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by Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
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Title: The Relations Between Religion and Science
Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884
Author: Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
Release Date: November 30, 2005 [EBook #17194]
Language: English
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THE RELATIONS
BETWEEN
RELIGION AND SCIENCE
EIGHT LECTURES
PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
IN THE YEAR 1884
ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M.A.
CANON OF SALISBURY
BY THE RIGHT REV.
FREDERICK, LORD BISHOP OF EXETER
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1903
_First Edition_, 8vo, 1884.
_Reprinted January and February (twice)_, 1885, _April_, 1885;
_Re-issue_ (_Crown_ 8vo), _November_, 1885, 1903.
OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
EXTRACT
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
OF THE LATE
REV. JOHN BAMPTON,
CANON OF SALISBURY.
--"I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor, Masters,
and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold
all and singular the said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the
intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned; that is to say, I will and
appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the
time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits
thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions
made) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity
Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, and
to be performed in the manner following:
"I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a
Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no
others, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hours
of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity
Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between
the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of the
third week in Act Term.
"Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons
shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects--to confirm and
establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and
schismatics--upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures--upon the
authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and
practice of the primitive Church--upon the Divinity of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ--upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost--upon the
Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and
Nicene Creeds.
"Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons
shall be always printed, within two months after they are preached; and
one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the University, and one
copy to the Head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city
of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library; and the
expenses of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the Land
or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the
preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they
are printed.
"Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to preach
the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree of Master
of Arts at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge;
and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons
twice."
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF.
Psalm civ. 24.
_O Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them all;
the earth is full of Thy riches._
The subject introduced: Scientific belief. Mathematics and Metaphysics
excluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's
account of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts.
Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development of
Science from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate:
which nevertheless can never attain to universality.
LECTURE II.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
Genesis i. 27.
_So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He
him._
The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity of knowledge.
Absolute knowledge of our own personal identity. Failure to show this to
be relative; in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. The
command to live according to that Law; Duty. The command to believe in
the supremacy of that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. The hope
of Immortality. The personification of the Moral Law in Almighty God;
the higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, if
any be made. The contrast between Religion and Science.
LECTURE III.
APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL.
Genesis i. 27.
_So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He
him._
Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler's
examination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution.
Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interference
of the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixed
nature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life.
LECTURE IV.
APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.
Romans i. 20.
_For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His
eternal power and Godhead._
Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recent
times. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argument
from design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force
to the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress;
from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real.
LECTURE V.
REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.
Hebrews i. 1.
_God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past to
the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by His
Son._
The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor of
Religion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge,
that it is due to Revelation. All higher Religions have claimed to be
Revelations. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament;
yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. The
miraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of this
mode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty.
LECTURE VI.
APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.
Psalm c. 3.
_Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we
ourselves._
Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formation
of the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics.
Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side,
life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yet
examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis
not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man not
inconsistent with dignity of humanity.
LECTURE VII.
APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER.
St. John xiv. 11.
_Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else
believe Me for the very works' sake._
The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. The
miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord's
Resurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in
the scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the time
when the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by our
Lord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required to
prove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence;
not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility of
demonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the
progress of Science.
LECTURE VIII.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.
1 Corinthians xii. 3.
_No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost._
Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two
cases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception
no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical
world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on
itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we
expect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are the
purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation.
Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physical
cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from
leaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee for
spiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience,
the heart, the will.
LECTURE I.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF.
The subject introduced: Scientific belief. Mathematics and Metaphysics
excluded. The Postulate of Science: the Uniformity of Nature. Hume's
account of it. Kant's account of it. Insufficiency of both accounts.
Science traced back to observation of the Human Will. The development of
Science from this origin. The increasing generality of the Postulate:
which nevertheless can never attain to universality.
LECTURE I.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEF.
'O Lord, how manifold are Thy works: in wisdom hast Thou made them
all; the earth is full of Thy riches.'--_Psalm_ civ. 24.
Those who believe that the creation and government of the world are the
work of a Being Whom it is their duty to love with all their hearts, Who
loves them with a love beyond all other love, to Whom they look for
guidance now and unending happiness hereafter, have a double motive for
studying the forms and operations of Nature; because over and above
whatever they may gain of the purest and highest pleasure in the study,
and whatever men may gain of material comfort in a thousand forms from
the results of the study, they cannot but have always present to their
minds the thought, that all these things are revelations of His
character, and to know them is in a very real measure to know Him. The
believer in God, if he have the faculty and the opportunity, cannot find
a more proper employment of time and labour and thought than the study
of the ways in which God works and the things which God has made. Among
religious men we ought to expect to find the most patient, the most
truth-seeking, the most courageous of men of science.
We know that it is not always so; and that on the contrary Science and
Religion seem very often to be the most determined foes to each other
that can be found. The scientific man often asserts that he cannot find
God in Science; and the religious man often asserts that he cannot find
Science in God. Each often believes himself to be in possession, if not
of the whole truth, at any rate of all the truth that it is most
important to possess. Science seems to despise religion; and religion to
fear and condemn Science. Religion, which certainly ought to put truth
at the highest, is charged with refusing to acknowledge truth that has
been proved. And Science, which certainly ought to insist on
demonstrating every assertion which it makes, is charged with giving the
rein to the imagination and treating the merest speculations as
well-established facts.
To propose to reconcile these opposites would be a task which hardly any
sane man would undertake. It would imply a claim to be able to rise at
once above both, and see the truth which included all that both could
teach. But it is a very useful undertaking, and not beyond the reach of
thoughtful inquiry by an ordinary man, to examine the relations between
the two, and thus to help not a few to find a way for themselves out of
the perplexity. And this inquiry may well begin by asking what is the
origin and nature of scientific belief on the one hand and of religious
belief on the other. In this Lecture I propose to deal with the former.
It is not necessary to include in the Science of which I am to speak
either Mathematics or Metaphysics. In as far as I need touch on what
belongs to either, it will be only for the purpose of answering
objections or of excluding what is irrelevant. And the consequent
restriction of our consideration to the Science which concerns itself
with Nature greatly simplifies the task that I have undertaken. For it
will be at once admitted in the present day by all but a very few that
the source of all scientific knowledge of this kind is to be found in
the observations of the senses, including under that word both the
bodily senses which tell us all we know of things external, and that
internal sense by which we know all or nearly all that takes place
within the mind itself. And so also will it be admitted that the Supreme
Postulate, without which scientific knowledge is impossible, is the
Uniformity of Nature.
Science lays claim to no revelations. No voice of authority declares
what substances there are in the world, what are the properties of those
substances, what are the effects and operations of those properties. No
traditions handed down from past ages can do anything more than transmit
to us observations made in those times, which, so far as we can trust
them, we may add to the observations made in our own times. The
materials in short which Science has to handle are obtained by
experience.
But on the other hand Science can deal with these materials only on the
condition that they are reducible to invariable laws. If any observation
made by the senses is not capable of being brought under the laws which
are found to govern all other observations, it is not yet brought under
the dominion of Science. It is not yet explained, nor understood. As far
as Science is concerned, it may be called as yet non-existent. It is for
this very reason possible that the examination of it may be of the very
greatest importance. To explain what has hitherto received no
explanation constitutes the very essence of scientific progress. The
observation may be imperfect, and may at once become explicable as soon
as it is made complete; or, what is of far more value, it may be an
instance of the operation of a new law not previously known, modifying
and perhaps absorbing the law up to that time accepted. When it was
first noticed in Galileo's time that water would not ascend in the
suction pipe of a pump to a greater height than 32 feet, the old law
that nature abhors a vacuum was modified, and the reasons why and the
conditions under which Nature abhors a vacuum were discovered. The
suction of fluids was brought under the general law of mechanical
pressure. The doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum had been a fair
generalization and expression of the facts of this kind that up to that
time had been observed. A new fact was observed which would not fall
under the rule. The examination of this fact led to the old rule being
superseded; and Science advanced a great step at once. So in our own day
was the planet Neptune discovered by the observation of certain facts
which could not be squared with the facts previously observed unless the
Law of Gravitation was to be corrected. The result in this case was not
the discovery of a new Law but of a new Planet; and consequently a great
confirmation of the old Law. But in each case and in every similar case
the investigation of the newly observed fact proceeds on the assumption
that Nature will be found uniform, and on no other assumption can
Science proceed at all.
Now it is this assumption which must be first examined. What is its
source? What is its justification? What, if any, are its limits?
It is not an assumption that belongs to Science only. It is in some
form or other at the bottom of all our daily life. We eat our food on
the assumption that it will nourish us to-day as it nourished us
yesterday. We deal with our neighbours in the belief that we may safely
trust those now whom we have trusted and safely trusted heretofore. We
never take a journey without assuming that wood and iron will hold a
carriage together, that wheels will roll upon axles, that steam will
expand and drive the piston of an engine, that porters and stokers and
engine-drivers will do their accustomed duties. Our crops are sown in
the belief that the earth will work its usual chemistry, that heat and
light and rain will come in their turn and have their usual effects, and
the harvest will be ready for our gathering in the autumn. Look on while
a man is tried for his life before a jury. Every tittle of the evidence
is valued both by the judge and jury according to its agreement or
disagreement with what we believe to be the laws of Nature, and if a
witness asserts that something happened which, as far as we know, never
happened at any other time since the world began, we set his evidence
aside as incredible. And the prisoner is condemned if the facts before
us, interpreted on the assumption that the ordinary laws of Nature have
held their course, appear to prove his guilt.
What right have we to make such an assumption as this?
