the old-time field of Europe, some in our own land ; and it matters not what name the world gives them, in what school it places them, with how much of suspicion it regards them, how bitterly they are hated or maligned — such workers are the need of the times, such thinkers are helping to banish intolerance from the world, and crush out tho4^uX- spirit of tyranny. They are helping to emancipate \^ conscience, and enthrone Christ in every heart. They ?'0, meaning forward, specere be- came jirospicere ; and gave rise to such words as prospectus, as it were a look-out, prospective, etc. In His Speech. 153 "With con, meaning with, spicere forms conspicere, to see together, conspectus, conspicuous. We saw before, in respectable, that a new word, spectare, is formed from the participle of spicere. This, with the preposition ex, out, gives us the Latin expectare, the English to expect, to look out; with its deriva- tives. " Auspicious is another word which contains our root as the second of its component elements. The Latin auspicium stands for avispicium, and meant the looking out for certain birds which were consid- ered to be of good or bad omen to the success of any public or private act. Hence auspicious, in the sense of lucky. Haru-spex was the name given to a per- son who foretold the future from the inspection of the entrails of animals. " Again, from specere, speculum, was formed, in the sense of looking-glass, or any other means of looking at one's self; and from it speculari, the English to speculate, speculative, etc. "But there are many more offshoots of this one root. Thus the Latin speculum — looking-glass — be- came specchio in Italian ; and the same word, though in a round-about way, came into French as the adjective espiegle, waggish. The origin of this French word is curious. There exists in German a famous cycle of stories, mostly tricks, played by a half-historical, half- mythical character of the name of Eulenspiegd, or Owl-glass, These stories were translated into French, 151 Max a Revelation of God. and the hero was known at first by the name of Ulespiegel, which name, contracted afterwards into Espiegle, became a general name for every wag. As the French borrowed not only from Latin, but like- wise from the Teutonic languages, we meet there, side by side with the derivatives of the Latin specere, the Old High German spehon, slightly disguised as Spier, to spy, the Italian spiare. The German word for a spy was speha, and this appears in Old French as espie, in modern French as espion. " One of the most prolific branches of the same root is the Latin species. Whether we take species in the sense of a perennial succession of similar individuals in continual generations, or look upon it as existing only as a category of thought, species was intended originally as the literal translation of the Greek eidos as opposed to genos or genus. The Greeks classified things originally according to hind and form, and though these terms were afterwards technically de- fined by Aristotle, their etymological meaning is in reality the most appropriate. Things may be classi- fied because they are of the same genus or 'kind — that is to say, because they had the same origin ; this gives us a genealogical classification ; or they can be classified because they have the same appearance, eidos, or form, without claiming for them a common origin, and this gives us a morphological classification. It was, however, in the Aristotelian, and not in its etymological sense, that the Greek eidos was rendered In His Speech. 155 in Latin by species, meaning the subdivision of a genus, the class of a family. Hence the French espece, a kind ; the English special, in the sense of particular as opposed to general. There is little of the root spas, to see, left in a special train, or a spe- cial messenger ; yet the connection, though not ap- parent, can be restored with perfect certainty. We frequently hear the expression to specify. A man specifies his grievances. What does it mean ? The mediaeval Latin specificus is a literal translation of the Greek eidopoios. This means what makes or consti- tutes an eidos or species. Now, in classification, what constitutes a species is that particular quality which, superadded to other qualities, shared in common by ail the members of a genus, distinguishes one class from ail other classes. Thus the specific character which distinguishes man from all other animals is reason or language. Specific, therefore, assumed the sense of distinguishing or distinct, and the verb to specify conveyed the meaning of enumerating dis- tinctly, or one by one. I finish with the French epicier, a respectable grocer, but originally a man who sold drugs. The different kinds of drugs which the apothecary had to sell were spoken of, with a cer- tain learned air, as species ; not as drugs in general, but as peculiar drugs and special medicines. Hence the chymist or apothecary is still called speziole in Italian, his shop spezieria. In French, species, which regularly became espece, assumed a new form to ox- 150 Man a Revelation of God. press drugs, namely, Spices / the English spices, the German spezereien. Hence the famous pahi $ Spices, gingerbread nuts, and Spicier, a grocer. If you try for a moment to trace spicy, or a well-spiced article, back to the simple root specere, to look, you will un- derstand that marvelous power of language which out of a few simple elements has created a variety of names hardly surpassed by the unbounded variety of nature herself. I say 'out of a few simple ele- ments,' for the number of what we call full predica- tive roots, such as or, to plow, or spas, to look, is indeed small." * I think there can remain little doubt in the mind of the reader that every one of the numerous dia- lects and languages commonly designated as Indo- European can be traced to a common source. Ex- amples such as have been given might be multi- plied almost indefinitely, were it not for wearying the mind with a repetition of that which possesses the same general characteristics. I do not claim to have proved that they all did actually have a common origin, but simply that every indication points that way. This is all that was attempted, and all that any fair-minded inquirer demands. It rests with our opponents — with those who contend for a diversity of sources — to prove the indications and probabilities which have been pointed out to be false or groundless. This they have not done. I am not * Science of Language, p. 256. In His Speech. 157 aware that any of them have had the temerity to even attempt it. Some have raised objections to cer- tain details, but they have amounted to very little. The whole process of tracing backward, and outward, and seeking vital connections, is so natural that it com- mends itself at once to every candid mind. It is al- most as natural as starting at some small twig on one side of a great tree and tracing it inward until it is found connected with some other twig, and then fol- lowing these on inward to still others, until combined they become a branch out of which proceed other twigs, which may appear very different, but which have the same kind of wood, and are fed by the same sap, which branch, still further inward, unites with others, all together at last forming the sturdy trunk, and terminating in a common root. If, now, we take any one of the Old Testament words, any Hebraic word, and trace it back in the same manner, we shall find it approaching in forma- tion other words of the same general speech, in much the same way as did the English word we first in- stanced in the beginning of this inquiry. The trac- ing is not as easy as in the former instance, but this is not surprising to any one at all acquainted with language study and language modifications. The reasons for the difficulty are numerous. The path over which we are traveling is a very old path, and greatly obscured by the accumulations of thousands of years. The words we are handling are unfamiliar 15 S Man a Revelation of God. and strange-looking at the best, no matter how faith- fully or long we have studied them. The language is emphatically a dead language. And yet we find every indication of the Hebraic branch uniting with the Aramaic ; for, as we follow out this branch, its characteristics extend to every Aramaic dialect of which we possess any certain knowledge. The Syriac and the Chaldee are the principal off- shoots of this branch. The language of Syria and Meso- potamia, of portions of Babylonia and Assyria, is cer- tainly full of interest. It is nowhere spoken in its original form to any great extent, but it is preserved in the literature of these lands ; in a translation of the Bible called the Peshito, and also in the Targmns, those most singular and yet very valuable paraphrases of the Bible. But most valuable of all are the cunei- form inscriptions which have been found in such abundance at Nineveh and Babylon. For many years these inscriptions seemed to baffle all attempts at deci- phering, but Sir Henry Rawlinson succeeded with some of them nearly a half century ago, and ever since that time the work has been going on with grati- fying success, so that we possess in these a rich fund of philological resources, as well as evidential. Every reader of George Rawlinson's Historical Evidences, and other kindred writings of more recent date, must have been impressed with this fact. As these two branches are found to unite, we see the Arabic coming into this family. In fact, the In His Speech. 159 Arabic forms the greater part of the Semitic tree at the present clay. It seems to possess something of the aggressive, absorbing power of the English language. It is a matter of current remark that wherever the En- glish language gets a footing it either absorbs or pushes out every other language. This seems to be the nature of the Arabic. In the extensive conquests of Mohammedanism, during the sixth and seventh centu- ries, it played an important part. It soon became the language of the countries bordering on Arabia, and also the literary language of Palestine, Cyprus, and Egypt ; and, through the power of Mohammed, and the extensive influence of the Koran, it absolutely displaced many of the dialects of Africa, and made a home for itself in many parts of Asia, and even in some European countries, for example, Spain and Sicily. As a spoken language, it possesses great vigor and terseness, while, as a written language, the fullness and variety of its grammatical forms, and the versatility of its conjugations, render it peculiarly adapted to the skillful presentation of any and all subjects. It is a comparatively easy matter to trace every dialect, and every minute ramification of this lan- guage, back to the two ancient dialects, the Ilim- ya/ritic and the Koreishttic, and these are readily found to be allied to the other two great branches above mentioned ; namely, the Hebrew and the Aramaic. 100 Man a Revelation of God. Thus, then, we have another language tree, another family of languages, clearly made out ; not with the fullness of illustration and amplitude of details with which the Aryan family was traced, nor yet with quite the unanimity of opinion among philologists, on all points, that was there found to exist, but with sufficient fullness, and such substan- tial accord as to give the Semitic family an undis- puted place alongside the Aryan. Here we have, then, these two clearly defined language families or language trees. They are so clearly defined that there is no mistaking the one for the other. And yet the two trees which appear so unlike in trunks and branches, and even in their minutest twigs, and which disappear beneath the surface as perfectly sep- arated trunks, may, after all, unite their roots together. Indeed, we have far greater reason to con- clude that they do than that they do not. Compari- sons between fundamental roots, or root forms, of the two languages have been instituted by many eminent philologists, and there is every reason to believe that the constituent elements which have entered into each family or tree are the same ; that the basal forms are identical. But there is another and a more perplexing prob- lem yet before us. Even though the indications plainly point to a common source for all the mem- bers of these two families, there yet remain uncon- sidered the almost innumerable dialects spoken l>y In His Speech. 1G1 the tribes and peoples inhabiting the larger part of the habitable globe. This greatly complicates our study, and yet I believe the results may be made at least measurably satisfactory. The languages of the two families thus far consid- ered have usually been termed " organic " or " amal- gamating." They represent the highest type of speech, wherein the fundamental roots, or basal forms, have so united in the formation of individual words as to lose their separate identity, or at least, so as to lose it in great measure. In consequence of this assimilation of roots and root forms we, by and by, have a language built up which is full of inflec- tions and conjugations. This we have noted con- cerning the Semitic family, and found it even more emphatically true of the Aryan. This highest type of language, represented in the Semitic and the Aryan, seems to have supervened upon what has been termed an "agglutinative" stage. "We find all through philological treatises the terms "agglutinative languages," "process of agglutina- tion," etc. This is an apt designation, having for its root, as is readily seen, our word " glue," and the terms are applied to that type, or stage, in language, wherein the fundamental roots, or root forms, have not yet reached the more perfect inflectional type, where, the roots having become perfectly assimilated, the changes of meaning are indicated by inflections ; but where these roots seem simply to have " stuck 162 Man a Revelation of God. together," each retaining in some sense its individu- ality, while giving up something of itself to the other, and so making a new word with a modified meaning. Every language between the primitive root type and the perfected inflectional type partakes of this char- acter, and may properly come under the designation " agglutinative." As before stated, the languages spoken by the peoples spread over the widest extent of territory are in this stage, and they constitute by far the largest number. These peoples are the wandering, nomadic clans and tribes of Europe and Asia. The name commonly given to all these " agglutina- tive " dialects is " Turanian," and I shall speak of the " Turanian family " of languages as the third member in the group, or the third language tree, which we de- sire to trace in and out as we have the Aryan and the Semitic. Because of the fact just stated, namely, that the languages represented in the Turanian family were and are the speech of wandering peoples, for the most part, we cannot expect our pathway to be as clear and unbroken as in the Aryan, nor even as in the Semitic. Still, I think we shall not find it un- traceable. Suppose w r e take for example some word in com- mon use among the Laplanders, away up in the north- ern part of Europe, and some one in common use among the Esthonians, who inhabit the islands in the Gulf of Finland. (I will not burden these pages or In His Speech. 163 perplex the reader by writing out the forms used in these strange languages, for the method of the tracing can be made equally plain without it.) As we look at the words they seem to have nothing in common, and yet a separation of their constituent parts shows us an intimate relationship with other words in the same languages, and we go on making discoveries of these relationships until we find the two dialects tak- ing on many common forms. Then, using these kin- dred forms as a starting-point, we can trace their progress, as they take on other roots, or, as the phi- lologists would say, as they go on "agglutinating," until we find the Tavestian and Karelian dialects fully made out. Ultimately we are able to trace a relationship more or less distinct between the numer- ous languages spoken by the nomad peoples compos- ing the Finnic tribes all through the northern part of Europe and north-western Asia, and even south as far as Constantinople. Pursuing the same manner of inquiry in regard to representative words in use by the cultured Osmanli, or followers of Osman, heard in the polite circles of Tripoli and Tunis, or anywhere throughout the wide stretches of country over which the conquests of this tribe extended, and we reach the same conclusion concerning the substantial relationship existing among all the Turks and their allies, from Siberia, on the north, to the Indo-European provinces on the south, and from the river Lena, in the extreme north-east, 1G-A Man a Revelation of God. to Africa and southern Europe on the south-east. I do not mean to say that these affinities are always plain, but I am quite sure that any one who will be at the pains to examine the copious illustrations of their relationship, as they are made to appear in the more comprehensive treatises on this subject, will be fully convinced that they are not theoretical or imag- inary, but actual, affinities. Nor need he be a reader or speaker of the Turkish language in order to distin- guish these marks of similarity. Personally I have no knowledge of any of the dialects of this language, cannot read a sentence without a lexicon, and yet I can see very clearly by a few hours' study of a Turk- ish grammar that it is a language of no mean impor- tance, and that its alliances with others cannot but be numerous and close. Their alphabet contains thirty- three letters. Twenty eight of these were taken di- rectly from the Arabic, and four from the Persian, only one being native Turk. Their grammar is surprisingly complete, and at once indicates a language of great resources. The verb, for example, is thrown into such a variety of forms as to express all shades of meaning, there being seven species or genera — active, passive, causal, re- ciprocal, negative, etc. — and besides all these, addi- tional provision is made for a more complete expres- sion of the subjunctive, conjunctive, optative, and potential moods by " gluing on " certain particles. In various ways it runs out into and borrows from the In His Speech. 165 languages belonging to the Aryan and Semitic fami- lies with which it has come into contact. The same tracing process pursued with words of the Mongolic dialects, spoken by the Kalmuks and Diirbets, or any of the tribes from China to the VoW, brings out similar evidences of relationship among all of them. And so of numerous other branches of this great and widely scattered Turanian family ; as the Malaic, the Tamulic, and the Samoyedic. Having made out these various branches, the next step is to discover sufficient similarity among them to warrant us in placing them together in one common family. Some authorities object to thus grouping them, be- cause the relationship here established is not as clearly shown as among the various branches of the Aryan and Semitic. In raising this objection they reveal either a lack of appreciation of the real nature of the question, or a disposition to be captious. Any one disposed to look at the matter fairly, and having a full appreciation of the problem, would not for one moment expect to find the same niceties of family likeness between the Finnic and Mongolic branches of the Turanian as between the Scandinavian and German branches of the Aryan, or the Aramaic and Hebrew branches of the Semitic. He would under- stand that the ruder the forms of speech the less fixed they are, and the more readily do they take on new forms under changed conditions ; and that these new 166 Man a Revelation of God. forms, taking to themselves still newer and more strange agglutinations, would come to have very little the appearance of the original. Now, all, or nearly all, of the branches of the Tura- nian family are made up of these ruder forms, these agglutinative dialects, and the difficulties which meet us only help to prove the genuineness of the results reached. The immense number of apparently irreconcilable differences which philologists have succeeded in rec- onciling, and especially the very substantial progress made in this direction within recent years, leads us to believe that in due time all will be made plain, and the Turanian family be as fully recognized as are the other two at the present writing. This much we can even now assert, without fear of successful contradiction, that the plainly shown evi- dences of similarity are sufficiently numerous to in- validate every objection yet brought against Turanian unity. This in itself leaves us on vantage ground up to the present hour, and this is sufficient. Having, then, all the known lan^ua^es of the earth grouped into three families — Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian — our next inquiry is, Have these three fam- ilies any thing in common ? This question has re- ceived many answers — answers about as various as they are numerous. In the multiplicity of authorities on the subject one scarcely knows whence to choose. But after a In His Speech. 167 somewhat diligent examination I have arrived at the conclusion that certainly no one of those who deny that they have any thing in common has substan- tiated that denial by any evidence which is even ap- proximately complete. Several claim to have done so, and almost bewilder us with examples of the " nu- merous," "insurmountable," " unexplainable," "ine- radicable," and all other terrible differences which exist between them ; but the claim, notwithstanding the good rhetoric and the weighty words which are brought to its support, amounts in the last analysis to only a skillful pointing out of the fact that each one of these families possesses much that is peculiar to itself; that each one is in a very marked degree sui generis. But this we all admit, and that gladly ; for it in- creases, rather than diminishes, the indications of primary unity. It is decidedly amusing to observe the herculean blows which have been expended upon such a man of straw. No objections to the theory of a common origin for these three families of speech having been proven to be valid, we may at least consider the question an open one, and look for the indications of a common origin. In the first place, we find that all languages are, in a certain sense, progressive, and if any thing becomes plain from a careful examination of the Aryan languages, in their inflectional or highest stage, it is that they may have once been in the 168 Man a Revelation of God. agglutinative or lower stage, even as the agglutina- tive may have once been in the radical or monosyllabic stage. Secondly, we find certain fundamental roots, certain basal forms, in the Semitic which look a little like and have meanings very much like cer- tain fundamental roots in the Aryan. Thirdly, we find, in some of the Turanian forms, a significant sort of progression toward the Aryan forms, and in a few instances what appears to us to be an actual passing over into the Aryan. Fourthly, we discover an in- termingling of the three families, especially of the Semitic and Aryan, and even the taking on of certain Aryan features by the much-despised Turanian. Now, in the absence of any proof to the contrary, we submit that these facts, which lie upon the very surface, may be justly considered to be exceedingly strong indications of unity of source. And if, with the necessarily meager acquaintance the most ad- vanced philologists as yet have with the languages of the earth, so many facts point to a single source from whence all languages sprang, may we not reasonably expect that every fact added to our present stock will point us thither still more clearly ? I believe we may, and consider myself warranted in affirming, at the close of this section, that my initial proposition is sustained ; namely, that diversity of origin lias never yet been proven, but that, on the contrary, every es- tablished philological fact at least points toward, and seems to indicate, unity of origin — one single source. In His Speech. 160 SECTION SECOND. Having thus, as I believe, shown conclusively that, as far as philological science has arrived at well- established data, these data all point to a common origin for all the languages of the earth, and having certainly shown that no one has proved diversity of origin, I proceed to inquire whether any other earth-born creature besides man has the faculty of speech. To any one unaccustomed to reading the de- liverances of "advanced science" such an inquiry would perhaps seem unnecessary; for speech has from time immemorial been considered a distinctive characteristic of the human species. Down to the time of John Locke this fact was considered so undis- puted that it was assumed as an established premise in argument. He says: "This I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in brutes, and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes. For it is evident we observe no footsteps in these of making use of general signs for universal ideas ; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general signs. God having designed man for a sociable crea- ture made him not only with an inclination and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language which 170 Man a Eevelation of God. was to be the great instrument and common tie of society." * But in later years, as physical science has advanced in its triumphs, and naturalism has come to assert its absolute sway and demand the entire exclusion of every thing supernatural, it lias been thought neces- sary to show that articulate speecii is only a devel- opment, or a result of natural selection, and hence that it does not constitute a truly human distinction, because its germinant principles are possessed by brutes, and it really came through brutes to man. Charles Darwin, in his truly interesting and, in many respects, valuable work, entitled The Expres- sion of the Emotions in Man and Animals, pub- lished in London in 1872, enters into a most compre- hensive citation of incidents and illustrations to show, among other things, that man is not the only talking animal. He states many facts which are well known to every careful observer of the animal creation, and brings to view many which, though essentially known before, are comparatively new, and presents the whole in such chaste and earnest style as to lead the uninformed reader to the acceptance of a theory which rests, not upon the facts he so clearly and beautifully states, but upon the half-truths and as- sumptions which he clothes with equal beauty of language. I must not indulge myself in any formal * Essay Concerning Unman Understanding, by John Locke, Gent, vol. i, book iii, p. 427. In His Speech. 