The question was first clearly put by Hume, and was handled by him with
singular lucidity; but his answer, though very near the truth, was not
so expressed as to set the question at rest.
The main relation in which the uniformity of Nature is observed is that
of cause and effect. Hume examines this and maintains that there is
absolutely nothing contained in it but the notion of invariable
sequence. Two phenomena are invariably found connected together; the
prior is spoken of as the cause, the posterior as the effect. But there
is absolutely nothing in the former to define its relation to the
latter, except that when the former is observed the latter, as far as we
know, invariably follows. A ball hits another ball of equal size, both
being free to move. There is nothing by which prior to experience we
can determine what will happen next. It is just as conceivable that the
moving ball should come back or should come to rest, as that the ball
hitherto at rest should begin to move. A magnet fastened to a piece of
wood is floating on water. Another magnet held in the hand is brought
very near one of its poles or ends. If two north poles are thus brought
together the floating magnet is repelled; if a north and a south pole
are brought together the floating magnet is attracted. The motion of the
floating magnet is in each case called the effect; the approach of the
magnet held in the hand is called the cause. And this cause is, as far
as we know, invariably followed by this effect. But to say that one is
cause and the other effect is merely to say that one is always followed
by the other; and no other meaning, according to Hume, can be attached
to the words cause and effect.
Having established this interpretation of these words, Hume goes on to
ask: What can be the ground in reason for the principle universally
adopted, that the law of cause and effect rules phenomena, and that a
cause which has been followed by an effect once will be followed by the
same effect always? And he concludes that no rational ground can be
found at all, that it is the mere result of custom without anything
rational behind it. We are accustomed to see it so, and what we have
been so perpetually accustomed to see we believe that we shall continue
to see. But why what has always been hitherto should always be
hereafter, no reason whatever can be given. The logical conclusion
obviously is to discredit all human faculties and to land us in
universal scepticism.
It was at this point that Kant took up the question, avowedly in
consequence of Hume's reasoning. He considered that Hume had been misled
by turning his attention to Physics, and that his own good sense would
have saved him from his conclusion had he thought rather of Mathematics.
Kant's solution of the problem, based mainly on the reality of
Mathematics, and especially of Geometry, is the direct opposite of
Hume's.
It will be most easy to give a clear account of Kant's solution by using
a very familiar illustration. There is a well-known common toy called a
Kaleidoscope, in which bits of coloured glass placed at one end are seen
through a small round hole at the other. The bits of glass are not
arranged in any order whatever, and by shaking the instrument may be
rearranged again and again indefinitely and still without any order
whatever. But however they may be arranged in themselves they always
form, as seen from the other end, a symmetrical pattern. The pattern
indeed varies with every shake of the instrument and consequent
re-arrangement of the bits of glass, but it is invariably symmetrical.
Now the symmetry in this case is not in the bits of glass; the colours
are there no doubt, but the symmetrical arrangement of them is not. The
symmetry is entirely due to the instrument. And if a competent enquirer
looks into the instrument and examines its construction, he will be able
to lay down with absolute certainty the laws of that symmetry which
every pattern as seen through the instrument must obey.
Just such an instrument, according to Kant, is the human mind. Space
and Time and the Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the instrument.
Everything that reaches the senses must submit to the laws of Space and
Time, that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because Space and Time are
forms of the mind itself, and, like the kaleidoscope, arrange all things
on their way to the senses according to a pattern of their own. This
pattern is as it were super-added to the manifestations that come from
the things themselves; and if there be any manifestations of such a
nature that they could not submit to this addition, or, in other words,
could not submit to Mathematical Laws, these manifestations could not
affect our senses at all. So too our Understanding has a pattern of its
own which it imposes on all things that reach its power of perception.
What cannot be accommodated to this pattern cannot be understood at all.
Whatever things may be in themselves, their manifestations are not
within the range of our intelligence, except by passing through the
arranging process which our own mind executes upon them.
It is clear that this wonderfully ingenious speculation rests its
claims for acceptance purely on the assertion that it and it alone
explains the facts. It cannot be proved from any principle of reason. It
assumes that there is a demonstrative science of Mathematics quite
independent of experience, and that there are necessary principles of
Physics equally independent of experience. And it accounts for the
existence of these.
With Mathematics we are not now concerned, and I will pass them by with
only one remark. The ground on which Kant's theory stands is not
sufficient, for this simple reason. It accounts for one fact; it does
not account for another fact. It accounts for the fact that we attach
and cannot help attaching a conviction of necessity to all mathematical
reasoning. We not only know that two straight lines cannot enclose a
space, but we know that this is so and must be so in all places and at
all times, and we know it without any proof whatever. This fact Kant
accounts for. Space is according to him a part of our kaleidoscope; you
can always look into it and see for yourself what are the laws of it.
But there is another fact. This space of which we are speaking is
unquestionably to our minds not a thing inside of us but outside of us.
We are in it. We cannot get rid of a sense that it is independent of
ourselves. We can imagine ourselves non-existing, minds and all. We
cannot imagine space non-existing. If it be a part of our minds, how is
it that we can picture to ourselves the non-existence of the mind which
is the whole, but not the non-existence of space which, according to the
hypothesis, is the part? For this fact, which we commonly call the
objectivity of space, Kant's theory does not account. In fact Kant
appears to have no escape from assigning this objectivity of space to
delusion. But a theory which requires us to call an ineradicable
conviction of consciousness a delusion cannot be said to explain all the
facts. John Stuart Mill maintains that the other fact, namely, the
conviction of the necessity of mathematical truth, is a delusion. And
his account also must be pronounced for that reason to fail in
accounting for all the facts.
But our present concern is not with Mathematics but with Physics. And
here Kant fails altogether to convince; for, taking Time and the
Perceptive Powers of the Understanding as parts of the human mind, he
shows, what indeed is clearer and clearer every day, that the principles
(so called) of Physics are indispensable Postulates, not indeed of
observing with the senses, but of comprehending with the understanding,
whatever happens. In order to give anything that can be called an
explanation of any event we must show that it falls under the general
rules which constitute the uniformity of Nature. We have no other
meaning for the words understanding or explaining an event. Thinking,
when analysed, is found to consist in bringing all that happens under
universal laws, and no phenomenon can be said to be explained in thought
except by being so related to all other phenomena. But it does not by
any means follow that events cannot happen or cannot affect our senses
without being susceptible of such explanation. To say that an event
cannot be understood, and to say either that it cannot happen or that it
cannot be observed by the senses, are two very different things. The
fact is that Mathematics and Physics do not, as Kant assumes, present
the same problem for solution, and do not therefore admit of one
solution applicable to both. It is not the case that there is a science
of abstract Physics corresponding to the science of Mathematics and
sharing in the same character of necessity. In Mathematics we have
truths which we cannot but accept, and accept as universal and
necessary: in Physics we have no such truths, nor has Kant even
endeavoured to prove that we have. The very question therefore that we
are asked to solve in regard to Mathematics does not present itself in
Physics. I am constrained to believe that two and two are four and not
five; I am not constrained to believe that if one event is followed by
another a great many times it will be so followed always. And the
question is, why, without any constraint, I nevertheless so far believe
it that I require special evidence in any given case to convince me to
the contrary. And Kant's answer is irrelevant. He says that we cannot
think the sequence of events unless they fall under the postulates of
thinking, that is, the postulates of science; but this is no answer to
the question. Why do we believe that, unless the contrary be proved,
everything that is observed by the senses is capable of being reduced
under these postulates of thinking? The sequence of things cannot
otherwise be explained; but why should the sequence of all things that
happen be capable of being explained? The question therefore still
remains unanswered. What right have we to assume this Uniformity in
Nature? or, in other words, what right have we to assume that all
phenomena in Nature, observed by our senses, are capable of being
brought within the domain of Science? And to answer this question we
must approach it from a different side.
And there is the more reason for this because it is undeniable that both
the definition and the universality of the relation of cause and effect,
as they were accepted by Hume and his followers, are not accepted by men
in general. In ordinary language something more is meant by cause and
effect than invariable sequence, and the common assumption is not that
all Nature obeys this rule with absolutely no variation, but that the
rule is sufficiently general for all practical purposes.
If then we begin by asking what is the process of Science in dealing
with all questions of causation, we find that this process when reduced
to its simplest elements always consists in referring every event as an
effect to some cause which we know or believe to have produced some
other and similar event. Newton is struck by a falling apple. His first
thought is, 'how hard the blow.' His second is wonder, 'how far the
earth's attraction, which has caused this hard blow, extends.' His
third, 'why not as far as the moon?' And he proceeds to assign the
motion of the moon to the same cause as that which produced the motion
of the apple. Taking this as a working hypothesis, he examines what
would be the motions of all the planets if this were true. And the
examination ends with establishing the high probability of the Law of
Gravitation.
Now this being the invariable process of Science, it follows that our
conception of cause must come originally from that cause which we have
within ourselves and with which we cannot but begin, the action of the
human will. It is from this action that is obtained that conception
which underlies the ordinary conception of cause, namely, that of force
or power.
This conception of force or power is derived from the consciousness of
our own power to move our limbs, and perhaps too of passions,
temptations, sentiments to move or oppose our wills. This power is most
distinctly felt when it is resisted. The effort which is necessary when
we choose to do what we have barely strength to do, impresses on us more
clearly the sense of a force residing in ourselves capable of overcoming
resistance. Having the power to move our limbs, and that too against
some resistance, we explain, and in no other way can we explain, other
motions by the supposition of a similar power. In so doing we are
following strictly the scientific instinct and the scientific process.