171 refutation of this book, for this would involve quota- tions therefrom for which space cannot be spared; but it would be an easy task to show its utter lack of conclusiveness, and to demonstrate that materialism has grained from it nothing substantial. The same is emphatically true of his earlier work, published in 1868 in two large volumes, entitled The Variation of Animals and' Plants under Domestication, which, as before stated, tends strongly to confirm the belief in one single source from which language sprang; thus affording another illustration of that which is often found, namely, that a treatise by some learned author confessedly opposed to evangelical religion, which signally fails to substantiate the positions taken against the truths of revelation, positively as- sists the truth in other departments. Several other learned treatises, bearing either direct- ly or indirectly upon this subject, written by some of the foremost disciples of Darwin, and the most en- thusiastic champions of natural selection, evolution, survival of the fittest, etc., which it has been my privilege to read, I have found to contain similar unbridged chasms, the same lack of logical sequence in inference and conclusion, and the same disposition to beg the question by taking for granted that which remained to be proven. In none of them have I found the slightest evidence of the possession by brutes of the real faculty of articulate speech. In those instances wherein it seemed to be such, or 172 Max a Revelation of God. wherein an elaborate effort was made to cause it so to appear, it was clearly the merest imitation — some parrot like performance which proved nothing to their purpose. Max Miiller has well said, " Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is some- thing more palpable than a fold of the brain or an angle of the skull. It admits of no caviling, and no process of natural selection will ever distill significant words out of the notes of birds or the cries of beasts." And in the same general line of thought we find the learned and carefully conservative Pressense saying : " There is not a single proposition which does not imply a judgment; and judgments in their sequence are the manifestations of the natural logic of the hu- man mind. Reason, then, is the very soul of lan- guage. Is there any thing at all analogous to it in the cry or the instinctive sign of the animal? Is there any thing in that cry which implies ab- straction, generalization ? It does nothing more than express a sensation, or at most that totality of sensations susceptible of a certain development which constitute a want; it never goes further. Man, on the contrary, at once gets beyond sensa- tion, want ; he goes out of himself, and names and characterizes the object of his perception ; he knows it, and makes it known. We thus arrive at a second characteristic of speech. The inferior language of the animal is purely subjective, sensational, if we In His Speech. 173 may so say. It has attained its end when it has ex- pressed that which the animal feels ; it attempts no more. "When insects concert and understand one an- other by signs, it is always in order to obtain that which instinct requires, or to escape some impending danger. Man, on the contrary, even under the press- ure of sensation, fixes on the object which has ex- cited it, names it, and thus rises above the mere sense- impression to knowledge. To speak is to know. Soon he is no longer content to designate the object of his knowledge simply because he dreads or desires it ; he obeys a nobler impulse — he seeks to know it for itself, impelled by a higher need born of and de- veloped with his reason." It is sometimes objected that some men have not as much intelligence as some brutes. We grant it. But this is not the question now under discussion. The inquiry is rather qualitative than quantitative, one of kind rather than one of measure. The bird or the beaver doubtless knows more, in a certain sense — has more intelligence, in a certain sense — than the child or even the youth, but it is not that reason- ing faculty which generalizes, and which leads to the expression of abstractions in articulate speech. Hence, it is legitimate for us to argue from the fact of such expressions to the possession by man of that sort or kind of intelligence, or reason, which the brute does not possess, and which separates, distinguishes, dif- ferentiates him from all the brute creation. In Chips 174 Man a Revelation of God. from a German Workshop), by Max Miiller, published in 1875 in four volumes, containing a veritable mine of philological wealth, we find the following strong statement bearing upon the thought just presented : " We see to-day that the lowest savages, men whose language is said to be no better than the clucking of liens or the twittering of birds, and who have been declared in many respects lower even than animals, possess this one specific characteristic, that if you take one of their babies and bring it up in England it will learn to speak as well as any English baby ; while no amount of education will elicit any attempts at lan- guage from the highest animals, whether bipeds or quadrupeds." And again we hear him say in well- put phrase : " Language is the Eubicon which the animal never crosses, because it reveals a direct operation of reason ; it is reason expressed, just as reason is unexpressed language." Nor is it merely on this psychological ground that we postulate the inherent difference between human and brute language, for, as Pressense says: " Human speech, whether as making the reason fully conscious of itself, or as manifesting it in ar- ticulate words, differs altogether from the lansruaire of animals, which is one of mere corporeal signs. We do not mean to imply that there is no relation be tween the two. With regard to speech, as to his whole existence, it may be said that man begins by the instinctive, only there is in man, in a virtual state. In llis Speech. 175 something more than instinct — an element of higher life not to be developed from instinct alone by mere evolution, but which, coming from a higher source, will in the end transmute instinct into something higher. Man begins, indeed, with a cry, the corporeal sign, but he does not stop there, and rational speech is not the mere perfecting of the cry which was wrung from him by his first infantile sorrows. Nei- ther the cry nor the interjection contains the princi- ple of abstraction, of generalization, of reasoning, in- herent in true human speech." * These several positions are well taken. The objec- tion may be urged, however, that the authorities here cited are committed to Christianity, and would very naturally contend against every hypothesis which, if substantiated, would prove antagonistic thereto. This objection is not a worthy one, for it assumes a sort of inwrought dishonesty, and, if granted, invalidates all argument to some extent, lying against one party as strongly as against the other: and vet it has its weight ; hence I now desire to look into the writings of those who are not supposed to have any bias in either direction. In the progress of a somewhat extended argument, Professor W. D. Whitney says : " It is well to point out here that this change of the basis of men's communication from natural suggestiveness to mu- tual understanding, and the consequent purely con- * A Study of Origins, by Edmund de Pressense, p. 315. 1*'^ Man a Revelation of God. ventional character of all human language in its every part and particle, puts an absolute line of demarkation between the latter and the means of communication of all the lower animals. The two are not of the same kind any more than human soci- ety, in its variety of organization, is of the same kind with the instinctive herding of wild cattle or swarm- ing of insects, any more than human architecture with the instinctive burrowing of the fox and nest-build ins: of the bird, any more than human industry and accu- mulation of capital with the instinctive hoarding of bees and beavers." * It is immaterial to our present purpose that we cannot agree with the writer in the conclusions he draws from the argument, a part of which we quote. Our only purpose is to show that whatever weight it may have in the determining scale of our present in- quiry must be placed upon our side. Another accepted authority on philology — accepted, I mean, by those who lean toward the materialistic side of all those questions — is Edward B. Tylor, F.R.S. Ilis work, entitled Researches into the Early History of Mankind, is one of much worth, indicating great erudition and careful research, taking up in successive chapters " Gesture Language," " Gest- ure Language and Word Language," u Picture Writ- ing and Word Writing," " Images and Names," and so on through the whole progressive history of early * Encyclopedia BrUanmca. article " Philology." In His Speech. 177 man. lie is thoroughly noncommittal upon most points touching the question of theism, although evi- dently not a true theist, and yet he very clearly shows that articulate speech is a distinctively human exer- cise. I would not be understood as holding the au- thority of a writer of this class in higher estimation than that of one who is a pronounced believer in the supernatural, and an avowed champion of the divine human theory of language ; but it is quite refresh- ing to find so many of our supposed opponents wheeling into line with us on some one phase of our inquiry. Sir John Lubbock, in his Origin of Civilization and Primitive Condition of M an , takes substantially the same position. Prehistoric Times, already no- ticed in these pages, has given him a world wide repu- tation as an advocate of the immense antiquity of man, and there can be no question, in the mind of any one who has carefully read his writings, as to his unqualified disregard of a written revelation ; and yet he says : kt Although it has been at various times stated that certain savage tribes are entirely without language, none of these accounts appear to be well authenti- cated, and they are a priori extremely improbable. At any rate, even the lowest races of which we have any satisfactory account possess a language, imperfect though it may be, and eked out to a great extent by signs. I do not suppose, however, that this custom ITS Man a Revelation of God. Las arisen from the absence of words to represent their ideas, but rather because in all countries inhab- ited by savages the number of languages is very great, and hence there is a great advantage in being able to communicate by signs." lie says this in full view of facts the most ample going to show the degraded condition of many savage tribes, and the apparently almost brainless condition of some of the individuals thereof; for it would seem that he himself has ransacked every possible source of information concerning the habits and customs of all the uncivilized races to whom access could be had. In addition to his personal observations, he has evidently read nearly every thing that was ever written concerning the observations of others. He quotes approvingly from Travels in Brazil, by Spix and Martins; from Tropical South Africa , by Galton ; from Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, by Sproat ; from Indian Tribes of Guiana, by Brett; and several other volumes, all of which exhibit the lower types of mankind in their lowest aspects. And yet, notwithstanding all this, so strong are the evi- dences of an inherent difference in kind between the very lowest forms of articulate speech and the very highest of brute signs that he goes even further, and says : " Signs may serve to convey ideas in a manner which would probably surprise those who have not In His Speech. 179 studied this question ; still it must be admitted that they are far inferior to the sounds of the voice ; which, as already mentioned, are used for this purpose by all the races of men with whom we are acquainted. " Language, as it exists among all but the lowest races, although far from perfect, is yet so rich in terms, and possesses in its grammar so complex an organization, that we cannot wonder at those who have attributed to it a divine and miraculous origin. Nay, their view may be admitted as correct, but only in that sense in which a ship or a palace may be so termed : they are human in so far as they have been worked out by man ; divine, inasmuch as in doing so he has availed himself of the powers which Providence has given him." * Which is putting the case about as strongly as we could expect from Sir John. This is perhaps a sufficient citation of authorities, although in this field it is well always for a writer to give the results of others' investigation as a proof of his own positions. Mere dogmatism or preconceived theories should weigh little in a discussion of this kind. But here we have before us the declarations of the most emi- nent philologists of almost every phase of belief as to revelation, and there is substantial agreement in this one opinion — that no other creature possesses articu- late speech. Having shown this general consensus of opinion * Origin of Civilization and Primitive Condition of Man , p. 277. 180 Man a Revelation of God. among writers of note on this subject, it is proper for us to inquire if this is not in accordance with our race instincts, or intuitions. Take any man or any class of men — those who have never considered questions of ethics, or philology, or history ; and who have no theo- ries of morals or religion to support — and would they not be surprised to hear some lower animal speak as man speaks ? To ask the question is to answer it. There is a general conviction among men that speech is some- thing which belongs to no other creature. I would not be understood as setting forth this fact absolutely conclusive, but it has its weight, as it accords with all the historical indications which have been produced, and thus becomes in a certain sense confirmatory. I would not be understood as claiming to have proved, or as attempting to prove, that there may not have been, at some time or at some place on this earth, a race of beings, not human, who possessed the power of articulate speech, any more than I would under- take to prove that there are not inhabitants upon the other planets. But it rests with our opponents to show that there have been such, and until they do they have no right to demand of me a belief contrary to every ascer- tained indication, and contrary to my own intuitions. Nor would I have it understood that I wish to rob the brute creation of one iota of its claim to intelli- gence, in denying to it the power of speech ; and yet In His Speech. I s * I feel a little as Sydney Smith must have felt when he said : « I confess I feel myself so much at ease about the superiority of mankind, I have such a marked and decided contempt for the understanding of every baboon I have ever seen, I feel so sure that the blue ape without a tail will never rival us in poetry, paint- ing, and music; that I see no reason whatever that justice may not be done to the few fragments of soul, and tatters of understanding which they may really possess." "Man is man only because he speaks; but he could not have spoken if he had not been already man," said the illustrious Humboldt, and we have yet 'to find a successful contradiction of the de- claration. SECTION THIRD. The third and last question of this chapter is one on which there has been more serious disagreement, but which we confidently believe admits of an equally satisfactory answer. Could man have become possessed of speech, either by discovery, evolution, or art, had he not been given therefor a special endowment? We do not ask whether God gave to our first parents the full-fledged speech of later years, in the same manner as we might suppose some supernatural power to suddenly endow an adult mute with the 1S2 Man a It k violation of God. ready utterance possessed by some gifted orator. There may, and doubtless do, remain, in some cir- cles, a few of those visionaries who believe that God did thus present to Adam and Eve in the garden a complete grammar, rhetoric, and dictionary combined, and gave them entire and immediate mastery thereof; and no doubt these people consider themselves the only orthodox believers in the Bible account of crea- tion. But every one should know, and doubtless every one who will read such a volume as this does know, that the Bible not only does not teach any tiling of the sort, but does not even permit any such inference to be legitimately drawn. Such visionaries freely charge those who would look for a gradual growth and development of language with infidelity to revelation, while they are themselves the real ene- mies to Bible truth, because they heap upon it unnec- essary burdens. On the other extreme is a large class of men who deny the divine element in all creation, even the creation of man, and who, of course, profess to see nothing in human speech above a mere natural growth. With these extremists we have no desire to argue, for they have been shown in previous chapters to be either incapable of appreciating the force of an argument, or unwilling to admit the truth when convinced. But to these there seem to have joined themselves many naturalists and philoso- phers who profess to have faith in the supernatural, In His Speech. 1S3 but refuse to admit that it lias any place in human speech. The previous section has, in some measure, shown the absurdity of such refusal, but we need to look into the question of the origin of language a little more fully. As regards actual 2 )ossess ^ on ') the P r0 °f * s suffi- ciently clear that articulate speech belongs to man alone of all earthly creatures. This simplifies the present question to a considerable degree, for the fact that man, and man only, thus expresses himself proves that he, and he alone, possesses the language power. This fact being established, not only is the field nar- rowed to the study of man, but the object of our study is shown to be entirely separated from the brutes by at least one distinguishing mark. Again, it was shown in the first section of this chapter that all languages can be traced inward to a comparatively small number of fundamental roots. In fact, all philologists agree upon this much, no matter how diverse their views upon other points. Having, then, all languages traced back and reduced to these basal forms, we have no longer the wonder- ful fabric of perfected speech to account for, but merely its primary elements, merely these uncouth roots. But they are full of interest. Whence came they, and how? It is sometimes more interesting to study the beginnings of a process than its com- pletion. It is often more difficult also. 184 Man a Revelation of God. It is a comparatively easy matter to trace back the full-fledged bird-of-paradise to the egg, and even within the ess. to the germ ; but whence and how the life in the germ? I suppose it would have been just as easy for God to have created the bird full-grown as to have created the elemental ger- minant speck in that egg. Let us lay aside our rapt- ures over the beautiful plumage, and the graceful movements, and the wonderful growth, from an un- couth fledgeling just out of the shell up to this vision of perfection, and calmly study the primary elements. I think we shall find that just as in the egg, just as in all animal life, we reach a point back of which we cannot penetrate, however perfect our science or however complete our processes, even so is it in lan- guage. Naturalists may talk stiltedly and write learnedly about protoplasm and bioplasm, but at the last they are obliged to confess an unexplained begin- ning, except only as the Bible explains it. Likewise, philologists may talk fluently and write voluminously about onomatopoeia and the progressive power of interjections, may trace every known word to its fun- damental root, and all roots to a few fundamental forms, but at the last they are obliged to confess an unexplained beginning, except only as the Bible ex- plains it, by indicating that God placed in man a faculty of articulate expression. It is interesting to note with how much skill this crucial terminus is approached by all infidel evolti- In His Speech. 1S5 tionists both in life and language. But upon this we must not here enter. Many with whom we cannot agree in regard to the origin of language have afforded substantial support to what we esteem the true theory while endeavoring to build up an opposite one, and it is quite probable that, could philologists come to an understanding of terms, there would be much less of disagreement. Hensleigh Wedgwood, in his work entitled The Origin of Language, says : " Language in its actual condition is an art, like baking or weaving, handed down from generation to generation ; and when we would trace upward to its origin the pedigree of this grand distinction between man and the brute creation, we must either suppose that the line of tradition has been absolutely endless, that there never was a period at which the family of man was not to be found on the earth speaking a language bequeathed to him by his ancestors, or we must at last arrive at a generation which was not taught their language by their parents. The question then arises, how did the generation in which language was originally developed attain so valuable an art? Must we suppose that our first parents were supernaturally endowed with the power of speaking and understanding a definite language, which w T as transmitted in natural course to their de- scendants and variously modified in different lines of descent through countless ages, during which the race of man spread over the earth in separate 186 Man a Revelation of God. families of people, until languages were produeed between winch, as at present, no cognizable relation can be traced ? Or is it possible, among the principles recognized as having contributed elements more or less abundant in every known language, to indicate a suf- ficient cause for the entire origination of language in a generation of men who had not yet acquired the command of that great instrument of thought, though in every natural capacity the same as ourselves?" Thus broadly and yet definitely does he state the question, and having in the statement itself given us a hint of the answer he proceeds soon to say that " The investigator of speech must accept as his start- ing ground the existence of man as yet without knowledge of language, but endowed with intellect- ual powers, and command of his bodily frame, such as we ourselves are conscious of possessing/ 1 By which, if he means to affirm that man did not come into ex- istence at the first with full-fledged speech, he is sim- ply stating a truism ; but if he means to affirm, what seems from his subsequent argument to be probable, that the power of speech was in no sense a special gift to man, he is at once in conflict with the most advanced philological teachings, and with the general trend of thought on these lines. Certainly, when he affirms that u the mental process underlying the prac- tice of speech is the same as when communication is carried on by means of bodily gestures," and that " the same mental principles are involved in a nod or In His Speech. 187 a shake of the head as in a verbal agreement or refu- sal," * he is either stating half-truths, which lie is sure will be accepted by every body, with the hope that by their help the half-falsehoods of his theory will be floated, or he is indulging in meaningless generalities. We are strongly inclined to the former view, for, in his undertaking to account for all language on the principle of unassisted imitation, he essayed an im- possible task, but at the same time one which led him along lines where lie many beautiful and in- structive truths. His work is a very valuable one, and it is only where he overstrains facts or inferences to make them tit a theory that failure results, and he comes finally to a very modest conclusion, if we mark the hypothetical statement thereof: "Thus all anal- ogy tends to the belief that the whole of language would be found to spring from an imitative source if the entire pedigree of every word were open be- fore us." f The italics are mine, and yet, with a fuller definition of his terms, he might be found to mean by his statements only what the known facts warrant. It seems a pity that men cannot so define their terms as to make their meaning clear, or else make use of only such as are well understood ; unless, perchance, they prefer the " cloudy maze, the safe retreat of words in words enfolded." * The Origin of Language, by Hensleigh WedgwooJ, p. 13. f Ibid., p. 154. 188 Man a Revelation of God. F. W. Farrar, who has written much and well on this subject, is worthy of notice. His Language and Languages is perhaps the most able defense of the onomatopoetic, or sound-imitative, origin and develop- ment of human speech that has ever been published. He has evidently made extensive researches, and has brought to the subject a great wealth of learning, and yet I think his readers cannot fail to discover a warped judgment on many important points, and sev- eral contradictions of himself in the course of the work. At page 48 he says: "Language may with more accuracy be called a discovery or a creation than an invention of the human race. Undoubt- edly the idea of speech existed in the human intelli- gence as a part of our moral and mental constitution when man first appeared upon the surface of the earth. In this sense we may call language a divine gift." In this declaration he takes a position which, were it not discounted by its settings, would be im- pregnable. Still further, at page 212, he goes on to say : "Language, then, was not a direct revelation of the Almighty, nor was it an inevitable result of our physical organization ; nor was it a purely me- chanical invention accepted by general agreement, in consequence of a felt necessity ; but the ca- pacity for language was a part of our human con- stitution, and in the development of this capacity the senses, the memory, the understanding, the In His Speech. 