We are putting into the same class the motions that we observe in other
things and the motions that we observe in ourselves; the latter are due
to acts of our own wills, the former are assigned to similar acts of
other wills. Hence in infancy, and in the infancy of mankind, the whole
world is peopled with persons because everything that we observe to move
is personified. A secret will moves the wind, the sun, the moon, the
stars, and each is independent of the others.
Soon a distinction grows up between the things that seem to have a
spontaneous motion and those that have not, and spontaneous motion is
taken as the sign of life. And all inanimate things, of whatever kind,
are held to be moved, if they move at all, by a force outside
themselves. Their own force is limited to that of resisting, and does
not include that of originating motion. But though they cannot originate
motion they are observed to be capable of transmitting it. And the
notion of force is expanded by the recognition that it can be
communicated from one thing to another and yet to another, and that we
may have to go back many steps before we arrive at the will from which
it originated. We began with the notion of a power the action of which
was or appeared to be self-originated: we come to the notion of a power
the action of which is nothing more than the continuance of preceding
action. And the special characteristic of the action of this force as
thus conceived, which we may call the derivative force, is seen to be
its regularity, just as the special characteristic of the
self-originating action was its spontaneity.
As experience increases the regularity of the action of the derivative
force is more and more observable, and then arises the notion of a law
or rule regulating the action of every such force. And a perpetually
increasing number of phenomena are brought under this head, and are
shown to be, not the immediate results of self-originating action, but
the more or less remote results of derivative action governed by laws.
And even a large number of those phenomena, which specially belong to
life and living creatures, in whom alone, if anywhere, the
self-originating action is to be found, are observed to be subject to
law and therefore to be the issue not of self-originating but of
derivative action. And this observed regularity it is found possible to
trace much more widely than it is possible to trace any clear evidence
of what we understand by force. And so, at last, we frequently use the
word force as it were by anticipation, not to express the cause of the
phenomena, which indeed we do not yet know, but as a convenient
abbreviation for a large number of facts classed under one head. And
this it is which enables Hume to maintain that we mean no more by a
cause than an event which is invariably followed by another event. We
discover invariability much faster than we can discover causation; and
having discovered invariability in any given case, we presume causation
even when we cannot yet show it, and use language in accordance with
that presumption. Thus, for instance, we speak of the force of
gravitation, although we cannot yet prove that there is any such force,
and all that we know is that material particles move as if such a force
were acting on them.
As Science advances it is seen that the regularity of phenomena is far
more important to us than their causes. And the attention of all
students of Nature is fixed on that rather than on causation. And this
regularity is seen to be more and more widely pervading all phenomena of
every class, until the mind is forced to conceive the possibility that
it may be absolutely universal, and that even will itself may come
within its supreme dominion.
But to the very last the idea of causation retains the traces of its
origin. For in the first place every step in this building up of science
assumes a permanence underlying all phenomena. We cannot believe that
the future will be like the past except because we believe that there is
something permanent which was in the past and will be in the future. And
this assumption of something permanent in things around us comes from
the consciousness of something permanent within us. We know our own
permanence. Whatever else we know or do not know about ourselves, we are
sure of our own personal identity through successive periods of life.
And as our explanation of things outside begins by classing them with
things inside we still continue to ascribe permanence to whatever
underlies phenomena even when we have long ceased to ascribe individual
wills to any except beings like ourselves. And without this assumption
of permanence our whole science would come to the ground.
And in the second place let it be remembered that we began with the will
causing the motions of the limbs. Now there is, as far as we know, no
other power in us to affect external nature than by setting something in
motion. We can move our limbs, and by so doing move other things, and by
so doing avail ourselves of the laws of Nature to produce remoter
effects. But, except by originating motion, we cannot act at all. And,
accordingly, throughout all science the attempt is made to reduce all
phenomena to motions. Sounds, colours, heat, chemical action,
electricity, we are perpetually endeavouring to reduce to vibrations or
undulations, that is, to motion of some sort or other. The mind seems to
find a satisfaction when a change of whatever kind is shown to be, or
possibly to be, the result of movement. And so too all laws of Nature
are then felt to be satisfactorily explained when they can be traced to
some force exhibited in the movement of material particles. The law of
Gravitation has an enormous evidence in support of it considered simply
as a fact. And yet how many attempts have been made to represent it as
the result of vortices or of particles streaming in all directions and
pressing any two bodies together that lie in their path! The facts which
establish it are enough. Why then these attempts? What is felt to be yet
wanting? What is felt to be wanting is something to show that it is the
result of some sort of general or universal motion, and that it thus
falls under the same head as other motions, either those which originate
in ourselves and are propagated from our bodies to external objects, or
those which, springing from an unknown beginning, are for ever
continuing as before.
This then is the answer to the question, Why do we believe in the
uniformity of Nature? We believe in it because we find it so. Millions
on millions of observations concur in exhibiting this uniformity. And
the longer our observation of Nature goes on, the greater do we find the
extent of it. Things that once seemed irregular are now known to be
regular. Things that seemed inexplicable on this hypothesis are now
explained. Every day seems to add not merely to the instances but to
the wide-ranging classes of phenomena that come under the rule. We had
reason long ago to hold that the quantity of matter was invariable. We
now have reason to think that the quantity of force acting on matter is
invariable. And to this is to be added the evidence of scientific
prediction, the range of which is perpetually increasing, and which
would be obviously impossible if Nature were not uniform. And yet again
to this is to be added that this uniformity does not consist in a vast
number of separate and independent laws, but that these laws already
form a system with one another, and that that system is daily becoming
more complete. We believe in the uniformity of Nature because, as far as
we can observe it, that is the character of Nature.
And I use the word character on purpose, because it indicates better
than any other word that I could find at once the nature and limitation
of our belief.
For, if the origin of this belief be what I have described, it is
perfectly clear that, however vast may be the evidence to prove this
uniformity, the conclusion can never go beyond the limits of this
evidence, and generality can never be confounded with universality. The
certainty that Nature is uniform is not at all, and never can be, a
certainty of the same kind as the certainty that four times five are
twenty.
We can assert that the general character of Nature is uniformity, but we
cannot go beyond this. Every separate law of nature is established by
induction from the facts, and so too is the general uniformity. Every
separate law of Nature is a working hypothesis. So too is the uniformity
of Nature a working hypothesis, and it never can be more. It is true
that there is far more evidence for the uniformity of Nature as a whole
than for any one law of Nature; because a law of Nature is established
by the uniformity of sequences in those phenomena to which it applies;
whereas every uniformity of sequence, of whatever kind, is an evidence
of the general uniformity. The evidence for the uniformity of nature is
the accumulated evidence for all the separate uniformities. But, however
much greater the quantity of evidence, the kind ever remains the same.
There is no means by which we can demonstrate this uniformity. We can
only make it probable. We can say that in almost every case all the
evidence is one way; but whenever there is evidence to the contrary we
cannot refuse to examine it.
If a miracle were worked science could not prove that it was a miracle,
nor of course prove that it was not a miracle. To prove it to be a
miracle would require not a vast range of knowledge, but absolutely
universal knowledge, which it is entirely beyond our faculties to
attain. To say that any event was a miracle would be to say that we knew
that there was no higher law that could explain it, and this we could
not say unless we knew all laws: to say that it was not a miracle would
be _ex hypothesi_ to assert what was false. In fact, to assert the
occurrence of a miracle is simply to go back to the beginning of
science, and to say: Here is an event which we cannot assign to that
derivative action to which we have been led to assign the great body of
events; we cannot explain it except by referring it to direct and
spontaneous action, to a will like our own will. Science has shown that
the vast majority of events are due to derivative action regulated by
laws. Here is an event which cannot be so explained, any more than the
action of our own free will can be so explained. Science may fairly
claim to have shown that miracles, if they happen at all, are
exceedingly rare. To demonstrate that they never happen at all is
impossible, from the very nature of the evidence on which Science rests.
But for the same reason Science can never in its character of Science
admit that a miracle has happened. Science can only admit that, so far
as the evidence goes, an event has happened which lies outside its
province.
To believers the progress of Science is a perpetual instruction in the
character which God has impressed on His works. That He has put Order in
the very first place may be a surprise to us; but it can only be a
surprise. In the great machinery of the Universe it constantly happens
to us to find that that which is made indispensable, is nevertheless not
the highest. The chosen people were not the highest in all moral or even
in all spiritual characteristics; if we refuse the explanation given by
Goethe that they were chosen for their toughness, yet we have no better
to give. The eternal moral law is of all we know the highest and
holiest. Yet the religious instinct seems to have been more
indispensable for the development of humanity according to the Divine
purpose than the observance of that moral law in all its fulness. It
would never have occurred to us beforehand to permit in Divine
legislation any concession to the hardness of men's hearts; yet we know
that it was done. Science now tells us that Order takes a rank in God's
work far above where we should have placed it. It is not the highest; it
is far from the highest: but it appears to be in some strange way the
most indispensable. God is teaching us that Order is far more universal,
far more penetrating than we should have supposed. But, nevertheless, it
is not itself God; nor the highest revelation of God. It is the stamp
which, for reasons higher than itself, He appears to have put on His
works. What is the limit to its application we do not know. There may be
instances where this Order is apparently broken, but really maintained,
because one physical law is absorbed in a higher; there may be instances
where the physical law is superseded by a moral law. But we shall
neither refuse to recognise that God has stamped this character on His
works, nor let it on the other hand come between us and Him. For we know
still that He is greater than all that He hath made, and He speaks to us
by another voice besides the voice of Science.
LECTURE II.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
The voice within. The objection of the alleged relativity of knowledge.