180 emotions, the will, and the imagination all played their part. u The great secret — the divine idea of language — became intuitively evident to man from the working of his intellect upon two strictly analogous facts. He found that the effect of powerful passion was to force from him involuntary spontaneous sounds, which, when repeated, recalled the passions by which they had been originally stimulated, and not only recalled them by virtue of the law of association to him who had originally felt them, but also conveyed and expressed them to others who were similarly affected by similar causes. Bat besides this, as may still be observed in children, the delicate sensibility of the nervous system in the still fresh and unworn human organism gave rise to a spontaneous echo of external sounds, an echo which partly repeated and imitated the sounds themselves, and partly modified them in accordance with the ideal impression which they reproduced. Originally, this repercussion of the sounds which had thrilled the auditory nerve was not due primarily to an instinct of conscious imitation, but to a far subtler law of physical sympathy with the outer world ; but as it conveyed a pleasurable sense of power it would at once be adopted as a vol- untary exercise apart from any necessity. In this instance, also, it would be instantly discovered that the imitative sounds, however modified by organic or subjective influences, inevitably recalled, by the same 100 Man a Revelation of G on. law of association, the external phenomena with which they were connected. In both cases it would be instantly discovered that sounds were capable of becoming signs, not of sounds only, but of things. Here, then, were the elements of language ; here lay hidden the germs of that infinite discovery which made man worthy of his destined immortality; here, ready provided by the working of divine laws, were the materials by which he was enabled to express his own sensations, and to recall the most strik- ing aspects and influences of the world in which he lived."* Now this conclusion, in part, at least, is well drawn, and has the ring of genuine truth, but the steps by which it is reached are in many particulars extremely unsteady and most decidedly crooked. There is alto- gether too much " taken for granted." It sounds all very well for a man to say, " Any one with his eyes open can see " this or that ; " A man not bereft of rea- son cannot fail to understand the significance " of this or that ; " Any mortal with half an ear must dis- tinguish the adaptation of sound to sense in all these imitative words ; " but in " cold type " such assertions look too much like an attempt to browbeat the reader, or force him into assent to the writer's the- ory. As a matter of fact, very many writers, and a vast number of readers, having hoth eyes open, pos- sessed of their reason, and having not merely " half an * Langvage and Languages, by F. W. Farrar, p. 212. In His Speech. 191 ear," but two good and whole ears, entirely fail to see, understand, and hear as our learned author does con- cerning many philological questions. Every student of this subject grants that there is much of truth in the onomatopoetic theory, as regards a multitude of indi- vidual instances. But it would seem that its support- ers lose sight of the still greater multitude of in- stances in which there is none at all, and go into ecstasies over the lesser number which possess it. If the live or six hundred fundamental roots could he accounted for in this way, and as clearly, or even if a third part of them could be thus accounted for, there would he substantial ground on which to rest the theory, but comparatively few words even can be thus traced, much less roots. Max Miiller says significantly : " If this principle of onomatopoieia is applicable anywhere it would be in the formation of the names of animals; yet we listen in vain for any similarity between goose and cackling, hen and clucking, duck and .quacking, spar- row and chirping, dove and cooing, hog and grunt- ing, cat and mewing, between dog and barking, yelp- ing, snarling, or growling. There are, of course, some names, such as cuckoo which are clearly formed by an imitation of sound. But words of this kind are, like artificial flowers, without a root. They are sterile, and unfit to express any thing beyond the one object which they imitate. " The number of names which are really formed by 192 Man a Revelation of God. an imitation of sound dwindles down to a very small quotum if cross-examined by the comparative philol- ogist, and we are left in the end with the conviction that though a lanoriage might have been made out of the roaring, fizzing, hissing, gobbling, twittering, cracking, banging, slamming, and rattling sounds of nature, the tongues with which we are acquainted point to a different origin." * This appears to the writer to be a sufficient refuta- tion of the much lauded theory of onomatopoeia, and nothing further will be added. The interjectional theory is somewhat similar, and is held in common with this by most of its advocates. It undertakes to show that all language sprang orig- inally from interjections, or impulsive cries: that the first man stepped on a sharp stone and cried ! that the first woman came suddenly upon some un- couth-looking animal and shrank back with an ugh! That they both saw something that struck them as being funny and began to ha, ha! that they were suddenly amazed and cried ah! And so on from these impulsive sounds, bursting forth from the lips as involuntary expressions of emotion, articulate speech grew up. At first thought this seems a very plausible hy- pothesis. Those who look no deeper than the sur- face accept it at once, as not only a satisfactory but a very simple solution of the problem in hand. But * Science of Language, by Max Miiller. In His Speech. 193 a little closer scrutiny reveals its weakness, and a full investigation shows it to be built upon air, even as it is made up of expulsive breath. We freely grant that interjections have, in all probability, always had a place in human speech, and always will have, no matter how perfect it becomes. They are, in a certain sense, indicators of our merely animal life. A man cries O! when he is hurt just as naturally as a dog yelps. We also grant that out of these merely animal signs a sort of language may be formed ; but when we trace human speech, as we now possess it, back to its roots we do not arrive at interjections, but at general terms, at bundles of possibility, at germinant structures whose very nature forbids the thought that they represent nothing more than interjectional accre- tions. In a somewhat peculiar, though very sound and judicious work, entitled Diversions of Purley, is found a very satisfactory answer to this theory : "The dominion of speech is erected upon the down- fall of interjections. Without the artful contrivances of language, mankind would have had nothing but interjections with which to communicate, orally, any of their feelings. The neighing of a horse, the low- ing of a cow, the barking of a dog, the purring of a cat, sneezing, coughing, groaning, shrieking, and every other involuntary convulsion with oral sound, have almost as good a title to be called parts of 9 194 Man a Kevelation of God. speech as interjections have. Voluntary interjec- tions are only employed where the suddenness and vehemence of some affection or passion returns men to their natural state, and makes them for a moment forget the use of speech ; or when, from some circum- stance, the shortness of time will not permit them to exercise it. And in hooks they are only used for embellishment, and to mark strongly the above situa- tions." * The very patent fact stated in this answer of Tooke, namely, that these involuntary cries of men have no more right to be called parts of speech than the natural cries of brutes, gives us a very significant intimation of the real motives in the case. If the in- terjectional theory of language could be made to stand, the great, or at least one of the great, barriers separat- ing man from the brutes would be removed, and materialism would gain substantial ground. This may in some measure account for the zeal with which even so desperate a case is championed in certain quarters. We have said that the fundamental roots back to which all languages have been traced are germinant structures, or general terms. These represent, of course, generalizations of thought. An interjection cannot represent any general notion. Hence interjec- tions cannot bear any intimate relation to funda- mental roots — they cannot serve to name a primary * Diversions of Purley, by John Home Tooke, London, 1860, p. 32. In His Speech. 105 conception of the human intellect. It is true there has been much disagreement among philosophers con- cerning the primary conceptions of the human mind, and an almost interminable indulgence in metaphysical hair-splittings over the so-called przmum cognitum, and this has, in some measure, confused men concern- ing the primary generalizations which take place in naming objects or thoughts. Locke, Hamilton, Mill, Stewart, and Brown have discussed this whole subject with great thoughtt'ul- ness, and I would gladly quote from each one enough to show his position, but lack of space forbids. In view of this fact I will not ask the reader to accept my conclusions, but give Miiller's instead ; who, after giving extended quotations from some of these philosophers, and according to them the fullest consideration, says : " Nouns all express originally one out of the many attributes of a thing, and that attribute, whether it be a quality, or an action, is necessarily a general idea. The word thus formed was in the first instance intended for one object only, though of course it was almost immediately extended to the whole class to which this object seemed to belong. . . . The first thing really known is the general. It is through it that we know and name afterward individual objects, of which any general idea can be predicated, and it is only in the third stage that these individual objects, 103 Man a Revelation of God. thus known and named, become again the represent- atives of whole classes, and their names or proper names are raised into appellatives. "And how do we know things ? We perceive things by our senses, but our senses convey to us informa- tion about single things only. But to hiow is more than to feel, and to perceive more than to remember, more than to compare. Now, the first step toward this real knowledge, a step which, however small in appearance, separates man from all other animals, is the naming of a thing, or the making a thing know- able. All naming is classification bringing the indi- vidual under the general ; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know only by means of our general ideas. ... At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genesis of lan- guage. Analyze any word you like, and you will find that it expresses a general idea peculiar to the individual to which the name belongs. . . . The four or five hundred roots which remain as the constituent elements in different families of language are not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are pho- netic types produced by. a power inherent in human nature. They exist, as Plato would say, by nature ; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of God. The num- ber of these phonetic types must have been almost In His Speech. 197 infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of natural elimination which we observed in the early history of words that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type. ... If inductive reasoning is worth any thing, we are justified in believing that what has been proved to be true on so large a scale, and in cases where it was least expected, is true with regard to language in general. We require no supernatural interference, nor any conclave of ancient sages, to explain the realities of human speech. All that is formal in language is the result of rational combination ; all that is material the result of a mental instinct. The first natural and instinctive utterances, if sifted differ- ently by different clans, would fully account both for the first origin and for the first divergence of human speech. We can understand not only the origin of language, but likewise the necessary break- ing up of one language into many ; and we perceive that no amount of variety in the material or in the formal elements of speech is incompatible with the admission of one common source. The Science of Language thus leads us up to that highest summit from whence we see into the very dawn of man's life on earth ; and where the words which we have heard so often from the days of our childhood — 4 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech' — assume a meaning more natural, more 198 Max a Revelation of God. intelligible, more convincing, than they ever had before." * It is perhaps unnecessary to add any thing further, although where there exists so great an "embarrass- ment of riches" as we find in this field one scarcely knows where to stop. In bringing this chapter to a close, there exists a sort of indefinable unsatisfaction in the writer's own mind ; for the subject is so vast that a whole volume, instead of a few pages, should be devoted thereto. Yet we believe that there can remain no serious question in the mind of any reader as to either the unity of the source whence language came, or the divine element which enters into it. Leaving that inner consciousness which speaks to every man of the divinity within him entirely out of the present consideration, every logical mind, tracing the vast multitudes of human dialects inward to a few great families, and these families to a compara- tively few root forms, as we have done, and then tracing these to fundamental generalizations, which are shown to be entirely outside of and above the powers of the brute creation, must, as it seems to us, just by a purely intellectual or rational conclusion, arrive at a point where he sees a somewhat which is not of man or by man primarily and solely, but of God through man ; constituting a revelation in and through mortal speech of that immortal One whose * Science of Lawjua'je, by M;ix Miiller. In His Speech. 100 only-begotten Son, co-equal with the Father, when he came into the world to manifest forth the eternal God, could find no more revelatory name, no more communicable term for the Unsearchable One than Logos, the Word — the Word, which was God— the Word, in which was life— the WOKD, which was the Light of men. "On earth there is nothing great but man ; in man there is nothing great but mind." — Phavorinus. " Man's actions here are of infinite moment to him, and never die or end at all. Man reaches upward high as heaven— downward low as hell ,' and in his threescore years of time holds an eternity fear- fully and wonderfully hidden. . . . The universe is the realized thought of God." — Carhjle. "Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself." — Plato. " Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature ; but he is a thinking reed." — Pascal. " Mind is God's first end." — Charming. "Man, an image of the invisible God, created to be like him in knowledge." — Duright. " Still o'er these scenes my memory wakes, And fondly broods with miser care; Time but. the impression deeper makes, And streams their channels deeper wear." — Bui'ns. " Keep this forever in the imagination of the thoughts of the heart of thy people." — David. " In man, the more we dive, the more we see Heaven's signet stamping an immortal make." — Unknown. In His Mental Chakactekistics. 201 CHAPTER IV. IN HIS MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS. In our examination of man's physical structure we found many indications of design pointing to an all- wise Designer. In the present chapter we purpose to take under consideration his mental structure. The treatment of this department of our subject will of necessity be brief. It will be impossible to do more than simply touch upon the more manifest indications of a su- preme Mind as seen in the human mind, and yet, even in this partial survey, I am confident that we shall not only find a satisfactory refutation of all those theories of unbelief which deny the supernatu- ral, and attempt to reduce man to a mere living ma- chine, and those which through Agnosticism prac- tically proclaim Atheism ; but also such a complete and soul-cheering revelation of God as has not re- warded any of our previous inquiries. The subject is not without its real difficulties, al- though the ^m-eal ones are most numerous. The former ure inherent in the very nature of the problems in- volved, and must be met as best they can under the necessary limitations of human thought. The latter 9* 202 Man a Revelation of God. are largely the result of the metaphysical smoke arising from the interminable conflicts of learned disputants, who seem to prefer contention to agreement, if only a good opportunity be theirs for constantly airing their superior knowledge and dialectical skill. A few of these must receive attention, merely for the sake of showing them to be imaginary, and thus removing from the mind of the general reader all apprehen- sion of danger from these threatening clouds which hang so heavily over truth. One of these, which has taken on immense propor- tions since the publication of Immanuel Kant's works, is agnosticism, or nescience— a denial of the possibil- ity of real knowledge. It is a great bugbear in phi- losophy, and the more one examines it the more aston- ished does he become that sensible men, not to say learned men, should have ever formulated such a the- ory, or, the theory having been formulated, should give it credence; and yet it is here, and seems to have "come to stay" — at least for a time— and mul- titudes find in it a peculiar fascination. There is a beautifully simulated modesty about it which appeals to certain natures with great force, and by its very defects wins recognition and partial adoption. I mention this theory first, because it lies at the threshold of the door we are proposing to enter, and seems to entirely block up the way by denying that we can know any thing absolutely. It discredits e\cvy deliverance of the mind by declaring it wholly In His Mental Characteristics. 203 untrustworthy, and by so doing virtually denies the existence of mind as commonly understood. For the logical consequence of even a partial denial of the validity of knowledge is a complete denial. There is no half-way ground on which to stand. I am aware that agnostics do not undertake to carry the theory to its logical conclusions, and are unwill- ing to admit them when held up to their view. But refusal to admit a valid inference does not invalidate it. Those who assume the unreality of the primary knowledge of self, as self, and as a thinking self, must admit the absolute banishment of all certainty from the world, even the certainty of their own as- sumed " unreality." I desire the reader to see the absurdity of this spe- cious hypothesis so plainly that all the fair enticing forms into which it has been thrown may no longer exercise the slightest influence upon his thought. To this end let us look a little more closely at what we call knowledge. Knowledge, considered in its fundamental elements and requisites, is one and the same in hind, whatever may be the object of that knowledge. It is well to keep this in mind ; for the primary purpose of agnos- tics is to prove that man cannot know God. In no other way can this inability be made to appear plausible than by showing self to be imaginary. But even agnostics talk of knowledge as a something. This it is impossible to deny without rendering all 20-i Man a Revelation of God. words meaningless. Now, in order to the existence of knowledge there must be something to be known ; and evidently there cannot be something known with- out somebody to know it, or possess knowledge of it. In other words, there must be a thinking person — a knoioer — and an object to be known, or it is impossi- ble for that which all parties call "knowledge" to exist. Even Herbert Spencer, in his Psychology, says : " The co-existence of the subject and object is a deliverance of consciousness which, taking precedence of all analytic examination, is a truth transcending all others in certain ty." To which every one of us assents. We cannot do otherwise. Now, bearing in mind that knowledge is one in kind, take a step farther. The notion has become prevalent in certain quarters, supposed to be centers of learning, that we can know only material substances — only that which can be handled, weighed, or measured, seen, tasted, smelled, or heard. This results, doubtless, from a too constant consideration of the material aspects of our being. A fact of consciousness is as truly a fact as a loaf of bread, or a block of wood, or any other material substance ; and it is a contradiction of terms to affirm that man cannot absolutely know himself as a thinking being as really as he can know the con- crete substances of which he thinks. Those who champion this gross notion argue that it is impossible to know any thing which we cannot show to be true by experiment. For the sake of the argument, sup- In His Mental Characteristics. 205 pose we grant this. There is a possibility of experi- menting upon the immaterial, in thought, as really and truly as upon the material. I am sitting in my pulpit on a Sunday morning, ohserving the congregation already assembled, and the late comers as they enter the doors and pass down the aisles. I think of Mr. A. as having come from his elegant home, blessed with perfect health, and having all of this world's goods that heart can wish. I think of Mr. B. as having come from a home of pov- erty, and see that he is in a condition of physical weak- ness. In the five minutes thus spent I recognize and take note of a hundred different faces, and call up in thought a thousand different circumstances. I am not conscious of any logical processes of thought. I know these faces instantly. It is act- ual, primary, fundamental sense-perception through the eyes. This sort of knowing our opponents admit. But now I submit that my knowledge of my own self, perceiving these faces, is just as actual, primary, and fundamental ; although it does not come through sense-perception. While looking upon these faces I may not have thought of myself as thinking ; but, instantly, upon turning the mind within, and asking what I am doing, I become conscious of rejoicing in A.'s prosperity and of sorrowing over B.'a hard lot. I am conscious that the rejoicing and the sorrowing exist, as entities; immaterial, 'tis true, but entitles nevertheless, objects of knowledge. I can pick them 200 Man a Revelation of God. up and handle thein, "experiment upon them," if you please, weigh and measure them, with a view to determining which is the greater. Then, with this certain knowledge obtained, I look for the knower, which is the other absolute requisite for knowledge, and find it to be myself. The existence of this self is just as certain as the existence of the faces, or the emotions resulting from beholding them. I know this self-existence intuitively. The knowledge is just as actual, primary, and fundamental as that which came through sense-perception. It would seem impossible that any man should re- fuse to admit the certainty of this primary knowledge of self as a knower. But some men who claim to possess great stores of knowledge, to be great " know- ers," do refuse to admit it. The general reader may think that lam belaboring a "man of straw," but not so. Professor Huxley, in Lay Sermons, claims that our knowledge of any thing we know or feel is " nothing more than a knowledge of states of consciousness ; " that " some of these states we refer to a cause we call self, others to a cause or causes we call not self, but neither of the existence of self or not self have we any certainty" — and much else of the same sort. Now, here is either an egregious mistake of a thought- fill man, or a desperate attempt to save a sinking the- ory by throwing out an extremely shadowy plank. lie either fails to distinguish the real nature of introspection himself, or hopes to so befog us that we In His Mental Characteristics. 