Absolute knowledge of our own personal identity. Failure to show this to
be relative; in particular by Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Moral Law. The
command to live according to that Law; Duty. The command to believe in
the supremacy of that Law; the lower Faith. The Last Judgment. The hope
of Immortality. The personification of the Moral Law in Almighty God;
the higher Faith. The spiritual faculty the recipient of Revelation, if
any be made. The contrast between Religion and Science.
LECTURE II.
THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created
He him.' _Genesis_ i. 27.
The order of phenomena is not the highest revelation of God, nor is the
voice of Science the only nor the most commanding voice that speaks to
us about Him. The belief in Him and in the character which we assign to
Him does not spring from any observation of phenomena, but from the
declaration made to us through the spiritual faculty.
There is within us a voice which tells of a supreme Law unchanged
throughout all space and all time; which speaks with an authority
entirely its own; which finds corroboration in the revelations of
Science, but which never relies on those revelations as its primary or
its ultimate sanction; which is no inference from observations by the
senses external or internal, but a direct communication from the
spiritual kingdom, the kingdom, as philosophers call it, of things in
themselves; which commands belief as a duty, and by necessary
consequence ever leaves it possible to disbelieve; and in listening to
which we are rightly said to walk not by sight but by faith.
Now, before going on to say anything more about the message thus given
to us from the spiritual world, it is necessary to consider an objection
that meets us on the threshold of all such doctrines, namely, that it is
simply impossible for us to know anything whatever of things in
themselves. Our knowledge, it is urged, is necessarily relative to
ourselves, whereas absolute as distinct from relative knowledge is for
ever beyond our reach. We can speak of what things appear to us to be;
we cannot speak of what they are. We know or may know whatever comes
under the observation of our senses as phenomena; we cannot know what
underlies these phenomena. And sometimes it has been maintained that we
not only cannot know what it is that underlies the phenomena, but cannot
even know whether anything at all underlies the phenomena, and that, for
aught we can tell, the whole world and all that exists or happens in it
may be nothing but a system of appearances with no substance whatever.
This doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge is not only applied to
things external but to our very selves. We know ourselves, it is
maintained, only through an internal sense which can only tell us how we
appear to ourselves, but cannot tell us in any the least degree what we
really are.
Now this contention is an instance of a tendency against which we are
required to be perpetually on our guard. The final aim of all science
and of all philosophy is to find some unity or unities that shall
co-ordinate the immense complexity of the world in which we live. Now
there is one and only one legitimate way of attaining this aim, and that
is by patient, persevering study of the facts. But the facts turn out to
be so numerous, so multifarious, that not one life nor one generation
but many lives and many generations will assuredly not co-ordinate them
sufficiently to bring this aim within probable reach. Hence the
incessant temptation, first, to supply by hypothesis what cannot yet be
obtained by observation, and, secondly, to bend facts to suit this
hypothesis; and, if the framing of such hypotheses be legitimate, the
distortion of facts is clearly not legitimate. It seems too long to wait
for future ages to complete the task. We must in some sort complete it
now; and for that purpose if the facts as we observe them will not suit,
we must substitute other facts that will. Accordingly every doctrine
must be made complete, and to make this doctrine of the relativity of
knowledge complete, we must get rid of all exceptions. But there is one
exception that we cannot get rid of, and that is the conviction of our
own identity through all changes through which we pass. Every man
amongst us passes through incessant changes. His body changes; he may
even lose parts of it altogether; he may lose all control over some of
his limbs, or over them all. And there are internal as well as external
changes in each man. His affections change, his practices, his passions,
his resolutions, his purposes, his judgments; everything possibly by
which he knows his own character. But through all these changes he is
conscious of being still one and the same self. And he knows this; and
knows it, not as an inference from any observation of sense external or
internal, but directly and intuitively. All other knowledge may
conceivably be relative, a knowledge of things as they appear, not of
things in themselves. But this is not; it is a knowledge of a thing as
it is in itself; for amidst all changes in the phenomena of each man's
nature, this still remains absolutely unchanged. We do speak of sameness
in application to phenomena; we say this is the same colour as that;
this is the same musical note as that; this is the same sensation as
that. But here we mean a different thing by the word same. We mean
indistinguishability. We mean that we cannot distinguish between the two
colours, the two notes, the two sensations. And this no doubt is a
relative knowledge, not a knowledge of things in themselves. But we do
not mean incapacity of being distinguished when we speak of our own
personal identity. When a man thinks to-day of his life of yesterday,
and regards himself as the same being through, all the time, he does
not simply mean that he cannot distinguish between the being that
existed yesterday according to his memory and the being that exists
to-day according to his present consciousness: he means that the being
is one and the same absolutely and in itself.
And this conviction of personal identity will presently be found to fall
in with the revelation of the Moral Law, which is my subject in this
Lecture. For it is by virtue of this personal identity that I become
responsible for my actions. I am not merely the same thinking subject, I
am the same moral agent all through my life. If I changed as fast as the
phenomena of my being changed, my responsibility for any evil deed would
cease the moment the deed was done. No punishment would be just, because
it would not be just to punish one being for the faults of a totally
different being. The Moral Law in its application to man requires as a
basis the personal identity of each man with himself.
If corroboration were needed of the directness of the intuition by which
we get this idea of our own personal identity, it would be found in the
entire failure of all attempts to derive that idea from any other
source. Comte, the founder of the Positive School, can do nothing with
this idea but suggest that it is probably the result of some obscure
synergy or co-operation of the faculties. John Stuart Mill passes it by
altogether as lying outside the scope of his enquiries and of his
doctrine. Mr. Herbert Spencer deals with it in a very weak chapter[1] of
his remarkable volume of First Principles. He divides all the
manifestations made to our consciousness, or, as we commonly say, all
our sensations, into two great classes. He selects as the main but not
universal characteristic of the one class, vividness; of the other
class, faintness; a distinction first insisted on, though somewhat
differently applied, by Hume. He adds various other characteristics of
each class, some of them implying very questionable propositions. And we
come finally to the following astonishing result. Sensations are divided
into two classes; each has seven main characteristics which distinguish
it from the other. One of these classes make up the subject, that which
I mean when I use the words I myself; the other the object or that
which is not I. But there is absolutely nothing to determine which is
which, which class is the subject and which is the object, which is I
myself, and which is not I myself. Vividness and faintness plainly have
nothing in them by which we can assign the one to that which is I, the
other to that which is not I. If we were to conjecture, we should be
disposed to say that surely the most vivid sensations must be the
nearest and therefore must be part of that which is I; but we find it is
quite the other way. The faint sensations are characteristic of that
which is I, and the vivid of that which is not I. And the same remark
applies to each pair of characteristics in succession. The fact is that
Mr. Spencer has omitted what is essential to complete his argument; he
has not shown, nor endeavoured to show, nor even thought of showing, how
out of his seven characteristics of the subject the conception of a
subject has grown. It is quite plain that he not only makes his classes
first and finds his characteristics afterwards, which we may admit to
have been inevitable; but he fails altogether to show how that by which
we know the classes apart has grown out of the characteristics that he
has given us. The characteristics which he assigns to that which is I,
all added together, do not in the slightest degree account for that
sense of permanent existence in spite of changes which lies at the root
of my distinction of myself from other things. The very word same, in
the sense in which I use it when speaking of myself, cannot be defined
except by reference to my own sameness with myself. It is a simple idea
incapable of analysis, and is indeed, as was pointed out in my last
Lecture, the root of the character of permanence which we assign to
things external. To say that this conception has been evolved from the
characteristics that Mr. Spencer has enumerated is like saying that a
cat has been evolved without any intermediate stages from a fish, or a
smell from a colour.
But, if we now go a step further, and ask in what form this personal
identity presents itself in the world of phenomena, the answer is clear:
our personality while bound up with all our other faculties, so that we
can speak of our understanding, our affections, our powers of perception
and sensation, as parts of ourselves, yet is centred in one faculty
which we call the will. 'If there be aught spiritual in man,' says
Coleridge, 'the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be a
spirituality in man.' The will is the man. It is the will that makes us
responsible beings. It is for the action of our will, or the consent of
our will, that we come to be called in question. It is by the will that
we assert ourselves amidst the existences around us; and as the will is
the man in relation to phenomena, so on the other side the will is the
one and only force among the forces of this world which takes cognizance
of principles and is capable of acting in pursuit of an aim not to be
found among phenomena at all. The will is not the whole spiritual
faculty. Besides the power of willing we have the power of recognising
spiritual truth. And this power or faculty we commonly call the
conscience. But the conscience is not a force. It has no power of acting
except through the will. It receives and transmits the voice from the
spiritual world, and the will is responsible so far as the conscience
enlightens it. It is the will whereby the man takes his place in the
world of phenomena.
It is then to the man, thus capable of appreciating a law superior in
its nature to all phenomena and bearing within himself the conviction of
a personal identity underlying all the changes that may be encountered
and endured, that is revealed from within the command to live for a
moral purpose and believe in the ultimate supremacy of the moral over
the physical. The voice within gives this command in two forms; it
commands our duty and it commands our faith. The voice gives no proof,
appeals to no evidence, but speaks as having a right to command, and
requires our obedience by virtue of its own inherent superiority.
Its first command we call duty. The voice within awakes a peculiar
sentiment which, except towards its command, is never felt in our souls,
the sentiment of reverence. And it commands the pursuit of that,
whatever it may be, to which this sentiment of reverence attaches. This
is the positive test by which we are to know what is ever to be our
highest aim. And along with this there is a negative test by which we
are perpetually to correct the other, namely, the test of universality.
The moral law in its own nature admits of no exceptions. If a principle
of action be derived from this law it has nothing to do with time, or
place, or circumstances; it must hold good in the distant future, in
planets or stars utterly remote, as fully as it holds good now and here.