207 shall fail to understand it. I am inclined to give him credit for honesty — and the blunder. The fact is, he nowhere succeeds in giving an} 7 in- telligible explanation of what he means by this nebu- lous expression, "states of consciousness," upon which- he hopes to float his theory. We would respectfully suggest to Mr. Huxley that this is all-important. In whom do these "states of consciousness" exist, or of what do they co7is»st f If Mr. Huxley, or any other man, can be certain of "states of consciousness," there must be, according to the accepted fundamentals of all thinking, some entity represented by the expression. This brings him back to the original self, and certainty of the ex- istence of self, and he finds that he has simply been dealing with the same substance under a different name, fondly imagining that he had found something new. And Huxley is only one of several illustrious men of similar views, all of whom have numerous followers. I think the reader will agree with me, that the absurdity of agnosticism is so manifest that Chris- tian scholars need not be disturbed by it ; and yet I desire to record the opinions of those whose au- thority is of greater weight than mine. Samuel Harris, LL.D., says : " Agnosticism belies the consti- tution and consciousness of man, debars itself from the possibility of argument in its own support, and contradicts and nullifies itself. It is impossible to appeal to knowledge in proof that knowledge is im- 20S Man a Revelation of God. possible, or to reason, to prove that reason is irra- tional or untrustworthy." We find the opinion of Augustine quaintly and vigorously expressed in Civitas Dei: "I am most certain that I am, and I know this and delight in it. In respect to these truths I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the academicians .who say, ' What if you are deceived V If I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived ; and if I am deceived, by this token I am. And since I am, if I am de- ceived, how am I deceived in believing that / am? for it is certain that I am, if I am deceived. Since, therefore, /, the person deceived, should .fo, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in the knowledge that / am. Consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that / know. For as I know that I am, so I know this also — that I know." No author whom it has been my privilege to read has summed up the whole matter in few words more completely than St. George Mivart, F.E.S., in Les- sons from Nature as Manifested in Mind and Mat- ter. He says : " Absolute skepticism, with every po- sition that necessarily involves it, is to be rejected as an absurdity. For, if nothing is certain, if there is no real distinction between truth and falsehood, there can, of course, be no useful discussion. If our life may be a dream within a dream, if we may not be supremely sure that a thing cannot both he and not he, at the same time and in the same sense, then thinking In His Mental Characteristics. 209 may indeed be affirmed to be an idle waste of thought, were it not impossible to affirm that any thing is or is not any thing, and as impossible to affirm such im- possibility. Such skepticism is, of course, as prac- tically impossible as it is absurd." Of the same opin- ion is the celebrated Hermann Lotze, as expressed in his Logic, published in Oxford, in 1884, in three books, "Thought," "Investigation," and "Knowl- edge," and also in his Metaphysics, in three books, "Ontology," "Cosmology," and "Psychology," pub- lished the same year. After taking up and most thoroughly exposing the fallacies of the experimentalists and semi-agnostics, he scatters out-and-out agnosticism to the winds as follows: "It must seem utterly inconceivable that we should ask for the ' what ' of a thing and yet look for the answer in any thing except that which this thing is and does ; or that we should inquire as to its ' being,' and yet seek this anywhere except in its activity. And in the same way here, it must seem equally unintelligible that we should suppose we do not know the soul, because, although we know all its acts, we are unluckily ignorant of the elastic sphere to which, according to Kant's comparison, the nature manifested in these acts is attached ; or that instead of seeking the living reality of the soul in its produc- tion of ideas, emotions, aud efforts, we should look for it in a nameless ' Being,' from which these con- crete forms of action could not flow, but in which, 210 Man a Revelation of God. after some manner never to be explained, tliey are supposed to participate. . . . Every soul is what it shows itself to be, unity whose life is in definite ideas, feelings, and efforts. . . . Within this sphere the soul shows itself to be to a certain extent an independent center of actions and reactions ; and in so far as it does so, and so long as it does so, it has a claim to the title of substance." This is strong language to come from such a source on this subject ; for, if we were to believe the state- ments made in some of the more popular philosoph- ical publications of the past two years, we should be obliged to place Hermann Lotze among the sup- porters of a semi-agnostic materialism. It is always safest to examine the writings of such a man for ourselves, for there is a fixed determination in many pseudo-scientific quarters to range every illustrious name on the side of infidelity. We feel warranted in concluding that the dense fo^- bank of agnosticism, which seemed like a mountain ly- ing at the very threshold of our subject, has vanished from the sight of the reader; and we may assume the existence of a thinking power in man, and proceed to examine it, as to its constitution and characteristics, with the same confidence with which we enter upon the examination of any other subject It becomes necessary in this examination to con- sider first of all certain claims which have been set up, and stoutly championed, by those disciples of phys- In His Mental Characteristics. 211 ical science wlio are bending every energy of their nat- ures to the banishment of God from his universe. Positivism, and its corollary, or logical sequent, secularism, is so allied to agnosticism that whatever refutes one refutes the other; therefore it is unneces- sary to give it any special notice at this point, and we invite attention to that phase of materialism which pertains to our present inquiry. Not content with endeavoring to prove that matter is eternal, and ordinary animal life the result of ma- terial forces exercised in some sort of a self-organ iza- tion, materialistic philosophers have been making strenuous efforts to show that even the human mind, with all its varied endowments of consciousness, memory, reason, will, etc., is, after all, only a " mode of motion," a "peculiar manifestation of force," a " striking correlation of nervous energies," a " highly specialized arrangement of atoms " — in a word, any thing which you please to call it, if only you make use of materialistic terminology. These men of science profess to do simply this — when stripped of all disguises and glosses of language — reduce mind and spirit to matter. Then, having nothing to account for in man, or the whole animal creation, except organized matter, find the origin of all its varied forms in unorganized matter, and thus shut God out of the calculation. At first thought it would seem that there could be no occasion for the refutation of such an hypothesis, 212 Max a Revelation of God. for the simple reason that sober-minded men would not be influenced by any thing so contrary to con- sciousness. But so oreat has been the advancement of material o science in the last fifty years, so astonishing have been her triumphs over the obstacles previously bar- ring up her way, that men have come to look it pun her as supreme, and vast multitudes are ready to write " Omnipotent" as one of her titles, while the increased facilities of communication and multiplied comforts of life secured by these triumphs have placed at the disposal of scientific men the largest wealth, and won for them the most enthusiastic praise ; hence, very naturally, men are inclined to accept their deliverances as final, and be guided by them, even in matters outside of their own legitimate domain. I would not be understood to teach, by the phrase " their own legitimate domain," that men should be confined to any one special line of investigation or search for truth. On the contrary, I would urge upon every scholar the importance of becoming acquainted with all departments of learning, and as far as possi- ble mastering the fundamentals, at least, of all the sciences. But the difficulty lies in this : that many of those who have accomplished much in the physical sciences, and a few who have become preeminent therein, have presumed to condemn, without investi- gation, the mental and moral sciences, even to the In His Mental Characteristics. 213 extent of denying them the name of sciences, and scoffing at their advocates as men of " narrow minds, 11 of " undeveloped reasoning faculties," of " fossilized ideas," or " moss-covered theological vagaries," utter- ly incapable of appreciating the " scientific method " and the marvelous progress of the present age ; while, without having given one hour a week on the aver- age, during the whole period of their scientific career, to the serious study of mental science from a theolog- ico-moral stand-point, they esteem themselves capable of pronouncing authoritatively upon all ethical and biblical questions. This is by no means the animus of the truly great men of science, of those who have actually done most toward bringing about the un- paralleled progress of recent years, but simply of the few eminent men who have made the most noise, and the multitude of would-be imitators, who are eagerly striving to gain recognition by becoming faithful echoes. Genuine science, like genuine religion, is modest and child-like in spirit and bearing. Both have the same divine authorship. Spurious science, like spu- rious religion, is self-asserting, arrogant, puffed up, doth " behave itself unseemly." Both have the same earthly authorship. Professor Tyndall says : " Not alone the exquisite mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself, emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena, were once latent in a fiery cloud." Bear in mind, 214 Man a Revelation of God. then, that, if materialism be true, there is no more in- dication of supernatural power in the mind of an Aristotle, a Homer, or a Webster than in the pulp of a jelly-fish or the claw of a lobster. This is not generally admitted by even the advo- cates of the materialism of the present time. Never- theless, the logical conclusion of all materialistic the- ories is just what we have indicated, and no theory is worth any thing which cannot abide its own inevit- able results. Lange says : " Sensationalism is the subjective of which materialism is the objective." If this bj true — and I have yet to find that it has been successfully denied — it is possible, at the outset, to place material- ism in contradiction with itself, and, were it our pleasure so to do, we might leave this house, so greatly lauded for its material strength, thus " divided against itself," to bring about its own demolition. Those infidels who talk so flippantly about the con- tradictions of the Bible would do well to cease re- affirming these unimportant and, for the most part, imaginary discrepancies, and turn their attention to the endless contradictions of their own cherished the- ories, many of which agree in only one particular ; namely, in declaring that " the Bible is not what it claims to be." But we must look a little more closely at a few of the exact puttings of this theory as related to mind. Close acquaintance reveals character. Those who In His Mental Characteristics. 215 Lave been attracted by the fair exterior will perhaps loathe the inner nature. I am not sure that there is any essential difference between the old and the new save in the dress, the style, the rhetoric of the putting. For example, we find in the writings of Cabanis, one of the old-time materialists, the following : " The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile;" and polite natural- ism of a later period curls its lip and elevates its nose at the offensive language, but fully adopts the teach- ing notwithstanding ; for in a work to which I have already made reference in a former chapter, entitled, Kraft und Stoft, the erudite Buchner claims that " mental activity is a function of the cerebral sub- stance. The same power which digests by means of the stomach thinks by means of the brain. As there is no bile without liver, so there is no thought without brain. The secretion of the liver and kidneys pro- ceeds imperceptibly, and produces a tangible sub- stance. In so far it is superior to the secretion of thought. Mental activity is emitted by the brain as sounds are by the mouth, as music is by the organ." This is certainly a frank putting of the case. Ev- ery body can see just what is meant. Without any sophistries of statement the avowal is made that the brain, this gray substance of which we have been speaking, can and does make emotion, will, and imag- ination, poems, orations, and essays, out of the blood 216 Max a Revelation of God. which flows to it, just as the stomach makes chyme out of the food and drink we swallow. To manufact- ure another " Paradise Lost," or Declaration of Inde- pendence, it were only necessary to set the gray pulp of the cerebrum at work upon its constituent fluids and solids, as the liver would go to work upon the fluids and solids passing through it. And now I imagine I hear some astonished reader — astonished because he has not been accustomed to reading 1 or hearing the exact utterances of materialism, but rather its dogmatic assertions concerning Bible truth — saying within himself, " Did sane men ever make such declarations as these ? Are such statements to be found in published volumes?" And I answer, " Yes ; and much more of the same sort." As to their sanity I care not to be asked to pronounce. The bald statements are before the reader in the exact language of the writers. Still the reader is perhaps incredulous as to so manifest an absurdity being seriously advocated by any body at the present day. If so, let him turn to Lewes's great work, Prob- lems of Life and Mind, and he will And whole chap- ters given to statements similar to, or in support of, the following : " The neural process and the feeling are one and the same process, viewed under different aspects. Mind is a function of the organism, and this both in the mathematical and the biological sense of the term. Intelligence is the sum of the nervous ad- justments on which organic actions depend, and the In IJis Mental Characteristics. 217 sum of organized experiences which determine conduct." This may be a little smoother language than Biich- ner's, but it means the same. It may not be quite as offensive to the taste as the statement, " the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile," but it is equally offensive to reason. Bishop Thomson has well said, "If the brain se- cretes the mind it is different from the mind, and hence it should be provided with an apparatus like the gall-bladder to receive its product. It has been conjectured that a part of the brain has been reserved for this purpose, which has been compared to a cal- culating machine. The hypothesis breaks down un- der its weight of absurdity. Mind is different in its nature from matter. Mind is self-active, capable of controlling its principles and trains of thought. We address logic to the mind, but not to the liver. You cannot make a man a Calvinist by calomel, or a Universalist by belladonna. You cannot cure rheu- matism with Calvinism, or neuralgia with Armin- ianism." * Attention is also invited to the palpable absurdity, and contradictory nature, of the positions taken by scientific evolutionists who refuse to be called mate- rialists. Perhaps Haeckel stands among the fore- most of these, and in order that the reader may un- derstand the position he occupies I quote a brief pas- * Evidences nf Ffvpohd Religion, p. 48. 10 218 Man a Revelation of God. sage from the concluding chapter of his Evolution of Man, entitled " Results of Anthropogeny." He has conducted his reader through twenty-live long chap- ters, and exhibited the strongest possible phases of evolution and the monistic philosophy, and here he sums up the whole matter : " This mechanical or monistic philosophy asserts that every-where the phenomena of human life, as well as those of external nature, are under the con- trol of fixed and unalterable laws. It further asserts that all phenomena are produced by mechanical causes, not by pre-arranged, purposive causes. In the light of this monistic conception of nature, even those phenomena which we have been accustomed to regard as most free and independent, the expressions of the human will, appear as subject to fixed laws as any other natural phenomena. Man is not above nature, but in nature. The real materialistic philoso- phy asserts that the vital phenomena of motion, like all other phenomena of motion, are effects or prod- ucts of matter." Here the reader notices the surprising inconsistency of this great evolutionist, and no doubt feels inclined to discount his abilities ; but be not too severe upon him. He is simply making a masterly effort to extri- cate himself from the dilemma into which his theories have brought him, and is not to blame for some man- ifestations of discomfiture. You or I would do the same if in the same hard case. In His Mental Characteristics. 210 Lest I should seem to unwarrantably magnify the inconsistencies of this "monistic philosophy," which, after all, refuses to be called materialism, I give the well-chosen words of Dr. Diman : " The strongest intellectual attraction of materialism consists in the fact that it is a system of monism ; it apparently sat- isfies the craving for unity which is so deeply planted in the human mind, and which receives new support with the progress of knowledge. We may assume, without hesitation, that a monistic theory is the ex- pression of rational thought. Human intelligence instinctively conceives of all co-ordinate causes as sec- ondary. But the evident argument against material- ism is that it does not meet this very want. Sup- posing matter to have been reduced to a single, pure, homogeneous physical element, we have still to explain the fact that, in all the phenomena of the universe, matter is always combined with force. It is not dead matter with which we deal, but matter organized, and undergoing incessant and universal transmutations. The question at once arises, Is mat- ter the cause of force, or is force the cause of mat- ter? Unless one of these questions be answered in the affirmative, we have two original principles in the universe instead of one, and thus, at the first step, sacrifice that principle of unity on which scientific materialism so much prides itself. For, evidently, if force and matter be conceived of as not related as cause and effect, but as inseparable and co-ordinate, 220 Man a Eevelation of God. we have two eternal principles instead of one, and the boasted monism of materialism is merged in du- alism. The perplexity of the problem is not less- ened but increased. If, on the other hand, force be conceived as the cause of matter, we preserve unity but we destroy materialism. For we trace the exist- ence of matter to an immaterial source; it becomes at once secondary and dependent. If reason pursues its search for unity it cannot stop with physical force, for a universe of physical force would be simply an aggregate of forces. Behind the multiplicity of nat- ural forces there must reside some single, original, and indivisible power. But when we have reached this conclusion, we are on the threshold of the great truth that the universe had its origin in mind. Thus, in this whole discussion of matter and force, material- ism is involved in fatal contradictions. As a rea- soned system of the universe it goes beyond its own limits, and falsifies its own premises. For material- ism, so far as it claims any logical basis, rests on the postulate that all knowledge is attained through the organs of sense, and that beyond what the senses report, and the generalizations from this, we know and can know nothing. The properties of matter, it is claimed, are the sole, the direct, the immediate ob- jects of the senses : and the facts of nature do not demand for their explanation any thing distinct from matter. Materialism, of necessity, involves sensa- tionalism, and sensationalism necessarily signifies that In His Mental Characteristics. 221 all knowledge of matter is dependent on the particu- lar constitution of the senses of the individual. The materialist cannot pretend to any knowledge of mat- ter as it is in itself; it can exist for him only so far as his senses perceive it to exist. " Yet the whole system of scientific materialism is built up on the assumption of the real and independent existence of force and matter. We are told that force and matter are eternal ; that they are absolutely in- capable of increase or diminution, of creation or an- nihilation. On what evidence are these assertions made ? Is the eternity of matter or of force any thing which the senses report to us? Or is it a legitimate generalization from any thing that the senses report? When he ventures to make these assertions, the ma- terialist asserts something that he could by no possi- bility have learned through his senses, and something that no experiment of science could have demon- strated. "Modern materialism rests throughout upon a series of realistic hypotheses, and yet these hypotheses, from its own stand-point, are wholly untenable. Material- ism claims to be a system which appeals only to prin- ciples that are rigidly scientific, yet it cannot reach one of the conclusions on which it strongly insists without setting these principles aside." ' I am confident that those of my readers who have examined the writings of materialistic science with * The Theistic Argument, by I. Lewis Diman, pp. 349 ; 350. 222 Man a Eevelation of God. any care will agree with the conclusion here reached. For, although many valuable facts are brought to light by materialists, for which every genuine inves- tigator is always thankful, when it comes to theories and philosophical conclusions their inherent incon- sistencies are so great that all manner of verbal hedg- ing and fencing are indulged in. The truth is, as I think will appear to every reader, that materialism, so far from proving a help to the establishment of that uniformity of nature's on-goings, in which materialistic scientists seem to take so great delight, actually hinders it. "We who contend that there is " a spirit in man : and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding," that matter is under the control of mind, and man's will free, that it is this immaterial part of us which constitutes that imasre of the divine in which we claim to have been created, do not hereby contend that the order of the universe is left entirely to the caprice of man's will, as our opponents endeavor to make it appear. We do not combat a truly scientific doctrine of " persist- ence of force," or "indestructibility of matter," or " cosmic and vital development," or any other authen- ticated datum of established science. On the con- traiw, as has been already shown, our opponents are the men who are smiting themselves in the face, and then complaining of unfair treatment from lis. But, with all its inconsistencies and contradictions, "materialism is abroad," and it has obtained a mighty In His Mental Characteristics. 223 grasp upon the thought of the age. It should receive the most careful attention from every friend of truth, especially as related to psychology. Here it is most insidious in its elementary appeals to belief. It lays down certain fundamental princi- ples which every body readily admits, and by gradual advances reaches out into the inadmissible, and even the unthinkable; but does it so deftly that the un- wary are easily led captive by its subtle genius— the more easily, since its leadings harmonize with the natural propensities of human nature. All parties are ready to grant that the relations ex- isting between mind and body are very intimate; that mind, as we know it, does not exist without body. Man is not all soul, neither is he all body, but is both. Thus much physiology teaches us. This she does, by calling our attention to those organs of the body most closely associated with the mind, and the characteristic phenomena which accompany cerebral action. In a former chapter attention was called to the marvelous structure of the nervous system, and we there found marked indications of All-wise design. We do not wonder that physiologists, constantly engaged in the study of physical phenomena, constantly employed with their vivisections, chemical reactions, and end- less experiments, should come to almost expect to find the very seat of life, the very inmost soul of man. The tracing of these experiments is full of genuine 2:21 Man a Revelation of God. interest, as far as they pertain to the legitimate domain of physiology, and are performed by men of recog- nized standing in that department of science. All that we complain of is that semi-scientific philosophers are constantly endeavoring to substantiate some skep- tical theory of irreligion, by appeals to data which have never been themselves substantiated. Of all the non-sequiters that have been foisted upon the world, some of the most far-fetched are met with in the writings of these theologico-physiological philos- ophers, some of whom would appear to possess very little actual knowledge of physiology, but to be adepts in the use of elastic inference. Sensory impressions are made upon the nervous system; which, in its minute ramifications, reaches every part of the body, and somehow these impres- sions are communicated to the mind. The most superficial observation leads to the con- clusion that the central organ of thought and action is within the skull. Proceeding to the study of this central organ, we find it made up of various lobes, and of two distinct kinds of substance, and divided into two hemispheres, or halves. Careful investigation has enabled us to assign to the upper and forward portion of the brain, called the cerebrum, the larger share in all intellectual proc- esses. Thus far we all a^ree. The intimate relation existing between the various organs and parts of the body, and this cerebrum, through the marvelous In His Mental Chabactebistics. 225 nervo-telegrapliie communication, is patent to every student ; and yet one would conclude, from the patron- izing air with which certain infidel philosophers in- form us of this intimate relation, that it was a new discovery, on which they had some special claim. But when these same would-be informants proceed to in- struct us that the cerebrum is the mind — that memory, reason, emotion — in a word, the whole mind — is only so much pulpy gray substance — they are taking a long stride into the unknown, and we cannot go with them. It is true that thought, as we know it cannot exist without the brain, but it is equally true that the brain can exist without thought. This will be universally admitted, and this admission necessitates the farther admission that thought is not the brain, for, if it were, the brain could not exist without it. Let the reader carefully note that I say, " Thought, as we know it, cannot exist without the brain," for we believe that thought, as existing in God and the spir- itual realm generally, does exist without the materia! brain. The gray substance is absolutely necessary to thought in our present existence, just as the writer's pen, or its equivalent, is absolutely necessary to his writing ; but who will say that the pen is the writing ? The latest investigations in physiological science leave the problem of the body's relation to the mind just here — declaring the former to be but the instru- ment of the latter, and the brain to be a part of the 10* 226 Man a Revelation of God. body. Hence the final conclusion of all genuine sci- ence is that the mind of man is not material, but that it must work through a material instrument as long as it remains under our observation. This appears to me a sufficient answer to all objectors who would ma- terialize mind and its phenomena, but I am glad to support my own opinion with that of others. The author of Cosmic Philosophy, Professor Fisk, says : u One grand result of the enormous progress achieved during the last forty years, in the analysis of both psychical and physical phenomena, has been the final and irretrievable overthrow of the material- istic hypothesis. 1 ' The author of the Philosophical Basis of Theism, Professor Harris, says : " Material- ism is essentially the dogmatic assertion that all phe- nomena are the manifestations of matter and force and are accounted for by them. Mental phenomena are realities which materialists do not deny, but which they try to account for as manifestations of matter and force. But they are proved to be not the mani- festations of matter and force, and not accounted for by them. . . . And this conclusion implies that material- ism, as a philosophical theory of the universe, is an entire failure. . . . That the physical phenomena recog- nized by science as concomitant with mental phe- nomena are themselves, as explanations of the mental phenomena, inconceivable, and involve insuperable difficulties." Sir William Dawson, in a treatise on the same sub- In His Mental Characteristics. 227 ject, says : " It has become evident that the more re- cent discoveries as to the functions of brain will not warrant the extreme views of materialists. Force, whatever may be its true character, is now regarded as something distinct from matter, and that by means of which matter is put into motion, and consequently eventuates in the phenomena with which we are fa- miliar. Now, man is essentially an active power, who by his volition puts forth forces to mold and change material things. These do not originate in any part of his body, which is simply an instrument employed by the mind, but in his spiritual nature, which is in reality his true self. The action of mind upon and through the body manifests the operation of a con- scious force which can have originated in nothing but spirit, and the cessation of the operation of that force and the negation of consciousness is utterly impossible to conceive."* Without further citation of authorities, or further development of the argument, I feel warranted in proceeding to consider the characteristics of the hu- man mind, assuming the demonstrated existence of not merely a thinking power in man, as opposed to the doctrine of agnosticism, but also of a real entity, distinct from body, which we call mind, as opposed to materialism, positivism, sensationalism, evolutionism, and any and every other ism which undertakes to deny such entity. * Revelation ami Natural Science, p. 31. 22S Man a Kevelation of God. I believe that, without laying ourselves open to the charge of " begging the question," we may speak of the manifestations of that entity in the terms which men in general are accustomed to apply to the mani- festations of mind, and seek for a revelation of God therein. The characteristics of the mind which furnish indi- cations of a divine Author are so numerous, and strik- ing, that I cannot hope to give to each one the atten- tion it deserves, but may simply notice a few, and these without any pretensions to either logical se- quence or completeness. Intuition. I would first call attention to intuition, not with the purpose of discussing this power philosophically, but with a view to discovering therein indications of the divine image. It is by the intuitive power of the mind that we become acquainted with the universal principles which underlie all correct thinking. Intuition gives us uni- versal truths or self-evident knowledge, as, for exam- ple, the axioms of mathematics, the fundamentals of logic, and the data of self-consciousness in general. I say it is by the intuitive power of the mind that we reach and hold these fundamental truths, for they are not a somewhat which is thrown into, or impressed \tpon, the mind by some power inherent in that some- what, or by some power outside of and unknown to In His Mental Chabactebistics. 229 the mind ; bnt the mind is itself active in this funda- mental knowing ; in the mind itsel fmheres the power to intuit — to, in a sense, formulate certain basal prin- ciples or axiomatic truths, which it holds unyieldingly as necessarily true, and which every other healthy human mind holds in the same manner and in the same sense. How it does this it is not our province to explain, nor has any man a good reason for asking an explanation. The fact is here, is manifest to every individual ; and the very inexplicability of the how only serves the more perfectly to separate this power from the ordinary explainable powers of the mere bodily organism, and to mark it with superior dignity. There has been an almost endless amount of meta- physical quibbling, and bandying about of big words to no good purpose, over this question of the intui- tions. There has also been much of very great value written upon the same subject. Some of our wisest men have handled it with the utmost clearness, and have uniformly come at last to substantially the con- clusion to which the clear common sense of even the unlearned man of careful thought is sure to come j namely, that the mind, the ego within, is consciously active in formulating for itself even these primitive data of necessary truth ; that, although it does not stop to go through any laborious, protracted process of reasoning to make out that the whole of a thin^ is greater than any of its parts, or that a body cannot 230 Man a Revelation of God. he and not be at the same time and in the same sense, yet it does act in the decision, it does contribute something thereto, instead of being a mere mass of impressionable matter or sensitized plate, which pas- sively receives some thing from somewhither — nobody knows whence. Now mark the marvelous sweep of this intuitive power. It is a power which not only contributes that primitive knowledge of our every- day experiences which is so important to all of us, no matter how lowly our position or how circumscribed our field of view, and which in a very important sense makes the most obscure man a veritable sovereign; but it forms the sure foundation of the most elaborate sreneraliza- tions of the foremost minds in all ages, and is that without which all intellectual advancement would be impossible. It enables man to make calculations the bare results of which would seem beyond all compre- hension, to say nothing about the intricate mazes through which the various processes of the solution had to be carried. But through all these apparently dizzying measurements and formulae, geometrical and other figures, this power guides, placing knowl- edge to knowledge, relation to relation, inference to inference, with unerring precision, and, in the well- trained mind, without conscious effort. In such exer- cise this power grows, and upon it seems to feed in such a manner that the entire being is exhilarated. Who that has ever passed successively from the ele- In His Mental Characteristics. 231 mentary processes of geometry on up through the integral and differential calculus does not remember with what a sort of indefinable uplift the solution of the first difficult problem seemed to " come to him" while he was all the while conscious that " he did it?" Who does not remember how his whole nature seemed to glow and burn, as with an inner fire truly super- natural, when the vaster generalizations of some of the problems of the higher mathematics took on form and substance, and he shouted "Eureka," with full, soul-cheering certainty ! Let not some critical reader here congratulate him- self that he has discovered inconsistency in the author, in that he is attributing to intuition the triumphs which belong to inductive reasoning. Be that as it may, the intuitive power plays a very important part in all these processes. The mind arrives at all its conclusions by a process of reasoning, however rapid that process may be. What we call intuition, or intuitive reason- ing, as distinguished from reasoning in the common acceptation of the term, seems absolutely instantane- ous in its action ; but this does by no means invalidate its claims to genuineness. Although w r e think of it as instantaneous, it consumes time in its processes, though such minute portions thereof as to be undis- coverable by any known means of measurement. In other words, its action is "as quick as thought," and we have nothing quicker with which to com- pare it. 232 Man a IIevelation of God. In the calculations instanced above, or even in sim- ple addition, there are numerous illustrations of this rapidity of thought. Place before the average book- keeper a column of figures to be added. Let it ex- tend the entire length of a sheet of foolscap, and almost before you could read the figures, yes, quicker than the ordinary reader would call out the figures one by one, he will tell you the sum total of the entire column. This is so commonly done that we do not often stop to consider what must take place in that book-keeper's mind in order to accomplish the result. In the first place, perceptive or presentative intuition must clearly recognize the first figure, and give it its true value ; then, holding this firmly within its grasp, must clearly recognize the second figure, and give it its true value ; and then, with both images and values securely 'held, rational processes must make out and declare the sum of the two, which sum must now take the place in perception which was previously occupied by the two separate figures, and alongside of it must be placed, by the presentative faculty, a third figure; and so on through the whole column. At each successive step new figures are seized upon, and old ones released, new totals made up, and old ones cast aside; and all with such rapidity that the most fluent speaker cannot possibly articulate even the results as fast as all of these multiple processes can be gone through by his marvelous mind-faculty. In His Mental Characteristics. 233 Moreover, not merely one column, but oftentimes two or even three or more columns, will be added with almost startling rapidity. Nor is this all, but large numbers will be multi- plied and divided with a facility which is absolutely amazing to any one who has never studied this God- given, Divinity-revealing faculty, which resides in every mind, and only needs cultivation to enable it to assert its power. Who can fail to see in all this the plainest indica- tions of Spirit? True, we cannot mathematically demonstrate that all these operations may not be per- formed by means of some hitherto unknown processes of material nature ; but no reasonable man asks that a negative shall be mathematically demonstrated. Nor can we thus demonstrate the positive existence of Spirit, but we can discover such sure indications thereof that the mind rests satisfied in the conscious- ness. This introduces us to that phase of intuition con- cerning which I have as yet said but little in this connection, but which was under review while deal- ing with agnostic objections ; namely, self -conscious- ness. The soul's recognition of itself as a " self? and of its surroundings as surroundings, and of its acts as self-acts — this is the very foundation of our being. This is that beneath which and beyond which we cannot go. This is the inner sanctuary of the soul — that holy of holies which no scalpel ever lays bare, no 23± Max a Revelation of God. microscope ever sees, no spectruni analysis ever re- solves, no chemical reaction ever affects — which all science and all philosophy have striven in vain to ex- plain, but which is naked and open to itself, and the denial of whose existence has been shown to argue either insanity or insincerity. Here every normal mind rests secure in its own conscious being, looks calmly out upon its environ- ment, and receives impressions from without, through the senses; looks reverently up into the face of the Author and reflects his image, declaring within itself, and for itself, that truth is the same every-where and at all times; that when it cognizes a truth it knows it to be such, and that every other mind, even the mind of the Eternal, must of necessity — the neces- sity of His all-perfect attributes — cognize it as the same. Thus does each individual man, in this very funda- mental element of his mind, become a revelation of God unto himself, whether he will confess it or not. This may sound like dogmatism, and no doubt the disciples of nescience and materialism will character- ize it as such, but we claim to have shown satisfactory indications of the validity of our position, and appeal to the " consciousness " of every reader, the objector included, in support thereof. I take pleasure in here adding the following from The Logic of Introspection, a most suggestive and very able work by the .Rev. J. B. Wentworth, D.D. : In His Mental Characteristics. 235 "Looking within, the arcana of my .own mind, I think I see there evidences of the Divine inworking. I seem to myself to find there certain modes of Su- pernal Energy operating within me. — Facts, that are Supernatural, the result of a Divine Force acting upon my mind; a sense of God moving in and upon my mental being, and producing therein unique conscious phenomena ; which, my reason beholding, it at once attributes to a Supernatural Source, and, by them, gains at once, not merely or especially, an idea of God, but a vision of God. . . . For, it seems plain to my reflective thinking, that God as positively enters the domain of human Consciousness, through the Religious or Spiritual faculties of man's nature, as that Matter or Body does, by means of the powers of Sense-per- ception. And, we may have as emphatic a subjective sense of the Divine Nature, as we have of Self, if we will but listen attent to the voices that speak to the ear of Spiritual Self-consciousness." Memory. The next characteristic of the human mind to which I desire to invite attention is memory. This is certainly one of the most useful, as well as one of the most interesting and wonderful faculties of the mind. It is not my purpose to enter into any discus- sion of the metaphysics or philosophy of memory, which might well occupy an entire chapter, or even an entire volume, but simply to direct attention 236 Man a Revelation of God. thereto, as a faculty of the mind which speaks in unmistakable language of an omnipotent Creator. Those who desire to study it critically can find an abundance of literature on the subject, and wide differences of opinion as regards abstract definitions — from Sir William Hamilton, who would consider it a capacity* rather than a faculty, to Hopkins, McCosli, and Harris, who would consider it an actual power of the mind — but substantial agreement as regards its results. The vast importance of memory must appear evi- dent to any one who will consider it for a single mo- ment. What were all the other faculties of the soul without memory ? The intuitive power might per- form its wondrous work, and formulate all those great fundamental principles of thought and knowl- edge of which we have been studying, and if there were no registration of them, if they could be given no permanency, there could be no extended use thereof for purposes of reflective thought or consecu- tive reasoning. Moreover, we could never gain any valuable ex- perience from all the information received through the senses. Sight, hearing, touch, taste — all the senses, might convey to us their normal impressions, but they would profit or please us only for the moment, and would be gone forever. No such word as " expe- rience" would be needed in our vocabulary. * Metaphysics, p. 414. In His Mental Characteristics. 237 Consider what this means, and there dawns upon us some conception of what memory does for us even in its most ordinary exercise ; some conception of what we should be without this faculty. The past an utter blank! Each moment gone beyond recall, with all that it brought us, as soon as the succeeding moment approaches ! The thought is too cheerless to be enter- tained. And yet the wisest physiologist, or the most skillful chemist, has never succeeded in finding out what takes place in the mind by way of " registra- tion" or "storing up;" and the profoundest philos- opher has never satisfactorily explained it. Sufficient for us that this power exists, with all its manifold advantages. Some writers have been inclined to discount the worth of memory as an intellectual faculty, holding that an unusually good memory indicates a lack of logical reasoning power. There may be some truth in this, but not necessarily. It is true that we often find a person of uncertain logical strength manifest- in- surprising readiness in retaining concrete facts and figures; but this does by no means signify that the ready memory is the occasion of the weak log- ical faculty, any more than unusually good eye- sight in a person partially deaf signifies that the ready sight is the occasion of the poor hearing. It simply indicates that one faculty may be, by nature, superior to another in certain minds; or, what seems to me more probable, that one faculty has been culti- 238 Man a Revelation of God. vated more carefully than another, and the person has come to depend upon it, rather than the other, thus continuing to increase the disparity. It has been held by some that every incident, im- pression, or fact, however trivial, of which the mind takes cognizance is retained, and at some future time will return to consciousness. That such is the case no one can be certain, but there are many well- known facts which seem to warrant this conclusion. These facts assure us that all our experiences may come back to us in every minutest detail, and that many of them certainly will. How this truth adds weight to the otherwise insignificant circum- stances of life ! Memory is an ever-present photogra- pher, with cameras pointing in every direction through all the senses, and through consciousness as a whole; constantly shifting her scenes, and, with more than lightning speed, completing and storing away her negatives, to be brought out as occasion shall offer during advancing life ; and, as we believe, to be brought out in their completeness after the close of life. How careful, then, should we be of our sur- roundings, and even of our thoughts ! How we should treasure every ennobling truth, and every ele- vating opportunity ! Emphatically true does it be- come, that every person builds his own dwelling, and adorns it for himself, and in it he must abide. Surely, none but Divine Wisdom could have de- vised such a plan for the restraint of evil passions, In His Mental Characteristics. 239 and the subduing of vain imaginations. The phys- ical law of entail does hold in the mental world, in this particular at least. Furthermore, we find in this faculty a cheering revelation of God in his benevolent attributes, when we consider how the joy and gladness of life are increased hereby. Not only is memory a powerful deterrent from wrong living and impure thinking, but an equally powerful incentive to right living and chaste thinking. Moreover, we find that memory, under the training of good desires and a righteous will, retains most viv- idly and permanently the pleasant, satisfying experi- ences of life. Then, also, in childhood and youth, this faculty is specially active, and treasures up the bright and joyous incidents of glad young life with eager love, and makes them a never-failing source of comfort in after years. What joy to the aged pilgrim to sit amid the lengthening shadows of earthly life, and allow thought to go back over the past ! As memory, with her blessed resurrection power, does her characteristic work, his enfeebled frame becomes lithe and strong again, his broken voice resonant and full, his dimming vision clear, and, with every sense awake, and heart throbbing with young life, he is a boy again, mingling with unbounded gladness in the scenes of childhood ; and, what is specially remarkable, as above suggested, he mingles in those scenes without the annoyances and 2i0 Man a Revelation of God. childhood trials which vexed his young spirit fifty years before. Only the brightest visions come back with full force. What satisfaction to the mature scholar, who now enjoys the repose of conscious intellectual power, a position of established recognition, and a sure compe- tency, to go back in thought over the days of his early intellectual struggles, in the midst, perhaps, of financial embarrassments ! The vision rises before him in such soul-satisfying grandeur that he almost shouts aloud again, as he swings his hat with the rest in some glad hurrah over a class triumph, or again fervently thanks God, at the close of some final examination, that, amid all the embarrassments, he has been kept, and helped, and permitted to pass up. Above all the satisfaction of present honors, from his constituents, he counts those old college-day visions ; and if ever his cheeks are wet with tears of joy over victories won they are caused to flow by old- time memories. The same is true of the wealthy business man. More to him than his great factories or stores, more to him than even his palatial residence, with all its elegant appointments, are the pictures which mem- ory paints of the first small business beginnings, and the first little cottage, with all the long series of struggles out of which the great fortune has come. Now, when we take into account the absolutely In His Mental Characteristics. 2±1 uuexplainable nature of tins faculty, which somehow stores up the experiences of a life-time, and yet fur- nishes no trace of that "how" or the "where;" when we consider its immense practical importance, so great that without it we could not carry on any of the ordinary affairs of life successfully, and then add to these its bearing on the formation of character, and its service as the enhancer and perpetuator of our joys, memory stands out before us as a truly divine gift, even if not " God's divinest gift," and be- comes an unmistakable revelation of God in man. The quaint " proverbial philosopher " has said, "Memory, the daughter of Attention, is the meet- ing mother of Wisdom." . Imagination. As the complement of memory, I now undertake a brief discussion of imagination. This faculty of the mind has been variously estimated by different writers of recognized ability, some considering it to be quite subordinate, and of decidedly little worth; others placing it among the higher and diviner gifts of the mind. As to this comparative estimate I have no desire to dogmatize ; but, considered in its essential character, this faculty certainly occupies a very important posi- tion, and performs a most important part in many of the higher employments of life ; while, considered 11 212 Man a Revelation of God. with reference to the subject we have in hand, it takes very high rank. In a certain sense it may be considered the creative faculty of the soul. "Not in the sense that the imag- ination actually brings any thing into being from nothing, for only God himself can do this ; but in that it creates, or puts into a form of mental con- creteness, that which previously existed only in the faintest outlines, or the most shadowy suggestions — so faint and shadowy, indeed, as to have been invisi- ble to a mind possessed of little imaginative power. Herein lies the peculiar significance of this faculty as a revealer of God in man, namely, in that it approaches, to all intents and purposes, so near to the accomplishment of what the universal human consciousness declares to be possible only to divine power. We walk into a celebrated picture gallery, and stand before a good copy of some ideal masterpiece, for example, "The Transfiguration." We study its general outline, and are attracted by its comprehen- sive boldness. Led on to a closer scrutiny, we care- fully scan each form and figure. Our interest in- creases. We gaze upon the delineation of features ? the lights and shadows, the reflected glory and the almost speaking gladness, and are enraptured while we gaze ; and yet all this is merely an ideal picture, a creation of the imagination out of certain mental con- cepts obtained from reading. In His Mental Characteristics. 