This duty we can subdivide under four heads, accordingly as we apply it
to our dealings with ourselves, with other moral and spiritual beings,
with other creatures that can feel pleasure and pain, with things that
are incapable of either. If we are thinking of ourselves only, duty
consists in the pursuit of holiness, that is, in the absolute subjection
of what does not demand reverence to that which does. It is plain that
what deserves reverence in us is that which approaches most nearly to
the moral law in character. The appetites, the affections, the passions,
have each their own separate objects. They may be useful in the highest
degree, but they cannot in themselves deserve reverence, for their
objects are not the moral law; they must therefore be absolutely
subordinated to the will and the conscience which have for their
objects the very law itself. Holiness consists in the subjection of the
whole being, not in act alone, but in feeling and desire as well, to the
authority of conscience.
If we are thinking of other moral agents, duty prescribes strict and
unfailing justice; and justice in its highest and purest form is love,
the unfailing recognition of the fullest claims that can be made on us
by all who share our own divine superiority: to love God above all else,
and to love all spiritual beings as we love ourselves, this is duty in
relation to other spiritual beings.
If we are thinking of creatures which, whether moral agents or not, are
capable of pain and pleasure, our duty takes the form of goodness or
tenderness. We have no right to inflict pain or even refuse pleasure
unless, if the circumstances were reversed, we should be bound in
conscience to be ready in our turn to bear the same infliction or
refusal. The precept, Do as you would be done by, is here supreme, and
it is to this class of duties that that precept applies, and the limits
of our right to inflict pain on other creatures, whether rational or
irrational, will be determined by this rule.
And, lower still, our duty to things that are incapable of all feeling
is summed up in that knowledge of them and that use of them which makes
them the fittest instruments of a moral life.
The sentiment of reverence is our guide in determining our duty, and the
test of universality perpetually comes in to correct the commands of
this sentiment and to clear and so to refine the sentiment itself.
As is the case in a certain degree with every other kind of knowledge or
belief, so in a very special degree the Moral Law finds its place even
in minds that have very little of thought or of cultivation. The most
untutored is not insensible to the claim made on our respect by acts of
courage, self-sacrifice, generosity, truth; or to the call upon us for
reprobation at the sight of acts of falsehood, of meanness, of cruelty,
of profligacy. Even in the most untutored there is a sense that these
sentiments of respect and reprobation are quite different in kind from
the other sentiments which stir the soul. And this is even more clear
in condemnation than in approval. However perverted the conscience (the
seat of these sentiments) may be, yet the pain of remorse, which is
self-reprobation for having broken the moral law, is always, as has been
well said, 'quite unlike any other pain we know,' and is felt in some
form and measure by every soul that lives. And as the sentiment thus
holds a special place in the most untutored, so too does the sense of
universality by which we instinctively and invariably correct or defend
that sentiment if it be challenged. The moment we are perplexed in
regard to what we ought to do or what judgment we ought to pass on
something already done, we instinctively, almost involuntarily,
endeavour to disentangle the act from all attendant circumstances and to
see whether our sentiment of approval or disapproval would still hold
good in quite other surroundings. We try to get, at the principle
involved and to ascertain whether that principle possesses the
universality which is the sure characteristic of the Moral Law.
It will be matter of consideration in a future Lecture how our knowledge
of the Eternal Law of the holy, the just, the good, and the right, is
thus purified in the individual and in the race. At present it will be
enough to have indicated the general principle of what may be called the
evolution of the knowledge of morals.
But I now go on from the Moral Law as a duty to the Moral Law as a
faith. For the inner voice is not content with commanding a course of
conduct and requiring obedience of that kind. This is its first
utterance, and the man who hears and obeys unquestionably has within him
the true seed of all religion. But though the first utterance it is not
the last. For the same voice goes on to require us to believe that this
Moral Law which claims obedience from us, equally claims obedience from
all else that exists. It is absolutely supreme or it is nothing.
Its title to our obedience is its supremacy, and it has no other title.
If it depended on promises of reward or threats of punishment addressed
to us, it might be considered as a law for us, but could be no law for
others. It would in that case, indeed, be a mere physical law. Things
are so arranged for you, and as far as you know for you only, that
terrible pain will come to you if you disobey, and wonderful pleasure if
you obey. Such a law as that might proceed from a tyrant possessed of
absolute power over US and the things that concern US, and might be
either good or bad as should happen. But such a law would not be able to
claim our reverence. Nay, rather, as is the case with all merely
physical laws, it might be our duty to disobey it. In claiming our
reverence as well as our obedience, in making its sanction consist in
nothing but the fact of its own inherent majesty, the Moral Law calls on
us to believe in its supremacy. It claims that it is the last and
highest of all laws. The world before us is governed by uniformities as
far as we can judge, but above and behind all these uniformities is the
supreme uniformity, the eternal law of right and wrong, and all other
laws, of whatever kind, must ultimately be harmonised by it alone. The
Moral Law would be itself unjust if it bade us disregard all physical
laws, and yet was itself subordinate to those physical laws. It has a
right to require us to disregard everything but itself, if it be itself
supreme; if not, its claim would be unjust. We see here in things around
us no demonstrative proof that it is supreme, except what may be summed
up in saying that there is a power that makes for righteousness.
Enlightened by the Moral Law we can see strongly marked traces of its
working in all things. The beauty, the order, the general tendency of
all creation accords with the supremacy of the Moral Law over it all.
But that is by no means all. We see, and we know that we see, but an
infinitesimal fraction of the whole. And the result of this partial
vision is that, while there is much in things around us which asserts,
there is also much which seems to deny altogether any supremacy
whatever in the Moral Law. The universe, as we see it, is not holy, nor
just, nor good, nor right. The music of creation is full of discords as
yet altogether unresolved. And if we look to phenomena alone, there is
no solution of the great riddle. But in spite of all imperfections and
contradictions, the voice within, without vouchsafing to give us any
solution of the perplexity, or any sanction but its own authoritative
command, imperatively requires us to believe that holiness is supreme
over unholiness, and justice over injustice, and goodness over evil, and
righteousness over unrighteousness. To obey this command and to believe
this truth is Faith.
This is the Faith which is perpetually presenting to the believer's mind
the vision of a world in which all the inequalities of this present
world shall be redressed, in which truth, justice, and love shall
visibly reign, in which temptations shall cease and sin shall cease
also; in which the upward strivings of noble souls shall find their end,
and holiness shall supersede penitence, and hearts shall be pure of all
defilement. This is the Faith which holds to the sure conviction that
all things shall one day come to judgment; and whether by sudden
catastrophe or by sure development, the physical system shall surrender
to the moral. This is the Faith which supplies perpetual strength to the
hope of immortality; for though it cannot be said that the immortality
of the individual soul is of necessity involved in a belief in the
supremacy of the Moral Law, yet there is a sense, never without witness
in the soul, that all would not be according to justice if a being to
whom the Moral Law has been revealed from within is nevertheless in no
degree to share in the final revelation of the superiority of that Moral
Law over what is without. We cannot say that it is a necessary part of
the supremacy of the Moral Law that every one of those who know it
should partake of its immortal nature. We cannot even say that it is a
necessary part of the ultimate redressing of all injustice and
resolution of all the discords of life that the hope of it should prove
true in the individual as it will certainly prove true in the universe.
For we are unable to weigh individual merit or demerit, and cannot
assert for certain that the balance of justice is not maintained even in
this present life. But nevertheless the hope that it must and will be so
is inextinguishable, and Faith in an Eternal Law of Morals is
inextricably bound up with hope of immortality for the being that is
endowed with a moral and responsible nature.
Faith in the absolute supremacy of the Moral Law is the first, but this
again is not the last step upwards in Faith. We are called upon, and
still by the same imperative voice within, to carry our Faith still
further, and to believe something yet higher.
For the supremacy of the Moral Law must be a moral, not merely a
physical supremacy. In claiming supremacy at all the Moral Law does not
assert that somehow by a happy accident, as it were, all things turn out
at last in accordance with what is in the highest sense moral. The
supremacy of the moral over the physical involves in its very nature an
intention to be supreme. It is not the supremacy of justice, if justice
is done as the blind result of the working of machinery, even if that be
the machinery of the universe. In our very conception of a moral
supremacy is involved the conception of an intended supremacy. And the
Moral Law in its government of the world reveals itself as possessing
the distinctive mark of personality, that is, a purpose and a will. And
thus, as we ponder it, this Eternal Law is shown to be the very Eternal
Himself, the Almighty God. There is a sense in which we cannot ascribe
personality to the Unknown Absolute Being; for our personality is of
necessity compassed with limitations, and from these limitations we find
it impossible to separate our conception of a person. And it will ever
remain true that our highest conceptions of God must fall altogether
short of His true nature. When we speak of Him as infinite, we are but
denying that He is restrained by limits of time and space as we are.
When we speak of Him as absolute, we are but denying that He is subject
to conditions as we are. So when we speak of Him as a person, we cannot
but acknowledge that His personality far transcends our conceptions. But
it still remains the truth that these descriptions of Him are the
nearest that we can get, and that for all the moral purposes of life we
can argue from these as if they were the full truth. If to deny
personality to Him is to assimilate Him to a blind and dead rule, we
cannot but repudiate such denial altogether. If to deny personality to
Him is to assert His incomprehensibility, we are ready at once to
acknowledge our weakness and incapacity. But we dare not let go the
truth that the holiness, the justice, the goodness, the righteousness,
which the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a supreme command, are
identical in essential substance in our minds and in His. Indeed, the
more we keep before us the true character of that law, the more clearly
do we see that the Moral Law is not His command but His nature. He does
not make that law. He is that law. Almighty God and the Moral Law are
different aspects of what is in itself one and the same. To hold fast to
this is the fullest form of Faith. To live by duty is in itself
rudimentary religion. To believe that the rule of duty is supreme over
all the universe, is the first stage of Faith. To believe in Almighty
God is the last and highest.