243 We walk through some magnificent cathedral, and take note of its symmetrical proportions, its elaborate adornings, and its exquisite beauty of design as a whole, and when we stop to consider that all this, which, in its present concrete form, fills us with aston- ishment, must necessarily have existed in its entirety as an ideal form in the mind of the architect, who had never seen one like it, we gain a new conception of the creative power of the imagination, and see, a little more clearly, the image of God reflected in the " man of the draughting instruments." We open some great poem, like the " Iliad " or " The Inferno," and as we read on, and one vision after another rises before our minds, in all its real- istic beauty or ugliness — overflowing joy, or heart- breaking grief— we find ourselves saying, "This is history ; this is true to the life ; the writer must have been there;" but at the same time we know better. We know that all these are only intellectual images, imaginary personages and experiences, built of the stuff " dreams are made of." And yet how superbly, how naturally, how grandly— shall we not say, how divinely ? — built ! Once more. Here stands a Sumner or a Gladstone, a Simpson or an Edwards, before eager thousands. He sways them — now as the ripening grain is swayed before the summer breeze, now as the forest trees before the mighty tempest. They weep, they laugh, they groan, they shout— they yield to doubt and fear, 244 Man a Revelation of God. or rise triumphant in spirit over every obstacle. What is the matter? What is this subtle power which moves men at the will of the orator ? Not the imagination alone. Certainly not ! And yet, strip every fact presented of every element con- tributed by this faculty to its elucidation, and you would look in vain for the manifestations so evident before. Nor yet alone in these somewhat exceptional affairs of life is this faculty found performing its mission. Every- where, in all conversation and all social inter- course, in every occupation and condition of our changing existence, imagination has a place and a function. Not always a good place or a beneficent function, for any faculty may be depraved ; and the purer, the more divine the normal, the more de- praved the abnormal. But if, in its divinely in- tended exercise, it touches with the roseate tinge of beauty many otherwise dreary places in life, lays the hand of blessing upon many an otherwise unblessed head, pours the oil of joy into many a wounded heart, and heals, as with the magician's wand, a host of otherwise incurable ills, its perversions cannot invalidate its claims. Truly, that must be a dull and passionless soul which fails to recognize in this gentle, though powerful, this beautiful, though often hideous minister, a something above the earth, rather than of the earth, a very element of the divine, a heavenly messenger to man, dwelling within his In His Mental Characteristics. 245 own breast, and inviting to almost endless im- provement and cultivation. Reason. There are several other characteristics of the human mind which furnish a clear revelation of the Divinity within us, of which it would be pleasing to write, but these rapidly multiplying pages admonish me that the space which remains should be devoted to reflective knowledge or reason. This is the crown- ing distinction of the human intellect ; this the very key-stone of that wonderful arch up toward which all the other faculties are ever building, and by which they all find their strength and complete- ness conserved. They are fundamental, it is true, and in that sense are of more vital consequence than this, but this occupies the place of proudest distinc- tion and sublimest effort. The foundation stones would doubtless remain in position without the key- stone, but not so the key-stone itself. They would but very imperfectly perform the work intended, if left without it, but it, without them, would not be a key-stone at all. In and of itself reason can furnish nothing. It must ever be preceded by the intuitions and other fundamentals. Spontaneous knowledge always supplies the raw material on which reflective knowledge, or reason, may do its work, and out of which it may produce such new and beautiful forms as to constitute them genuine creations. 216 Man a Revelation of God. The timber in the forest and the ore in the mine are fundamentally essential, and we magnify their importance ; but the majestic steamship, with her towering masts, and throbbing engines, and ribs of steel, is an essentially new creature, and as she speeds before the favoring breezes, or plows tri- umphantly through the angry billows full against the wildest tempests, we magnify her importance, and greet her as queen. There are probably comparatively few persons who ever seriously consider what a remarkable complex of activities the process of reasoning actually is. Sug- gest to men in general the mastery of a system of logic, and nineteen out of every twenty will decline the undertaking. If not on the score of supposed inability, they will put you off with the plea of in- sufficient leisure for such extended study. And yet, every normal mind constantly thinks in accordance with norms or rules. In other w T ords, every sane mind is a logical mind. All conversation is carried on on the basis of the logical syllogism ; that is, all conversation which is worthy the name. I do not say that all genuine conversation conforms strictly to severe log- ical methods. This would be to affirm a perfection in the untrained multitudes which is seldom, if ever, found iu the masters. But all genuine conversation or discussion is proceeded with on the basis of the syllogism. Very rarely do we state the complete syllogistic form in major and minor premise and In II13 Mental Characteristics. 2A7 conclusion. Some one of these is almost uniformly left to silent inference ; frequently even two of them. In this process of silent inference is seen one of the most wonderful elements of the reasoning power. A dozen times in the course of a few sentences, a thousand times in an address of a half hour's duration, will this faculty do its work, and do it so deftly as not to betray its own existence, even to its possessor. Need we wonder that it sometimes falls into fal- lacies ? The marvel is that there are not more frequent lapses. To illustrate my meaning. You call on your neighbor and find her child ill. You learn that it is malignant diphtheria. You return home and are now saying, " Mary Smith is going to die," or w r ords to that effect. This statement is an extreme- ly bald one — has no look of logic about it. Your interested listeners do not have the faintest tought of even a suggested syllogism, nor are you conscious of logical inference going on, or having gone on in your mind. Yet there has been such a process going on, and you are talking syllogistically. How? From past experience you have come to the fixed conclusion that, 1. All malignant diphtheria is fatal. During your stay at your friend's house you became aware that, 2. Mary Smith has malignant diphtheria ; and, 248 Man a Revelation of God. without any thought of inference or logical reasoning, or formulating a syllogism, you have come home, and are just now stating the logical conclusion of the above plain major and minor premises, namely, 3. " Mary Smith is going to die." A mother sees her child about to clutch a hot cof- fee-pot, and instantly catches its hand away. Unless you have considered this matter before, you smile when I say that her mind, in that instant, passed through all the steps of a syllogism, and acted ac- cording to the most elaborate logic. Yet this is no more than the simple truth. With lightning-like rapidity — nay, more, " as quick as thought " — that mother's mind formulates the following : 1. Baby's hand is just about to touch that hot coffee-pot. 2. Every hand that touches a hot cof- fee-pot gets burned. 3. Therefore, Baby's hand is about to be burned. But O, thou sluggish syllogism! Long before all thy "vain repetitions" of language have been, or could have been, spoken, baby's hand is safe — or perchance, into some other mischief. Of the various methods of reasoning, demonstra- tive and probable, analytic and synthetic, or inductive and deductive, etc., we have not space to treat, ex- cept to state a few general principles. Sir William Hamilton, in his Philosophical Dis- cussions, makes the following very terse and com- prehensive division of inductive and deductive reason- In His Mental Characteristics. 249 ino\ and the reader cannot do better than to fasten it firmly in mind : " Induction holds that what belongs, or does not belong, to all the constituent parts, belongs or does not belong to the constituted whole. Deduction, holds that what belongs, or does not belong, to the containing whole, belongs, or does not belong, to each and all of the contained parts." These, however, are but certain methods of hand- ling truth ; and, although worthy of all the attention which has been bestowed upon them, and perhaps deserving of much of the criticism, our chief interest must ever center in the examination of the funda- mental criteria of reason. Even these we cannot here discuss, but would call attention to the two kinds or two great subdivisions of truths, namely, necessary and contingent. Necessary truths are truths the opposite of which is unthinkable. Con- tingent truths are truths the opposite of which might be. The latter may be as certain as the for- mer, but they are not of necessity thus. When, in our reasoning, we make use of only nec- essary truths, as, for example, the axioms of math- ematics, we are reasoning demonstratively, and our conclusions are such that a sane mind must accept them, unless a flaw is found in the process. When we make use of contingent truths, it becomes only probable reasoning, and yet this may be as valid as the former. It cannot command assent, as oan de- 250 Man a Revelation of God. monstrative reasoning, but it can so convince as to win assent, which shall be equally perfect, and prove much more influential upon the life. When we compare the two as to their importance, taking into consideration the facts and circumstances with which human life has to deal, probable reason- ing is placed greatly in the ascendency. This takes into consideration all of evidence, as found in human testimony, in human experience, and in that remark- able weapon of the apologist — analogy. The triumphs of demonstrative reasoning, as seen in mathematics, wherein alone is found the strictly demonstrative process, are, after all, so largely con- tributed to by the intuitive faculty that this method loses much of its supposed glory. Moreover, the field is circumscribed in all directions, and admits of no extension. Probable reasoning, on the contrary, knows no bounds but the limits of thought, seizes boldly upon all problems, of all science, and all history, grapples with every question of life and destiny, and calmly rests the issue in the balances of judgment. But, of course, all this must be in accordance with certain well-established rules, or it amounts to nothing in the end. The mind must have a solid hold on what is absolutely known before reason can reach out into the unknown. Those who have been unaccustomed to the reading of mental science will now appreciate more fully the In His Mkntal Characteristics. 251 reason for so much space having been given to the establishment the claims of the fundamental condi- tions of all knowing. It having been satisfactorily shown that " thought implies the existence of a thinking being, to whom the thought belongs ; " that " quality implies a sub- stantive existence in which it inheres;" that " what- ever is perceived by the several senses exists, and substantially as perceived ; " that " whatever is re- called by the memory did exist as remembered ; " and that " consciousness, in general, makes a true and reliable report of our experience;" we are on solid ground as to primary facts. Certain fundamental judgments having also been satisfactorily settled, namely, that ''every effect must have a cause;" that "all objects exist in space and time ;" and that " space admits of various perfect and definite relations, both among objects and the different parts and posi- tions of the same, as time does among events and the different periods of the same existence ; " we are also on a firm foundation as to primary truths. The accept- ance of these basal conditions is necessary to all science, to physical no less than to mental, since, unless these can be depended upon for this and all other planets, the astronomer and the theologian, the physicist and the metaphysician, may as well mingle their instru- ments and books in a common heap, and apply the torch. But they can be depended upon. The evi- dence is complete, and there rises before us the sub- 252 Man a Revelation of God. stantial structure of the genuine monistic philosophy. Resting upon these fundamentals the entire universe of thought becomes one. Beholding the human reason binding together all other faculties of the mind, and satisfied that reason is the same every-where, we behold also the Infinite Reason binding together all the faculties (the laws, relations, and activities) of the universe. Here we discover the true doctrine of the " reign of law," of the unity of the universe. And how much more complete, and satisfactory to consciousness, is this conception than the materialistic ! Row it exalts law ! As we gain this face-to-face view of God, through the help of the image within our own souls, we behold, not an orphaned universe ruled by dead Fate, but a Divinely created universe controlled by harmonious, loving law. The revelation stands out bold and clear. We accept it gratefully and rejoice therein. With this conception of the divineness of reason, we no longer wonder at its marvelous achievements. To adequately notice these would involve the pres- entation of much that will necessarily come under review in ChajDter VI ; therefore I will avoid repe- tition by entirely omitting all such notice here. Consideration of the will is deferred to the next chapter, as belonging more naturally to the moral nature. What I have written is but a few meager hints, a few brief suggestions, of the almost in finite variety of In His Mental Characteristics. 253 details lying all about us as we enter the domain of the human mind. But this fact only lends additional force to the argument ; for, if in this imperfect pres- entation the revelation of God in man's mental characteristics shines forth so clearly, it cannot fail to appear absolutely unclouded to every reader who will be at the pains to follow out the lines of thought which have been merely suggested. " Come one, come all ! This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as II " — Scott's FAz- James. " My nerveless will is like a traitorous second, and deserts my purpose in the very gap of need." — Alexander Smith. "Conscience is a revelation of the Supreme God in man. And it brings man not only into converse with goodness, but relates him to it as the power which binds him in his daily life and would guide him to daily happiness." — Tulloch. " The satisfaction in consciousness of all intelligent and sentient beings is the governing motive in all virtuous acts." — Raymond. "Remorse is the pain of sin." — Theodore Parker. " Here, here it lies : a lump of lead by day, And in my short, distracted slumbers The hag that haunts my dreams." — Dryden. " Conscience, the torturer of the soul, unseen, Does fiercely brandish a sharp scourge within. Even you yourself to your own breast shall tell Your crimes, and your own conscience be your hell." — Future State. " These, having not the law, are a law unto themselves." — Paid. "I will put my law in their inward parts and write it in their hearts." — Jehovah. " A guilty conscience is like a whirlpool drawing in all to itself which would otherwise pass by." — Victor Hugo. In His Will and Moral Nature. CHAPTER V. IN HIS WILL AND MORAL NATURE. We have been considering in the last chapter man's mental characteristics. Among those characteristics the will occupies the most distinguished place. Over all the other faculties of the mind this faculty reigns supreme. As a sovereign he bears rule ; and yet, as a sovereign among constituents. I do not mean to say that the will, or indeed any other faculty, can be separated out as a distinct entity from the rest of the mind. The mind is one. It cannot be divided and subdivided into separate and independent powers. Much less, as some would teach, can these faculties be located in distinct portions of the brain. This sort of weighing and measuring, map- making and brain-surveying, is contrary to both good sense and sound psychology. But I do mean to say that in this one and indivisible whole, which w r e call mind, there are various faculties, each of which has something in itself which is sui generis, and therefore can be studied by itself, at least in its actions ; and in its nature, as associated with the other constituent parts of the mind. We have left the consideration of the will for the same chapter with the moral nature because of its 256 Man a Revelation of God. intimate connection therewith, which intimate and even fundamental connection will, I think, clearly ap- pear before we have completed our argument. I care not to enter upon a metaphysical discussion of the will, however interesting and profitable such discussion might prove, but simply wish to call atten- tion to a few fundamental principles, and some of the more manifest revelations of God, in the exercise of this faculty. Many profound thinkers have written learnedly upon the will, and I can hardly add any thing. Will has been variously defined, from the brief, bald, unsatisfactory definition of Edwards, namely, " The will is the power to choose," to the somewhat extended but almost equally unsatisfactory definition of Haven, namely, " I understand, by the will, that power which the mind has of determining or decid- ing what it will do, and of putting forth volitions accordingly. The will is the power of doing this ; willing is the exercise of the power ; volition is the deed, the thing done. The will is but another name for the executive power of the mind. What- ever we do intelligently and intentionally, whether it implies an exercise of the intellect, or of the feelings, or of both, that is an act of the will. All our voluntary, in distinction from our involuntary, movements of the body, and movements of mind, are the immediate results of the activity of the will."* * Mental Philosophy, p. 520. In His Will and Mobal Nature. 257 All of which is good as an explanation, but scarcely to the point as a definition, if intended as such, for the exact term which he is undertaking to define is used in the defining. Coleridge says, "Will is that which originates action or state of being," but this, of course, compre- hends too much, unless we pare down the term origi- nates to less than half its generally accepted bulk, and then we are thrown into equal though opposite diffi- culties. Whedon says, " Will is that power of the soul by which it intentionally originates an act or state of being." This seems to us to meet the re- quirements of a logical definition, although it also has had many criticisms heaped upon it. Another form in which the same author puts it is: " Will is the power of the soul by which it is the conscious author of an intentional act." Dr. Upham defines will to be " The mental power or susceptibility by which we put forth volitions." The truth is that nearly every writer on the will has some special theory in ethics to support, and his definitions, either consciously or unconsciously, bear the impress of that theory. Professor Harris gives a definition which, like that of Dr. Haven, is rather an explanation than definition. Still it is very excel- lent, and when I have given this I shall leave the reader to define will according to his own pleasure. " The will is the power of a person, in the light of reason and with susceptibility to the influence of 258 Man a Revelation of God. rational motives, to determine the ends or objects to which he will direct his energy, and the exertion of his energy with reference to the determined end or object. The will is a person's power of self-deter- mination. It is his power of determining the exercise of his own causal efficiency or energy. He can de- termine the end or object to which he will direct it ; he can exert it or call it into action when he will ; he can refrain from exerting it when he will. He has power of self-direction, self-exertion and self-restraint. This power is the will. Its function is, to determine the exercise of power. Its acts are determinations. We call it the power of self-determination."* Now, whatever may be the special metaphysical definition of the will adopted by my readers, I am inclined to think that all will agree that the will, as a power, has in it an element of the Divine so manifest that an appeal to consciousness cannot fail to reveal it. The human will, as far as we are able to determine, acts in its creative capacity, within its human limits, after the same identical fashion, and with the same sort of freedom, as the divine will. Endless as have been the controversies concerning the freedom of this faculty in action, I believe that if men would lay aside preconceived notions, and cease to press it into the service of some theological formula, there would soon be substantial harmony. An appeal to conscious experience, in any act requir- * Philosophical Basis of Theism, p. 349. In His Will and Mokal Natuke. 259 ing an exercise of the will, teaches us clearly, meta- physics all aside, that there is presented to the mind in some form a desire, or a want, and the mind forms some notion as to how that desire can be gratified, or that want supplied, and forthwith the will proceeds to put forth such efforts as the mind says are necessary to that gratification or supply. Every man's con- sciousness tells him that in the putting forth of this effort the will acts in a distinctively creative capacity, acts identically as we must think of the Infinite Creator acting in his creative, or directive, processes. The difference between the two is quantitative and not qualitative. There are things which God him- self cannot do. Let us, then, freely admit that man is placed under limitations, and not fear that in so doing we disrobe him of divinity. God cannot make two and two equal five, or a given mass to be round and square at the same time and in the same sense, or north to be south at the same time and in the same place, or right to be wrong in regard to the same act under the same circumstances. And yet, one would almost conclude that certain metaphy- sicians were disposed to consider it necessary that man be shown to be capable of doing some of these things, or their equivalent, in order to maintain his place as a man. Mistaken theorists ! Those who endeavor to make this appear are, as a rule, men who desire to lay upon supernaturalism a burden which does not belong to it, by demanding 2G0 Max a Revelation of God. proof of something the very existence of which is not claimed. We are offensively and patronizingly told that the universe is under law, and that man, being an integral factor in that universe, must come under its general laws ; and that the will, being a part of the man, must be under law. As if we did not know, or were unwill- ing to admit the facts ! But " law " is a very ambigu- ous term, and nothing pleases a controversialist with a poor case quite as well as a word which can be made to assume almost any meaning the user may choose. In view of these facts, before we can proceed intelligently with the consideration of our subject, some attention must be given to this term. Law, properly understood, is every-where, and well de- serves the high consideration accorded to it. No class of thinkers are more enthusiastic in its praise than theologians, and yet, one who confines his read- ing to the works of modern skeptical scientists would naturally conclude that theology had completely out- lawed all law, and was running wild and frenzied in a domain all fanciful and marvelous, wherein nothing possessed any regularity ; while physical science had become the conservator of all regulation, certainty, and law, and was maintaining not only the equilibrium of the material universe, but patiently striving to bring the universe of mind and morals into some sort of harmony in action and sentiment. Long before the great modern revival of physical In His Will and Moral Nature. 201 science put into every body's mouth the praises of " natural law " the great Hooker declared : " Of law no less can be said than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world ; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power, both angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different spheres and maimer, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." * And, all through the years of unparalleled progress which have since intervened, no class of men have so uniformly honored and reverenced general laws as theists. Sir William Dawson says in plain and unambiguous language : " The creative work is itself a part of divine law, and this in a threefold aspect : first, the law of the divine will or purpose ; second, the laws impressed on the medium or environment ; third, the laws of the organism itself and of its continuous mul- tiplication, either with or without modifications." But, as already indicated, there is a wide difference between the meanings attached to this term by theists and anti-theists, as well as a striking contrast between the character of the language and argument made use of by these two classes. For example, we take up The Dynamics of Nerve and Muscle, by Charles Bland Radcliffe, and we find a most stilted exaltation of physical law, and a constant slurring of those who * Ecclesiastical Polity, book i. 2G2 Man a Revelation of God. do not bow humbly at the shrine of naturalism. He concludes as follows : " Every tiling is in opposition to the dogma which ascribes to nerve and muscle a life of which the state of action is the expression." " Dogma" indeed! In the mind of such a writer, whose pages are literally teeming with the rankest assumption and assertion, every principle enunciated by a believer in revelation is " dogma," every oppo- nent a " fanatic," and every genuine Christian a de- luded follower of a still more deluded Leader. The same author in a more recent work, Vital Mo- tion a Mode of Physical Motion, says : " Every thing is in flat contradiction to the current doctrine of vital motion. Every thing tends to bring phenomena which have been regarded as exclusively vital under the dominion of physical law, to transmute vital motion into what proves to be nothing more than a mere mode of physical motion." What have we here? A most characteristic and striking illustration of the absurd extremes to which a pet theory may carry a very learned man, if he con- stantly looks upon one side of all truths, and persist- ently shuts out all elements which would spoil his the ory. And such illustrations are abundant ; abundant among not merely the dabblers in physical science, from whom we should expect just such inconsiderate- ness, but also among those from whom we have a right to expect better judgment, and more conservative language. In IIis Will and Moral Nature. 