It will be seen at once by those who have followed me that I am in this
Lecture only working out to its logical conclusion what was said long
ago by Bishop Butler in England and by Kant in Germany. Butler calls the
spiritual faculty whose commands to us I have been examining by the name
of conscience: Kant calls it the practical reason. But both alike insist
on the ultimate basis of morality being found in the voice within the
soul and not in the phenomena observed by the senses. Science by
searching cannot find out God. To reduce all the phenomena of the
universe to order will not, even if it could ever be completely done,
tell us the highest truth that we can attain to concerning spiritual
things.
Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passed
and treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can give
us a history of religion or of religions. But there is something
underlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evades
all attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attempts
to explain away our conviction of our own personal identity have
invariably failed and will for ever fail to satisfy human consciousness,
so too the strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot be got out
of phenomena at all. No analysis succeeds in obliterating the
fundamental distinction between moral and physical law; or in enabling
us to escape the ever increasing sense of the dignity of the former, or
in shutting our ears to the still small voice which is totally unlike
every other voice within or without. To bring the Moral Law under the
dominion of Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing more than
one of the phenomena of human nature, it is necessary to treat the
sentiment of reverence which it excites, the remorse which follows on
disobedience to its commands, the sense of its supremacy, as delusions.
It is always possible so to treat these things; but only at the cost of
standing lower in the scale of being.
But we have one step further to take. For as the spiritual faculty is
the recipient directly or indirectly of that original revelation which
God has made of Himself to His rational creatures, so too this appears
to be the only faculty which can take cognizance of any fresh revelation
that it might please Him to make. If He commands still further duties
than those commanded by the supreme Moral Law, if He bids us believe
what our reason cannot deduce from the primal belief in that Law and in
Himself, it is to that faculty that the command is issued. If over and
above the original religion as we may call it there is a revealed
religion, it is the spiritual faculty that can alone accept it. Such a
revelation may be confirmed by signs or proofs in the world of
phenomena. He who is absolute over all nature may compel nature to bear
witness to His teaching. The spiritual may burst through the natural on
occasion, and that supremacy, which underlies all nature and which is
necessarily visible to intelligences that are capable of seeing things
as they are in themselves, may force itself into the world of phenomena
and show itself in that manner to us. But this always is and must be
secondary. The spiritual faculty alone can receive and judge of
spiritual truth, and if that faculty be not reached a truly religious
belief is not yet attained.
External evidences of revealed religion must have a high place but
cannot have the highest. A revealed religion must depend for its
permanent hold on our obedience and our duty on its fastening upon our
spiritual nature, and if it cannot do that no evidences can maintain it
in its place.
This account of the fundamental beliefs of Religion when compared with
the fundamental postulates of Science shows that the two begin with the
same part of our nature but proceed by opposite methods. Both begin with
the human will as possessing a permanent identity and exerting a force
of its own. But from this point they separate. Science rests on
phenomena observed by the senses; Religion on the voice that speaks
directly from the other world. Science postulates uniformity and is
excluded wherever uniformity can be denied, but compels conviction
within the range of its own postulate. Religion demands the submission
of a free conscience, and uses no compulsion but that imposed by its own
inherent dignity. Science gives warnings, and if you are capable of
understanding scientific argument, you will be incapable of disbelieving
the warnings. Certain things will poison you; certain neglects will ruin
your health; disregard of scientific construction will bring your roof
down on your head; to enter a burning building will risk your life; some
of these things you may learn by ordinary experience, some of them by
that combination of experience which is called Science. But if you are
capable of the necessary reasoning you cannot doubt, however much you
may wish to do so. And yet to defy these warnings and take the
inevitable consequences of that defiance may be your highest glory.
Religion also gives warnings; it assures you that the Eternal Moral Law
is supreme; that, sooner or later, those who disobey will find their
disobedience is exactly and justly punished; that no appearance to the
contrary presented by experience can be trusted. But Religion will not
compel you to believe any more than Science will compel you to obey.
Disbelieve if you choose and Religion will do nothing but perpetually
repeat its warnings and add that your disbelief has lowered you in the
scale of being. So too Science gives promises; it promises, to the race
rather than to the individual, life on easier conditions, and of greater
length; fewer pains, fewer diseases; perpetually increasing comforts;
perpetually increasing power over nature. And Science is sure to keep
the promises. And yet we may refuse to accept the promises, and it is
conceivable that the refusal may be far nobler than the acceptance. And
Religion promises also. It promises stainless purity in the soul; and
truth and justice and unfailing love; and tenderness to every creature
that can feel; and a government of all that is under our dominion with a
single eye to the service of God. And we may refuse to believe these
promises or to care whether they are kept or not. But the refusal or
pursuit of such aims as these determines our position in the judgment of
the Supreme and in the court of our own conscience.
God has made man in His own image: that is, He has given man power to
understand His works and to acknowledge Himself. And it is in
acknowledging God that man finds himself divine. He is a partaker of the
divine nature in proportion as he recognises the Supreme Law and makes
it the law of his own will. And therefore has his will been made free as
well as his mind rational: he has the power to choose as well as the
power to know. And our choice lays hold on God Himself and makes us one
with Him.
LECTURE III.
APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL.
Contradiction of Free-Will to doctrine of Uniformity. Butler's
examination of the question. Hume's solution. Kant's solution.
Determinism. The real result of examination of the facts. Interference
of the will always possible, but comparatively rare. The need of a fixed
nature for our self-discipline, and so for our spiritual life.
LECTURE III.
APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION ON FREE-WILL.
'So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created
He him.' _Genesis_ i. 27.
Religion and Science both begin with the human will. The will is to
Science the first example of power, the origin of the conception of
cause; the bodily effort made by the will lies at the root of the
conception of force. It is by comparing other forces with that force
that Science begins its march. And the will is to religion the recipient
of the Divine command. To the will the inner voice addresses itself,
bidding it act and believe. It is because we have a will that we are
responsible. In a world in which there were no creatures endowed with a
will, there could be no right-doing or wrong-doing; no approval by
conscience and no disapproval; no duty and no faith.
Here is the first possibility of collision between Science and Religion.
Science postulates uniformity; Religion postulates liberty. Science
cannot ever hope to reduce all phenomena to unity if a whole class of
phenomena, all those that belong to the action of human will, are to be
excluded from the postulate of invariable sequence. The action of the
will is in this case for ever left outside. The evidence for the
absolute uniformity of nature seems to be shaken, when it is found that
there is so important a part of phenomena to which this law of
uniformity cannot be applied. If a human will can thus interfere with
the law of uniformity, there enters the possibility that behind some
phenomena may lurk the interference of some other will. Religion, on the
other hand, tells every man that he is responsible, and how can he be
responsible if he is not free? If his action be determined by something
which is not himself, how can the moral burden of it be put on him? To
tell a man that he is to answer for it if he does something which he is
tempted to do, is unmeaning, if he has no power to prevent himself from
doing it.
But this is not all. For besides the sense of responsibility we have a
direct consciousness of being free, a consciousness which no reasoning
appears to extinguish. We sharply distinguish between that which goes on
within us in regard to which we are free and that in regard to which we
are not free. We cannot help being angry, but we can control our anger.
We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain our indulgence or our
pursuit of them. We cannot directly determine our affections, but we can
cherish or discourage them. There are extreme cases in which our wills
seem powerless, but even here we are conscious of our power to struggle
for self-assertion and self-control. There is very much in us which is
not free; nay, there is much in us which impels us to action which is
not free. But we never confound this with our wills, and when our wills
are overpowered by passion or appetite, we call the act no longer a
perfectly free act, and do not consider the responsibility for it to be
quite the same.
This question of the freedom of the will was considered by Bishop
Butler in the Analogy. He contented himself with proving that, make what
theory we would concerning the necessity of human action, all men in
practice acted on the theory of human freedom. We promise; we accept
promises; we punish; we reward; we estimate character; we admire; we
shun; we deal with ourselves; we deal with others; as if we and all
others were free. And this was enough for his purpose. For he had to
reconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense of
justice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishments
were plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealings
with one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with that
sense of justice in God's dealings with us.
But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that for
two reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was most
often in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divine
foreknowledge arranging everything by supreme Will, not from the
conception of a blind mechanical rule holding all in its unrelaxing
grasp. And though to the cold reason it may make no difference how the
will is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the two kinds of compulsion
differ as life and death. To have no liberty because of being absolutely
in the hands of Almighty God is quite another thing from having no
liberty, as being under the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seems
possible to accept the one and call it an unfathomable mystery; but to
accept the other is to call life a delusion and the moral law a dream.
And in the second place, the doctrine of necessity advanced as a theory
and based on arguments not resting on facts, is a very different
antagonist from the same doctrine advanced as a conclusion of science,
and as deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observations. We may
dismiss the mere theory after showing that it has not substance enough
to hold its ground in ordinary life. We cannot so treat what claims to
be a scientific inference.
The modern examination of the question begins with Hume, who maintains
that the doctrine of liberty and that of necessity are both true and of
course compatible with each other. But his arguments touch only the
broad question whether they are true for practical purposes, not whether
either is true in the strict sense and without exception or
modification. To Kant's system, on the contrary, it was essential that
both doctrines should be true in the strictest sense. Holding that
invariable sequence was a law of Nature known independently of
experience and applicable to all phenomena in the minutest detail, he
could not allow that any act of the human will lay outside the range of
this law. Such an act being a phenomenon must, in his view, be subject
to the law which the constitution of our minds imposed on all phenomena
apparent to us. And yet, on the other hand, holding that the eternal
Moral Law made us responsible for all our acts, he could not but
maintain that in the doing of those acts we must be free. His mode of
reconciling the two opposites amounted to this, that our action
throughout life considered as a whole is free, but that each separate
act considered by itself is bound to the preceding acts by the law of
invariable sequence. We may illustrate this by the familiar instance of
a prism acting on a ray of light. The ray has or may have a colour of
its own before it passes through the prism. The prism spreads it out and
shows a series of colours. The order in which this series is arranged is
determined by the character of the prism acting on the nature of the
ray. The colours when combined give the colour of the ray; when
separated by the prism each has its own distinct character, and the
order of the colours is determined, and invariably determined, by the
prism. So too in Kant's view the character of a man in itself may be
free, but when it passes through the prism of time into the world of
phenomena and is spread over many years it shows a number of separate
actions, no one of which taken by itself exhibits the man, though all
put together are the true representation of him to human perception. The
man is free. His life represents his free choice. But his separate acts
are what that free choice becomes when translated into a series of
phenomena, and are bound each to the preceding by the law of invariable
sequence. It is plain at once that this does not satisfy our
consciousness. We are not conscious of freedom as regards our life as a
whole; we are conscious of freedom as regards our separate actions. Our
life as a whole embraces our past which is absolutely unchangeable, and
our future which is not yet within our reach; we are conscious of no
present power over either. Our separate acts are perceptibly subject to
our own control; nay, it is by the use of our free-will in our separate
acts that we are able to change the character of our life or to preserve
it from change; and with this corresponds our responsibility. We hold
ourselves responsible for each act as it is done; we hold ourselves
responsible for the character of our lives only so far as we might have
changed it by our acts. The solution leaves the difficulty where it was.
It is now customary with the advocates of the doctrine of necessity to
express it by a different word, and call it the doctrine of determinism.
The purpose of changing the word is to get rid of all associations with
the idea of compulsion; just so in Science it is thought better to get
rid of the words cause and effect, and substitute invariable sequence,
in order to get rid of the notion of some compulsion recognisable by us
in the cause to produce the effect. Determinism does not say to a man
'you will be forced to act in a particular way;' but 'you will assuredly
do so.' There will be no compulsion; but the action is absolutely
certain. Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse the sun, so in
given circumstances you will do the precise thing which it is your
character in such circumstances to do. And your sense of freedom is
simply the sense that the action proceeds from yourself and not from any
force put upon you from without.
But this too does not solve the problem. It is true that in regard to a
very large proportion of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be no
more than negative. We do what it is our custom, our inclination, our
character to do. We are not conscious of any force being put upon us;
but neither are we conscious of using any force ourselves. We float as
it were down the stream, or hurry along with a determined aim, but
having no desire nor purpose to the contrary, the question of freedom or
necessity never seems to arise. It is even possible and common for us
not to know ourselves as well as others know us, and to do many things
which an observer would predict as sure to be our actions, but which we
ourselves fancy to be by no means certain. Even in these cases we
sometimes awake to the fact that what we are thus allowing in our lives
is not consistent with the law of duty, and, do what we may, we cannot
then escape the conviction that we are to blame, and that we had power
to act otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the power. But it is
when a conflict arises between duty and inclination that our inner
certainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear and unconquerable. In
the great conflicts of the soul between the call of duty and the power
of temptation there are two forces at work upon us. We are never for a
moment in doubt which is ourselves and which is not ourselves; which is
the free agent and which is the blind force; which is responsible for
the issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. There is in this
case a real sense of compulsion from without, and a real sense of
resistance to that compulsion from within. It is impossible in this case
to account for the sense of being a free agent, by saying that this
merely means that we are conscious of no external force. We are
conscious of an external force and we are conscious that this will of
ours which struggles against it is not an external force, but our very
selves, and this distinction between the will and the forces against
which the will is striving is ineffaceable from our minds. That the will
is often weak and on that account overpowered, and that after a hard
struggle our actions are often determined, not by our wills but by our
passions or our appetites, is unquestionable. Often has the believer to
pray to God for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and often will
he feel that without that strength he must inevitably fall. But he knows
that whatever source may supply the strength, it is he that will have to
use it, and he that will be responsible for using it or neglecting to do
so.
The advocates of determinism urge that every action must have a motive,
and that the man always acts on that motive which is the stronger. The
first proposition may be granted at once. The freedom of the will is
certainly not shown in acting without any motive at all. If there be
any human action which appears to be without any motive, it is not in
such action that we find human freedom. Such action, if possible at all,
must inevitably be mechanical. A man who is acting from mere caprice is
even more completely at the mercy of passing inclination than one who is
acting from passion or from overpowering temptation. The freedom of the
will is not shown in acting without motive, but in choosing between
motives. But when it is further said that a man always acts from the
stronger motive, the question immediately follows, what determines which
is the stronger motive? It cannot be anything in the motives themselves,
or all men would act alike in the same circumstances; and it is clear
that they do not. It must be therefore something in the man. And if it
be something in the man, it must be either his will acting at the
moment, which in that case is free, or his character. But if it be his
character, then follows the further question, what determines his
character? If we are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we must
answer by assigning the determination to the sum total of surrounding
and preceding circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law of
uniformity but this; that, given such and such parents, such and such
circumstances of birth and life, there must be such a character and no
other. At what point is there room in this case for any responsibility?
I did not on this supposition make my character; it was made for me; any
one else born in my stead, and living in my stead, would of necessity
have acted exactly as I have done; would have felt the same, and aimed
at the same, and won the same moral victories, and suffered the same
moral defeats. How can I be held responsible for what is the pure result
of the circumstances in which I was born? But if, on the other hand, it
be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and
surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has
come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the
antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedents
and surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, and
yet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would have
altogether differed.
It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty.
Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and in
regard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchased
completeness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to be
accounted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spite
of all attempts to explain it away, the fact that we think ourselves
free and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains unaffected.
But let us examine how far the difference between the scientific view
and the religious view of human action extends.
Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of human
action, much even of that which appears at first sight to be more
especially independent of all law, is really as much regulated by laws
of nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed out
how often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the man
himself, and how often the will is certainly passive and consents
instead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to deny
that nature and not the will is producing the conduct. And not only so,
but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call
caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to
assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But
it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men
that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that
their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That
amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same
conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number
of suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds,
cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that
like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only
can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of
men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for
another, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter a
university, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) which
can be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable as far as
it goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for the
uniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all the
universality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls far short of proving
as much uniformity in human action as is proved in the action of
inanimate things. The induction which proves the uniformity of the laws
of mechanics, of chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than the
induction which proves the uniformity of human conduct, that it is
hardly possible to put the two side by side. When we turn from abstract
arguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is unquestionably
unproven.
And this agrees with the result of a careful examination of the facts of
human consciousness from the opposite point of view. We cannot but
acknowledge that when we look very closely we find a very large
proportion of our own actions to be by no means the result of an
interference by the will. A large proportion is due to custom; a large
proportion to inclination, of which the will takes no special notice,
and is not called on by the conscience to notice; a large proportion to
inclinations which we know that we ought to resist, but we do not
resist; a much smaller proportion, but still some, to passions and
appetites against which we have striven in vain; only a very small
proportion to deliberate choice. There is, in fact, no irresistible
reason for claiming freedom for human action except when that action
turns on the question of right or wrong. There is no reason to call
action free that flows from inclination or custom, or passion, or a
desire to avoid pain, or a desire to obtain pleasure. The will claims to
be free in all these cases, but it is free in the sense that it might be
exerted; and so, since it is not exerted, the action is not free. But
when, at the call of duty, in whatever form, the will directly
interferes, then and then only are we conscious not only that the will
is free, but that it has asserted its freedom, and that the action has
been free also.
The relation of the will to the conduct falls under four distinct heads:
for sometimes the will simply concurs with the inclination; sometimes it
neither concurs nor opposes; sometimes it opposes but is overpowered;
sometimes it opposes and prevails. In the first case, inclination of
some kind or other prompts the man to action. The inclination, whether
set up by an external object of desire or by an internal impulse of
restlessness or blind craving or the like, comes clearly from the
nature, and is not free choice. There is no reason to believe that it is
not in most cases, possibly in all cases, under the dominion of fixed
law. It may be as completely the product of what has preceded it as the
eclipse of the sun. And if the will concurs in the inclination, it is
needless to discuss the question whether the will acts or not. The
conduct is the same whether the will adds force to the inclination or is
simply passive. The freedom of the will may in this case be considered
as negative. So, too, may the freedom of the will be considered negative
in the second case, which is that of the will neither concurring with
inclination nor opposing it. In this case there may be a distinct
consciousness of freedom in the form of a sense of responsibility for
what inclination is permitted to do. A man in this case knows that he is
free, perhaps knows that he ought to interfere and control the conduct.