263 One of the most characteristic marks of genuine scientific attainments is modesty. As a most gratify- in** change from the preceding, I quote the following from a Christian theist, Hermann Lotze, in a work of great erudition recently published (1884), entitled Investigation : " In theoretical investigations of reality, we mean by a law the expression of the peculiar inward rela- tion which exists between two facts and constitutes the ground at once of their conjunction and of the manner of this conjunction, and in every simple case there is but one law. Tiie rule, on the other hand, prescribes a number of logical or mathematical opera- tions of thought, by which we are so to combine our perceptions as to arrive at conclusions, which in their turn tally with reality ; and there may be several such rules, all equally sound, for one and the same case. It is clear that not a few of the methods of procedure at present in vogue are mere rules ; but, more than that, it remains an open question whether any one of the laws, which we believe ourselves to have discov- ered, really deserves the name. The ultimate crite- rion of sense-perception is to be found in sense itself." The manifest modesty of this statement concerning law — law ! the term which every fledgeling in physi- cal science, and every novitiate in metaphysics, as well as the great materialists and pantheists, have first dei- fied, and then fallen prostrate before in most adoring 261 Man a Kevelation of God. worship — cannot but impress every careful thinker, coming as it does from a very prince among scientific men, and uttered as it was in the full light of the most recent revelations of applied science. It is but another striking illustration of the contrast existing between the genuine searcher after truth and the mere theorist, who, having formulated an hypothesis supposed to be new, or having caught up the echo of some popular thinker's formula, continues to nurse it, or re-echo it, determined to bring all the world to his criterion. So far from its being true that Christian scholars, believing in man's sovereignty as a free moral agent because of this endowment of will, desire to invalidate the claims of law in its true sense, they fully realize, and constantly affirm, that law is necessary to that sovereignty ; that without law all would be veriest chance, amounting to the worst sort of fatalism. This fact is dwelt upon by many writers on mind and morals, and I can hardly conceive of scientific men remaining ignorant of the fact, unless it be be- cause they ignore all books on mental and moral topics as unworthy the name of science, and so never examine them, much less read or study them. The following from Dr. Upham is only one of many sim- ilar declarations by authors on mental science of almost every phase of theological opinion : " Law and liberty necessarily go together. If it could be shown that the will acts irrespective of any In His Will and Moral Nature. 265 determinate methods and principles of action, in other words, if laws were not in any sense predicablc of the will, then it would, of course, follow that it is the subject of mere contingency and accident, which entirely and fully comes up to the utmost idea of fatality. And it would be found to be a fatalism of the worst kind ; an unintelligent fatalism. But hav- ing shown that the will has its laws, we secure in that single fact the possibility of liberty which we could not have without it. We are, accordingly, in a situ- ation in which the liberty of the will, that important and noble attribute of a morally accountable nature, is not necessarily excluded, which would certainly be the case, if the will were driven about hither and thither, without any possible foresight of what is lia- ble to take place, and without any regularity of action. If there is perfect harmony in other parts of the mind there will be perfect freedom in the will."* But I must not devote any further space to the con- sideration of this somewhat metaphysical phase of our subject. Thus much has seemed necessary, to the end that what may be said hereafter, and the in- ferences which shall be drawn, might rest on a sure and well-understood foundation. With this view of the will as an " either-causal power," in the midst of all the conflicting circum- stances and conditions of life, we gain new concep- tions of the dignity of humanity, of its separateness * Mental Philosophy, p. 505. 12 2CG Man a Revelation of God. from all other earthly life, of the sacredness of duty, and of the immeasurable significance of that little word ought. Even an imperfect recognition of this view led Kant to give way to his enthusiasm as follows: " Duty ! thou great, sublime name ! Thou dost not insinuate thyself by offering the pleasing and the popular, but thou commandest obedience. To move the will, thou dost not threaten and terrify, but sim- ply settest forth a law, which of itself finds entrance into the soul ; which even though disobeyed wins ap- proval and reverence, if not obedience ; before which the passions are silent, even though they work secretly against it." And who that has moved much among men and taken note of their struggles and triumphs has not been led to similar thinking, even though he may never have put his thought into words ? Man, as an animal, is full of animal passions and ap- petites. If only an animal he would be entirely at their mercy. But endowed with will he restrains ap- petite and curbs passion, asserting his supremacy over not only every material, but every physiological force, and manifests forth the divinity which is within him. So important is the will that it has come to be regarded, in some sense, as the measure of the man. To say of a man, " Pie has a weak will," is to offer as your opinion that he is effeminate. "He is a brilliant fellow, but has no will of his own," is accepted as a In His Will and Moral Nature. 207 sure prophecy of failure ; while " He is a slow thinker and a blundering speaker, but has a will like iron," is accepted as an almost certain prophecy of success. This is the universal verdict of mankind. Will is acknowledged to be an all-important faculty. A man without will-power would descend to a level lower than the brutes. To a "lower level,' 1 be- cause, with all the animal passions and appetites of brutes, he has not the natural brute instinct to pre- serve him from self-degradation. Behold a man who, by the indulgence of an appe- tite for strong drink, has suffered the inevitable con- sequence — a weakened will ! lie has, perhaps, a gen- erous, kindly, large-hearted nature. lie has a wife and children whom he loves with all the wealth of affection possible to the human heart. He has a beautiful home, furnished with every comfort. He has a host of true and tried friends who regret, beyond expression, to see his downward course, and are ready to let the past be past and consider life as begun anew. lie has been drinking to excess for years. His debauches have become prolonged and awful in the extreme, un- til finally delirium tremens have seized upon him, and after a severe illness he has recovered, and during his convalescence he has shed many bitter tears over his reckless and shameful debaucheries. Surrounded by the ennobling influences of his beautiful home, and encouraged by the abiding love of wife and children and the hearty assurances of his friends that he shall 2G3 Man a Revelation of God. be the same to tliem again as ever, if only lie will let drink alone, he has signed a total abstinence pledge, and goes forth fully resolved never to touch nor taste the accursed stuff. I am supposing him to be trusting simply in himself; supposing him not to have taken his weakened will to Christ to have it made anew, in the obtaining of a regenerated nature. He remains firm for a little time, till the old appetite comes back again, or until some old crony invites him to take a social glass. He looks at, or thinks about, the drink, and all his past life comes up before him. Memory is as true as ever. lie sees his recent condition of beastly drunkenness, and subsequent terrible illness. lie sees the former disgrace and heart-breaking grief of his family, and their glad-hearted hopefulness, when, after his recovery, he over and over again beo-u-ed their forgiveness and promised to never, never drink again. He sees the whole with a vivid- ness almost supernatural, and his very soul abhors the drink, while his whole nature revolts against allowing a single drop to pass his lips ; and yet, alas ! his will destroyed, he yields, and drinks, and is soon a beast once more, wallowing in the mire. In contrast with this only too common scene, behold the man who, from his earliest youth, has firmly set his will against not only inherited appetites and car- nal passions, but also against adverse circumstances. We will suppose him born of a parentage both be- sotted and unclean; born in poverty and reared in In His Will and Moral Nature. 2C>9 disgrace. He was surrounded during childhood by every influence calculated to corrupt, and event- ually to destroy. But, as advancing boyhood devel- oped into a kind of premature youth, he began to learn something of the former history of his parents; learned that his mother was the child of wealth and culture, and married his father as a young man of brilliant prospects but fast habits; learned that during ten years of wedded life they lived in luxury, and moved in good society, notwithstanding his father's wayward life, but that gradually the ruin came, so that hisfiyes never saw a sober father, or a chaste mother. Learning these facts, he re- solved to rise above his surroundings and vindicate the family name and honor. Other boys around him spent their days in lazy strolls or lounging, and their nights in street mischief ; he spent his days in earnest toil at any thing which would bring him an honest dime, and his nights in reading and study. Other boys spent their money for cigar- ettes, candy, and toys ; he spent his for food and cloth- ing, and an occasional book. Other young men began to drink, and frequent places of vice, and did all in their power to induce him to join them, making use of both coaxing and taunts ; but, although inherited appetite gnawed, with what would seem resistless power to any ordinary youth, and his baser passions lured him on to go with them, he went not. There was ever a steady gleam in his eyes as they met the 270 Man a Revelation of God. eyes of his enticers, which led them finally to say, " It's no use. He is as stubborn as a mule." Other young men wore fine clothes, and boarded at expen- sive places, and sometimes made him feel that he was despised, but he pocketed every slight, ignored every supercilious snub, and, with face firm set as the face of fate, moved steadily on, never swerving a hair's-breadth from the determination, formed when a boy, to rise above his surroundings and vindicate the family name and honor. All blandish- ments of sin and all solicitations of ease were alike powerless to turn him from his chosen course. Some- times they came in upon him like a flood, and it seemed for a time that all the hosts of darkness, combined together in hideous shapes of hereditary tendencies, and adverse circumstances, and fiendish associates, would drag him down despite all resist- ance ; but out of all such times of awful crisis he came forth with unscathed soul, and with his will strength- ened by conflict. Behold him now as he moves, a prince among his peers ! All the adornments of learning have been added to a character solidified by suffering and sub- dued by grace. In the midst of multitudes of friends and admirers, and abundantly supplied with all that an honestly earned fortune can secure, he moves mod- estly on, a mighty power in the community, a cham- pion of every good cause, hailed as a benefactor every- where, his very presence a strengthening benediction. In His Will and Moral Nature. 271 Who shall say that here is not a revelation of God in the human will? Who so blinded by the false lights of a preconceived theory as not to see the image? Who so deafened by the clangor of athe- istical trumpets as not to hear the divine voice? My readers know full well that this is no overdrawn fancy sketch, but one which has had its parallel in every Christian land. History is full of such bright examples. Our own America already furnishes many striking illustrations of this divinity within us, as seen in the winning of literary or scientific fame, and in the creation of great fortunes, by boys who had no capital with which to commence except a sound body and that indomitable energy, or will- power, which never confesses failure, but builds anew on the ashes of what seemed complete destruction, while weaker wills are whining over their ruin. The super-sensual, or hyper-material nature of the will may further be seen in its power over all bodily and material forces. Will can stand true to right against every adverse power, both within and without. We sometimes hear people talk of breaking the will by physical force. But, in reality, this is impossible; and this very fact, that it is contrary to consciousness to con- ceive of breaking a will with clubs, or binding it with chains, is presumptive proof of our position. You may break a man's skull with your clubs, and pound every bone that is breakable into shivers, and 272 Man a Revelation of God. as loii£ as life lasts his will can assert itself against you, and defy your physical power. You may chain him fast to some lone rock, and permit starvation and exposure to do their destroying work; and though every physical force cries out against the will, though in the midst of his agonies you may offer him release if he will but speak a single word, which his will says shall not be spoken, he will remain silent. You may hold out to him the most tempting and savory food, while the gnawings of hunger are inex- pressibly awful, and tell him he may eat to his ii 11 if only that word be spoken, and still he will remain silent. Just when the most excruciating thirst of ap- proaching death is upon him, you may hold within one inch of those parched lips a glass of purest water, and however loudly every physical force in all his body, every atom with all its " potency," every muscle with all its " dynamical power," every nerve with all its "conserved energy," every blood corpuscle with all its marvelous "appetencies," however loudly they may one and all cry out, beseeching the will to speak that word, and secure the life-giving water, the word will remain unspoken. Silent, of that w^ord at least, those lips will grow T cold in death, every physical force cease its action, and the all-conquering spirit, of which the will is the sovereign part, escapes not merely your chains but all chains, and rises superior to every restraining force. Nor is this all. That same will, which cannot be In His Will and Mural Nature. 273 coerced by physical force, can itself coerce all those forces. It can say yes, as well as no. This is seen when the will compels any member of the body to do that against which every element of the bodily forces rebels ; as, for example, when Cranmer thrust his hand into the flame, and held it there until it was entirely burned to a crisp. Consider just how every physical force would do its utmost to snatch the smarting, writhing, roasting hand from the flame ! But will, for the sake of a deeply-grounded principle, said, " Stay where thou art, thou faithless hand," and stay it did, till it was no longer a part of Cranmer's body. The long list of martyrs furnishes a multitude of examples of this uncoercible, yet coercing, power of the will ; and ever} 7 reader can readily call them to mind without citation. I do not forget that in all these examples of Chris- tian martyrdom there is to be considered the moral element, the sense of obligation ; but, as will be sub- sequently pointed out, this largely inheres in the will, and cannot be separated therefrom. Piety alone, relig- iousness merely — ardent, eager, zealous love for Christ, no matter how genuine— never constituted a Latimer, a Ridley, or a Knox. With these, there must co-exist the inflexible will, to make up the martyr-spirit. Nor need we go back to those early days to find ex- amples thereof. This revelation of God in man is to be seen in many of the humbler walks of life, where self and all bodily desires and natural cravings are daily 12* 'J7! L Majj a Revelation of God. restrained by the power of a noble will, acting for the good of others. This hyper-material power of the will is also seen in its control over disease. Every physician has marked the workings of this power again and again, while numerous careful observers, not phy- sicians, cannot have failed to note the same thing. I have not space for detailed instances, but they are every-where, and the reader's own observation can supply them. Volumes which read like romance have been written by grave and learned doctors, relat- ing circumstances showing a mastery of the will over disease which seems really incredible. And yet the evidence is so explicit that it cannot be reasonably doubted. I remark, in passing, that one of the bald fallacies of skeptical reasoning is the attempt to make this well-recognized fact serve as a proof of the identity, or sameness, of mind and matter. That a more con- tradictory proposition can scarcely be formulated, or a more egregious non sequitur be proposed, has been sufficiently shown in the previous chapter. Water is not necessarily a house because water ex- tinguishes a fire which is burning up the house ; which is perhaps about all that is necessary to say in reply to this sort of naturalistic imreason. We come, however, to the fullest revelation of the divinity in man's will only when we consider its re- markable power over the other faculties of the soul and In IIis Will and Moral Nature. 275 over other men. The dignity and Godlikeness of " him who rnletli his own spirit" have long been acknowl- edged. The man who, under the severest provoca- tion, feels the hot torrents of a naturally violent tem- per surging through his soul, and knows that he can give vent to his wrath if he choose, without harm to himself or his own interests, but who, from sheer force of will, says to the angry billows of foaming passion, " Peace, be still," proclaims, with eloquence all the more divine because silent, the sovereignty of will In its exhibitions of power over other minds it, however, appears more conspicuously. It appears thus in the orator who is called upon to speak to an audience not in sympathy with himself or his theme; perhaps even violently opposed to him. lie takes the floor amid groans of derision and hisses of con- tempt. The crowd is angry and turbulent, but with calm dignity he begins. The gleam of his piercing eyes catches the eye of some of the most abusive, and they quail into silence. His voice begins to be heard, and there is something in it which is more than sound. There is an indwelling power which no one undertakes to explain, but which every body soon feels. Erelong, that surging, vindictive crowd be- comes a respectful audience. His masterful will, going out through eye and voice, holds them, while his arguments and persuasions convince and move them, until, at the close, those who were ready to mob him before he began are eager to do his bid- 276 Man a Revelation of God. ding. Again and again have howling mobs, thirsting for blood, been thus subdued and controlled. Again and again have parliaments and senates, conventions and councils, which seemed determined not to treat a speaker with even decent courtesy, been compelled to listen to and respect him, by sheer power of in- domitable will. The English House of Commons has been the theater of many a struggle which was almost solely a struggle of one will against a power- ful majority. Our own national council chambers have furnished the same pertinent illustrations. Hamilton, Clay, Webster, Sumner! What scenes of sublime will contests rise before the student of American history at the mere mention of such names ! This sovereign power also appears thus in the leader of armies. All the difference between a uni- formly victorious general and a uniformly retreating one is often in that will-power which dominates other minds, which makes fighters of cowards, and turns poltroons into heroes. Sheridan learns that disaster has come to his army, lie puts spurs to his horse, and makes all possi- ble haste to reach the scene of conflict. With every receding mile his determination to turn the tide of battle increases; so that, when he meets his Giibordinate commanders and their men in full re- treat, his will is fixed to conquer or die. He compels them to halt, to re-form their broken lines, to arrest Is II is Will and Mokal Nature. 277 the onward march of a powerful enemy flushed with victory — in a word, compels them to refuse to acknowl- edge themselves whipped, and whips the foe instead. Grant takes a discouraged and demoralized army, in a time when the North is half paralyzed by un- accounted-for delays and purposeless campaigns, and the South is flushed with the hope of ultimate success, and with a resolute will goes to work. He puts into shape the men lie has and gets more. He commences to advance, and holds his grip. Statesmen and other generals criticise and find fault, but he never fal- ters. Mountains of difficulty which cannot be re- moved he tunnels. Obstacles which would terrify other' men he rides triumphantly over. Finally, he brings every will into subjection to his own masterful will, and " On to Richmond " changes to '' Richmond is ours." Washington, born to wealth and luxury, and yet reared to honest toil and endowed with a sturdy will, lays down the surveyor's chain, and the peaceful pur- suits of agricultural life, to accept the organization and command of the colonial armies. A well organized, perfectly disciplined, and thoroughly equipped army and navy are determined upon the subjugation of a few sparsely settled colonies, whose inhabitants are without military stores or money to purchase them, without soldiers or money to clothe them, and an almost measureless frontier, along which hostile sav- ages hover, ready to join with tories in murder and 27S Man a Revelation of God. pillage. Worse than all these, there are men in places of influence and power, who are opposed to him at every step. And yet, with the majestic mien of conscious power, he moves straight forward from one crucial test to another, subduing traitorous hate here and stimulating disheartened loyalty there, by the same commanding, God-given power, until, with the scars of eight years of awful gloom and unequal conflict upon him, he receives the sword of Corn- wallis at Yorktown. Cromwell, the Hampden farmer, comes into English history apparently all unqualified, and full of incon- gruities ; but we soon discover that there is a some- thing within him which controls other men : a will which never quails, and always reigns supreme. Whether we behold him, early in his career, leading on his freshly recruited Ironsides in the skirmish at Winceby, or biding his time for a whole month round Musselburg and Calton Hill, awaiting with grim de- termination the opportune moment when, at Dunbar, he strikes down three thousand of Leslie's army, captures ten thousand, and sends the remaining thousands fleeing for their lives; or whether we be- hold him standing like adamant in the midst of contending factions and warring sections, disvolving parliaments and tottering thrones, we see the same sovereign will; the same divinity within puts its stamp on rough-jacketed plowman, Lord Lieutenant, and Protector of the Commonwealth. In His Will and Moral Nature. 279 One more example from the annals of war — Napo- leon, the u Little Corporal." He rises out of absolute obscurity. He manifests great daring, and comes into prominence as a military leader. Indications of that marvelous control over other minds, which we are now seeking to illustrate, have already become conspicuous when his troops are called upon to stand before the Mamelukes at the battle of the Pyramids in Egypt, where they are seen in all their grandeur. The French army was inferior in numbers, and formed in separate squares. The Mamelukes charged upon them with impetuous fury again and again. With bayonets and with horses, with every conceivable means, and with the most reckless daring, they strove to break those squares ; but in vain. Napoleon was in the midst of his men, and swerved not. The one inflexible will infused itself into all others and made them adamant. The same power is seen at Austerlitz. and on many another bloody field, and finally at Waterloo. But here, Greek met Greek. Another will, as stubborn and even more powerful than his own, was opposed to his. Here occurred one of the sublimest will-fights in all military history. The " Invincible Bonaparte " and the "Iron Duke!" All subsequent history changed by the quality of one human will! The proud conqueror of all the armies he has ever grap- pled with seeks the conquest of the whole of Europe, and the world. In his way stands a will, mighty to control itself and others. The story has been too 2S0 Man a Revelation of God. well and too often told to need repetition. The " Iron " yields not ! The mightier will abides, the weaker flees ! The writer does not, of course, suppose that in any of these examples of the control of one will over another, will was the only element ; or that "in these military contests the leader was the only factor, and deserving of all the credit. To suppose this would be folly ; and yet, in the central power of one sovereign will was the mainspring of action in all these contests. This same mastery of will over other minds is seen in all the walks of life. Here is a public school, in a rough, hard neighborhood. The district has long been a terror to public school teachers. Last October a frail little fellow was employed. When he came into the neighborhood, a stranger, every body that saw him said, " Why, he can't manage our school ! The big boys will turn him out of doors in less than a week." And the " big boys " were all on hand the first morning with that exact intention. But there was something in the appearance of the quiet little fellow that caused them to wait a little, just to "see what he was like." There was a directness, a pre- cision, a calm assurance about his words, and in his movements, that made him seem " bigger than his inches." Many grave consultations were held during the in- termissions of the first day, and around the " four In His Will and Moral Nature. 2S1 corners 1 ' in the evening. But two or three burly fellows declared that they " were not to be domineered over by a pale-faced boy like him." Accordingly, the next day they took occasion to place themselves squarely in conflict with the teacher's plainly expressed authority, and were called to an account before the whole school. At first they were not only unyielding, but offensively rebellious ; but the steady gleam of those eyes which at a distance seemed so mild, the firm tones of that voice which heretofore had sounded so weak, the consciousness of mastery which seemed to show itself in every feature of that pale though rigid face, were too much for them. Any one of them could have picked him up and thrown him out of the window without much effort, but their brawny muscles were of no sort of use in such a conflict, and they simply submitted, they knew not why. That night at the rendezvous matters were discussed again, and the vanquished heroes of the previous evening said, "We don't know what it is, but there is some- thing in our little teacher that we don't want to tackle again," and so they all concluded. But my readers know what it was. It was the image of God as seen in a powerful will ; a clear revelation of that Creator who formed man in his own likeness, and gave mind dominion over all matter — and the more powerful mind a measure of control over the weaker. Every observer of men and things has taken note of this mastery of the more powerful will in all the rela- 282 Man a Revelation of God. tions of life. The child, bent on doing that which parental authority forbids, looks squarely into the parental eyes to see if it is safe to venture, and acts accordingly. He may be deceived, but will generally take a very just measure of the will through those soul-windows. The hardened highwayman, who would be supposed to fear nothing, and certainly not the face of a fel- low-man, has often been known to quail before the piercing eye of an intended victim, simply because he saw within him a power against which he dared not array himself. If we turn to general literature for information, we find that every writer of any prominence, in all the domain of history, biography, travel, or fiction, no matter what his theological or ethical theories, lias ex- alted the dignity of the human will ; but I must not indulge in even the briefest references thereto, but leave this specific subject, to take up the moral nature. The Moral Nature. If we were just commencing to look for a revela- tion of God in man, and were about to consider " The Moral Nature," it might be necessary to pause at the outset to prove that man has a moral nature. But after what has been already written this can hardly be requisite, unless it be to simply indicate in a general maimer the method of such proof, or, more strictly speaking, the great outlines. The will bears In His Will axd Moral Nature. 283 such an important part in all considerations of the moral nature that the whole chapter may properly be considered as pertaining to morals. The words duty, ought, obligation, etc., or their equivalents, are absolutely necessary to any discussion of moral character, and these all find themselv r es joined somehow to will. And yet there is a somewhat in the moral nature which is over and above, or at least outside of and beyond, the will alone. We cannot express in words what it is desired here to convey. And this very unvoiceable character of this element itself furnishes a hint of just what we hope to indicate a little more clearly, as we pass along. The acutest thinkers, and the foremost masters of hu- man language in all its subtlest forms, have striven in vain to define a moral idea. This class of thinkers and writers do not profess to actually define it, but simply strive to come at some sort of an understand- ing of what they shall consent to consider it. Occa- sionally some fledgeling can tell us perfectly all about it, and offer a definition which is comprehensively exact and exactly comprehensive ! We can investigate a moral action, within certain limits, as a student can examine a human body, but even as he comes ultimately to a something, or a some- what, which his scalpel cannot cut, or his micro- scope see, or his chemistry analyze, so do we come at last to a faculty, a spiritual entity, for which we as yet have no satisfactory word-dress. That the 284 Man a Revelation of God. moral quality of the action is not in the overt act is sufficiently evident. This is the part of the supposed moral action which comes first under our notice. Previous to the overt act there must have been in the mind of the actor a complete image or conception of his act. But it is not in this second part which comes under our notice that the moral quality resides, for this is merely the action, existing as a conception, awaiting actualization. Nor can we discover this moral quality for which we are seeking even in the determination to materialize that conception, if we look upon the determination simply as a resolve to do it as a mere action without reference to the effect. But when we trace the overt act back thus through the mental image, and the determination to material- ize it to the purpose of the determination, here we find the moral quality which we denominate good or bad. No matter what the outward action, as far as the moral quality of the actor is concerned, but what was his intent. An illustration may serve to more clearly bring out my meaning : 1. A man resolves to kindle a fire. (Here we have the purpose formed.) 2. His mind forms an image of the fire. (Here we have the conception of the act.) 3. lie kindles the fire, and it burns as expected. (Here is the overt act.) But tli us far the reader cannot decide what quality In His Will and Moral Nature. 2S5 of moral action I am supposing. He needs to know the motive of the kindling. Let him shut this book without looking any farther, and he will remain in perfect ignorance of the moral quality in the supposed case. But when he reads on, and finds me saying that I have in mind a man re- solving upon, conceiving of, and actually kin ti- ling a fire to burn up his neighbor's barn, he at once says, " The action was bad." Had it been that he was building a fire to warm some poor suffering body, he would have as quickly said, "The action was good." And yet he cannot define it. The decision is ren- dered. You ask him why he decided the one action to be good and the other bad, and if he is a blunt fel- low he will probably ask you if you take him to he a fool! If he is inclined to be philosophical he may undertake to explain himself, and possibly may make the matter clear ; but the blunt fellow is, after all, about right. The rugged, native sense is clearest on these questions, because they belong to a domain which the dialectician's tools will not touch. Every normal mind says, " Hands off. Unless you take me for a fool, don't insinuate that I don't know right from wrong." This is one of the most fundamental ideas of the mind. It is not derived by some process of educa- tion, or arrived at by methods of logical inference. Of course, it may be developed by education, and 2S6 Max a Revelation of God. strengthened by inference, but developing a seed and implanting the germ are two widely differing pieces of work. This spontaneous judgment upon the in- tent of an action cannot be accounted for in any other way than by admitting that it is an absolutely origi- nal element of our nature. Whence did it come 2 We do not find it in brutes, no matter how highly developed their physical organism. We do not even look for it. Why not ? A horse is left standing near a valuable young tree and gnaws the whole top off. We do not call the horse wicked or malicious. No question as to whether or not he had a grudge against the owner enters our minds. We find a similar tree mutilated by human hands, and at once the question arises, " What did he do that for ? " Also as between human actions this same spontaneous judgment makes perfect selection; pronouncing upon some, and utterly oblivious to others. In passing certain railway tracks I see a switch- man shove the lever, and think nothing of it as a moral action. It is what I see him doing almost every dav. But some day I see him shove the same lever, and open the switch, just as a train heavily loaded with passengers is coming at full speed, and immediately I say, " What did he do it for? Was it a mistake, or done on purpose?" I look out of my study window, and see a man walking through the blinding snow-storm. No ques- In His Will and Moral Nature. 287 tion arises as to the moral quality of the walking. But suppose some one says to me, "That man has just heard of a family, ten blocks away, who are in great need, and he is carrying them food and money." At once something within me says, " What a good deed ! " The storm is no worse than it was before my friend informed me of the facts, and he does not walk any differently ; and yet, this definitionless faculty within me did not even make me aware of its existence before, but now it causes my wmole nature to go out toward the kind-hearted, unselfish man who will face such a storm to give of his food and money to strangers in need. Now, while we cannot fully explain or satisfac- torily define the moral idea or faculty, we are priv- ileged to seek for the ground of its existence. This search is full of interest, and has occupied the thought of many of the best minds in all ages. All are agreed that it must rest on the notion of obligation or oughtness, and while this only shifts the question the shift is of value, inasmuch as it gives us a term on the etymology of which we can be in substantial harmony. If we consult Hobbes we find him laying down as the foundation of all obligation the civil law. But he manufactures his "civil law"' out of the absolute selfishness of men, among whom there is simply a combination for the greatest possible self-gratifica- 288 Max a Revelation of God. tion and protection, wherein ''acknowledgment of power is called honor." This, of course, is the most arbitrary despotism. An absolute despotism in murals is a far worse anomaly than in civil affairs, and it seems strange that both could enchain as many bodies and minds as they have at certain periods of history. Turning from this first modern theorv of obli- gation, we notice a second theory which is quite extensively held at the present day, and which 'professes to exalt God and the divine law, very much as the theory of Hobbes professed to exalt the state and the civil law ; and with very much the same result. This theory says we must obey God simply because he commands us to obey him ; that it is right to act in a given manner simply and solely because divine authority says so; that the ultimate ground of all obligation is the will of God. Whatever God wills is right hecause he wills it. This theory really appears well. It seems to meet the demands of normal thought. All theists grant that the will of God must and should be obeyed. All grant that it is, or ought to be, sufficient for the determining of the course of any and every true believer in God, to know the divine will in the case. But this is far from being the same as granting that a thing is right simply or solely because God wills it. The seeming is untrue to the inner consciousness after all, and is only a sort of verbal In His Will and Moral Nature. 280 trueness. There must be something back of even the divine will. The mind refuses to rest satisfied with- out postulating this something. Having thus exer- cised faith in this invisible, undefinable something, the Christian believer, at least, and, I am inclined to think, every theist, says, "God wills it because it is right," rather than " It is right because God wills it;" although in practical ethics both amount to the same, for the divine will is always right. Other theories place the ultimate ground of obliga- tion in self-interest, as Paley ; — in Order, as Jouffroy; — in the true nature of things, as Wollaston ; — or in the relations we sustain to one another and to God, as Wayland. The last named author sums up the ex- planation of his theory as follows : " Hence we sec that two tilings are necessary in order to constitute any being a moral agent. They are, first, that he possess an intellectual power, by which he can un- derstand the relation in which he stands to the beings by whom he is surrounded ; secondly, that he possess a moral power, by which the feeling of obligation is suggested to him as soon as the relation in which he stands is understood. This is sufficient to render him a moral agent." This is all true and good as far as it goes • but, as with the " right-is-right-because-God-wills-it " theory, there must be something back of these "re- lations" to account for the oughtness springing out of them. 13 290 Man a Revelation of God. The theories of Dr. Haven and Dr. MeCosh are full of suggestive truth, and deserving of notice, but 1 must forego the pleasure of examining them here ; for it is not our present business to enter upon a metaphysical discussion of morals, or a theoretical analysis of man's moral nature, but simply to examine it as it is, and see what elements of the God-con- sciousness we can find therein. In this examination we need to keep distinctly be- fore our minds the conditions of moral law as distin- guished from physical law, or law in general. This word "law" is so much used at the present day, and so carelessly, that those who desire to be understood need to constantly guard themselves in its employ- ment. Considerable attention w r as given it when speaking of the will, but in reference to the moral law even greater care is necessary. Under this general term the enemies of supernat- uralism would range not merely the ordinary move- ments of society and nations, but the moral principles and characteristics of individuals. In every possible way do our opponents endeavor to make it appear that law, one and the same, forever uniform and changeless, has from all eternity con- trolled, and will forever control, even the morals of this and all other worlds. We are willing to meet them on the common ground of law — and perhaps may agree, provided they will consent to a proper division of law into In His Will and Moral Xaitre. 201 what Dr. Hopkins call the " laws of things and of persons," whatever terms we may agree to distin- guish them by. " Laws are of two kinds — of things and of persons. They are those in accordance with which things are controlled, and those addressed to persons. Under the first, the sequences are uniform, and, so far as the human will is concerned, necessary. Under the second, there is an alternative presented to beings endowed with reason and free-will. They may obey or they may disobey. Between these two kinds of laws the differences are radical. Under the first, the subject does nut understand the law, knows nothing of the end proposed, is not capable of choosing it, is under no obligation to choose it, and has not control of the force requisite for its attainment. It is pas- sive, and its movements are necessitated. It is only in an improper sense, or figuratively, that rules in accordance with which beings thus unconscious are controlled can be called laws. The most striking ground of analogy between these two classes of laws and the basis of their common name is in their re- sults. This is order. Uniformity, and thus order, must be the result of the first class of laws; it is the result of the second when obeyed. Of the first class of laws, the laws of things, there are several kinds, as physical, vital, mental ; all having, however, the characteristics above mentioned. In all there is a force uniformly directed to an end. Up to a cer- 292 Man a Revelation of God. tain point the mind itself is as much subject to this class of laws as is matter. These laws, or rather the uniformities which are their exponent, are at the basis of experience, are the condition of education, and of that intelligent activity by which means are adapted to ends. u The second class of laws, or laws of persons, are obeyed consciously. The subjects of them under- stand the law, are capable of choosing the end it pro- poses, are under obligation to choose it, and have at their own control the force requisite for its attain- ment. Under this class law is not merely a rule regulating force and producing uniformity, or as some less accurately say, the uniformity itself ; but, as designating the end, it is directive. It is also im- perative. That, however, which makes it to be law is the fact that it is obligatory. An end may be des- ignated, we may be commanded to attain or accom- plish it, but if there be no obligation there is no law/' * It seems decidedly strange that men possessing acuteness of analytic power, and extensive learning, should ever miss these manifest distinctions. And yet we must conclude that they either actually do fail to see them or are dishonest. The latter we do not propose to charge without conclusive proof. As Mr. Buckle says concerning the essentials of morals, so say we concerning these essential distinctions in * Law of Love, p. 33. In Ills Will and Mojjal Xatuke. 293 1 .we, " They have been known for thousands of years,'' * howbeit, some of our modern savants in philosophical science seem not to have heard about them. Why, even in the old Grecian works on ethics there may be found numerous and very clear indications of the firm conviction of a law of the spirit which was above the law of the flesh, a sturdy faith in the absolute power of mind over body. As an illustration, we look at the scene in Socrates' s cell, as he lies securely chained and awaiting his sentence. His friends are permitted to visit and con- verse with him. As one enters he says, " What brings you here?" His friend, unwilling to speak the awful words, replies, " I come with serious news/' To which the old hero answers, " Ah ! the ship is re- turned from Delos, and I am to die to-day." "No! not to-day, but to-morrow or next day. I, however, have come to tell you -that all is arranged for your escape ; and for the credit of your friends and of the city, as well as for the sake of your wife and children, you must get up and flee with me." " No ! Unless the law releases me I stay. The laws protected my birth, my growth, my marriage, and my whole life. They now command my death. Did I save my life by breaking them, and did I, like a runaway slave, find quarter somewhere, I should be haunted by the ghosts of the laws of my country, on which I had laid * History of Civilization, vol. i, p. 129. 29-A Man a Revelation of G od. guilty hands." He remained in prison and his chains were taken off. "We see him sitting on his prison bed a willing captive in some sense. He would not escape when his friends had every thing arranged for his flight, and when, probably, even his enemies would have been glad to be rid of the execution without reversing the decree. We hear him as he sits there teaching philosophy, setting forth the principle of the mind's control over the body, and also the power of moral obligation over mind. He says, " Men who pretend to account for things by telling you that they are formed thus, and thus, seem to me like a man whom I should ask to tell me why I am sitting bent here on this bed edge, and who should reply, < Because, Socrates, the muscles and the nerves are bent so, and bend the bones so, and therefore yon are sitting there so.' Nay, nay, that is no explanation. When you "—speaking to Crito — " proposed my escape, had 1 been possessed with the thought that it was right to escape, that thought would have carried off the bones, muscles, and nerves, and at this moment the whole of them would have been in Megara or somewhere else, not here. But I was possessed with the thought that it was right to abide the course of law ; and that thought was the true cause of my being seated here." Socrates was ever speaking of the daimon which dwelt within him, and which directed all his words and acts. The very head and front of his offending In IIis Will and Moral Nature. 205 was the claim to tins indwelling divinity which mod- erns call "conscience," or the "inward voice." He believed iii a personality, which is an absolutely essential condition of a moral being. And if per- sonality is absolutely essential to man, to constitute him a moral being, we cannot think of the Supreme Agent in the universe otherwise than as a person- ality or person, for we cannot think of him as below man in the scale of being, or as any tiling less than a moral agent. Man having set before him a supreme end to be attained, as every person has, and having the mental ability to discern that " end," urged on to the attain- ing of that " end " by the true, the beautiful, and the good, is conscious within himself that he may choose to attain that end, or some other, according as he pleases, and he is likewise conscious that he must choose soine end, and that lie is responsible for the choice. This brings again into view another essential condition of a moral being; namely, freedom. He is also conscious that his quality or character will de- pend upon his choice. Thus is he consciously made the arbiter of his own destiny, and is exalted above the material universe and all the brute creation, becoming a conscious partaker of the divine nature, a law unto himself, a co-worker with God in bringing to pass the ends and processes of moral government under moral law. 29(3 .Man a Revelation of God. It matters not how humble a place he may fill, his supreme dignity is assured. In fact, it is only when men have become unnatu- rally blind that they fail to see the broad distinctions between physical and moral law, the vast superiority- of mind over matter, the supreme dignity of the moral faculties, and to ultimately behold the indwell- ing God. According to the psalmist, " The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." I do not stigmatize non- theists as fools, in the common acceptation of that term, but I have been very much interested in a work by Ilelvetius, translated from the French by Hooper in 1810, entitled, A Treatise on Man, Ills Intellectual Faculties and His Education, m which he quaintly and vigorously exposes the follies of pseudo- science and stilted philosophy, saying many things which should be read by the "popular science 1 ' writers of to-day. In one paragraph he says : " Man is born ignorant ; he is not born a fool ; and it is not even without labor that he is made one. To be such, and to be able to extinguish in himself his natural lights, art and methods must be used; instruction must heap on him error upon error; the more he reads, the more numerous must be the prejudices which he contracts. The ignorant man is as much above the falsely learned as he is below him of real science. The aim of bigotry is to blind mankind, and bewilder them in a labyrinth of false science." In His Will and Moral Nature. 297 I wish the reader to understand that I am not plead- ing for less of science, or less of mental discipline, to the end that the moral nature may be proportion- ately exalted, and " crude conscience," or " unques- tioning intuitions," as some please to phrase it, may have completer sway. This charge is sometimes made against those who magnify the importance of the "inner voice," but without reason, for the his- tory of intellectual progress shows that no class of men has furthered that progress as substantially as those who thus do. This charge is "after a piece" with the silly slurs indulged in by certain smart infi- dels against " blind faith," " unreasoning conscience." etc, ; when every candid and careful thinker knows that faith is at the very foundation of even ma- terial progress, and without it no substantial ad- vances could be made in literature or science, in society or state, any more than in the Church. As Winchell.very aptly says in summing up a masterful scientific work, "Faith is the logical corollary of science and the highest flight of reason." Conscience. We have been glancinc* somewhat hurriedlv at the bolder outlines of morals, with no intention of enter- ing into a systematic discussion, but now we desire to look a little more closely at conscience. To enter upon a careful examination would require an entire volume. Sufficient for our purpose if we obtain a 13* 298 Man a Revelation of God. view amounting to clear recognition, without the metaphysics of the subject. We care little for definitions as such, and yet it is interesting to notice a few. Wayland says: u By conscience is meant that faculty by which we discern the moral quality of actions, and by which we are capable of certain affections in respect to this quality." Joseph Cook says : " Conscience is that faculty which makes a man feel mean when he means to be mean." Dr. Hopkins says : " Conscience is the moral con- sciousness of man in view of his own actions as related to moral law. It is a testifying state. As the name imports, it is a double knowledge : a knowledge by the man of himself together with a knowledge of the law and as related to that. It involves a recognition by the person of the moral quality of his own acts,