But as he does not interfere, the freedom of the will is not asserted in
act. And it is possible that, as far as all external phenomena are
concerned, there may be no breach in uniformity of sequence. This,
however, can hardly be in the third case, which is when the will and the
inclination are opposed, and the will is overpowered. Although the
inclination prevails, yet the struggle itself is an event of the most
important kind, and is sure to leave traces on the character, and to be
followed by consequences. In this case we are distinctly conscious of a
power to add force to that one of the contending opposites which is most
identified with our very selves, and we know whether we have added that
force or not. And not only may we add this force directly from within;
we may and we often do go outside of ourselves to seek for aids to add
still more force indirectly, and we do for this purpose what we should
not do otherwise. We dwell in thought on the higher aims which are the
proper object of will; we read what sets forth those higher aims in
their full beauty; we seek the words, the company, the sympathy of men
who will, we are sure, encourage us in this the higher path. And, on the
other hand, we turn away from the temptation which gives strength to
the evil inclination, and if we cannot escape from its presence we
endeavour to drive the thought of it from our minds. All this action is
not for the sake of anything thus done, but for the sake of its indirect
effect on the struggle in which we are engaged. Whenever there is a
struggle, we are not only conscious that the will is free, but that it
is asserting its freedom. In these struggles there is not a mere contest
between two inclinations. We are distinctly conscious that one of the
combatants is our very selves in a sense in which the other is not. But,
nevertheless, when all has been said, it still remains in this case that
the will is beaten and inclination prevails, and the conduct in the main
is determined by the inclination, which is under the dominion of the law
of uniformity, and not by the will, which claims to be free. The fourth
case in which the will prevails may, of course, make a momentous breach
in the uniformity of sequence of the conduct. But in far the largest
number of cases the struggle is very slight, and the difference between
the will and the inclination is not, taken alone, of grave importance in
the life. And in those instances in which the struggle is severe and
the resulting change is great, it is very often the case that the way
has been prepared, as it were in secret, by the quiet accumulation of
hidden forces of the strictly natural order ready to burst forth when
the fit opportunity came. In the great conversions which have sometimes
seemed by their suddenness and completeness to defy all possibility of
reduction to natural law, there are often nevertheless tokens of deep
dissatisfaction with the previous life having swelled up slowly within
the soul for some time, even for some long time beforehand. The
inclination to go on in evil courses has been broken down at last, not
merely by the action of the will, but by the working of the machinery of
the soul.
To this it must be added that the action of the will is such that it
very often happens that, having been exerted once, it need not be
exerted again for the same purpose. A custom is broken down, an
exceedingly strong temptation has been overpowered, and its strength so
destroyed that its return is without effect. Or sometimes the act of the
will takes the form of deliberately so arranging the circumstances of
life that a dreaded temptation cannot return, or if it return cannot
prevail; the right eye has been plucked out, the right hand cut off, and
the sin cannot be committed even if desired. While therefore the will is
always free, the actual interference of the will with the life is not so
frequent as to interfere with the broad general rule that the course of
human conduct is practically uniform. In fact the will, though always
free, only asserts its freedom by obeying duty in spite of inclination,
by disregarding the uniformity of nature in order to maintain the higher
uniformity of the Moral Law. The freedom of the human will is but the
assertion in particular of that universal supremacy of the moral over
the physical in the last resort, which is an essential part of the very
essence of the Moral Law. The freedom of the will is the Moral Law
breaking into the world of phenomena, and thus behind the free-will of
man stands the power of God.
When the real claim of the will for freedom has been clearly seized by
the mind, it becomes apparent that there is no real collision between
what Science asserts and what Religion requires us to believe. Science
asserts that there is evidence to show that an exceedingly large
proportion of human action is governed by fixed law. Religion requires
us to believe that the will is responsible for all this action, not
because it does, but because it might interfere. Science is not able,
and from the nature of the case never will be able to prove that the
range of this fixed law is universal, and that the will never does
interfere to vary the actions from what without the will they would have
been. Science will never be able to prove this, because it could not be
proved except by a universal induction, and a universal induction is
impossible. At present there is no approximation to such proof.
Religion, on the other hand, does not call on us to believe that the
will often interferes, but on the contrary is perpetually telling us
that it does not interfere as often as it ought. Revealed religion,
indeed, has always based its most earnest exhortations on the reluctance
of man to set his will to the difficult task of contending with the
forces of his nature, and on the weakness of the will in the presence of
those forces.
And when we pursue this thought further we see that for such creatures
as we are the subjection of a large part of our own nature to fixed laws
is as necessary for our dominion over ourselves as the fixity of
external nature is necessary for our dominion over the world around us.
The fixity of a large part of our nature--nay, of all but the whole of
it--is a moral and spiritual necessity. For it requires but a
superficial self-examination to discern the indications of what the
profoundest research still leaves a mystery--that we are not perfect
creatures of our own kind--that our nature does not spontaneously
conform to the Supreme Moral Law--that our highest and best consists not
in complete obedience to which we cannot attain, but in a perpetual
upward struggle. Now such a struggle demands for its indispensable
condition something fixed in our nature by which each step upwards shall
be made good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing for the next
ascent. If there were nothing in us fixed and firm, if the warfare with
evil impulses, wayward affections, overmastering appetites had to be
carried on through life without the possibility of making any victory
complete, the formation of a perpetually higher and nobler character
would be impossible; our main hope in this life, our best offering to
God would be taken away from us; we could never give our bodies to be a
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God; we could give our separate
acts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly unable to form
ourselves into fitness for such a purpose. The task given to the will is
not only to govern the actions but to discipline the nature; but
discipline is impossible where there is no fixity in the thing to be
disciplined.
And this becomes still more important when we search more deeply and
perceive that not the nature only but the will itself is in some strange
way infected with evil. We can hardly imagine even a perfectly pure will
capable of continuing to the end a conflict in which no progress ever
was or could be made. The tremendous strain of fighting with an enemy
that might be defeated again and again for ever without ever suffering
any change or relaxing the violence of any attack or giving the
slightest hope of any relief, would seem too much for the most
unearthly, the most noble, the most godlike of human wills. But wills
such as ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with treachery to their
own best aspirations, how utterly impossible that they could persevere
through such a hopeless conflict.
It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed from
glory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when all
is over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is.
But that hope is never presented as one to be realized by some sudden
stroke fashioning the soul anew and moulding it at once into heavenly
lineaments. It is by steady and sure degrees that the Christian believes
that he shall be thus blessed. And this progress rests on the fixed
rules by which his nature is governed, and which admit of the character
being gradually changed by the life. The Christian knows that God has so
made us that a temptation once overcome is permanently weakened, and
often overcome is at last altogether expelled; that appetites restrained
are in the end subdued and cost but little effort to keep down; that bad
thoughts perpetually put aside at last return no more; that a clearer
perception of duty and a more resolute obedience to its call makes duty
itself more attractive, fills us with enthusiasm for its fulfilment,
draws us as it were upwards, and ennobles the whole man. The Christian
knows that the thought of the Supreme Being, the contemplation of His
excellency, the recognition of Him as the source of spiritual life has a
strange power to transform, and evermore to transform the whole man. In
this knowledge the Christian lives his life and fights his battle. And
what is this but a knowledge that he has a nature subject to fixed laws,
which he can indeed interfere with, but without which his
self-discipline would be of little value, and assuredly could not long
continue.
And if the progress of Science and the examination of human nature
should eventually restrict more closely than we might have supposed the
length to which the interference of the will can go; if it should appear
that the changes which we can make at any one moment in ourselves are
within a very narrow range, this, too, will be knowledge that can be
used in our self-discipline and quite as much perhaps in our mutual
moral aid. It is conceivable that the branch of science which treats of
human nature may in the end profoundly modify our modes of education,
and our hopes of what can be effected by it. But if so the knowledge
will only add to the store of means put within our reach for the
elevation of our race. And we may be sure that nothing of this sort will
really affect the revelation that God has written in our souls that we
are free and responsible beings, and cannot get quit of our
responsibility.
LECTURE IV.
APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.
Foundation of the doctrine of Evolution. Great development in recent
times. Objection felt by many religious men. Alleged to destroy argument
from design. Paley's argument examined. Doctrine of Evolution adds force
to the argument, and removes objections to it. Argument from progress;
from beauty; from unity. The conflict not real.
LECTURE IV.
APPARENT CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.
'For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even
His eternal power and Godhead.' _Romans_ i. 20.
The regularity of nature is the first postulate of Science; but it
requires the very slightest observation to show us that, along with this
regularity, there exists a vast irregularity which Science can only deal
with by exclusion from its province. The world as we see it is full of
changes; and these changes when patiently and perseveringly examined are
found to be subject to invariable or almost invariable laws. But the
things themselves which thus change are as multifarious as the changes
which they undergo. They vary infinitely in quantity, in qualities, in
arrangement throughout space, possibly in arrangement throughout time.
Take a single substance such, say, as gold. How much gold there is in
the whole universe, and where it is situated, we not only have no
knowledge, but can hardly be said to be on the way to have knowledge.
Why its qualities are what they are, and why it alone possesses all
these qualities; how long it has existed, and how long it will continue
to exist, these questions we are unable to answer. The existence of the
many forms of matter, the properties of each form, the distribution of
each: all this Science must in the last resort assume.
But I say in the last resort. For it is possible, and Science soon makes
it evident that it is true, that some forms of matter grow out of other
forms. There are endless combinations. And the growth of new out of old
forms is of necessity a sequence, and falls under the law of
invariability of sequences, and becomes the subject-matter of Science.
As in each separate case Science asserts each event of to-day to have
followed by a law of invariable sequence on the events of yesterday; the
earth has reached the precise point in its orbit now which was
determined by the law of gravitation as applied to its motion at the
point which it reached a moment ago; the weather of the present hour has
come by meteorological laws out of the weather of the last hour; the
crops and the flocks now found on the surface of the habitable earth are
the necessary outcome of preceding harvests and preceding flocks and of
all that has been done to maintain and increase them; so, too, if we
look at the universe as a whole, the present condition of that whole is,
if the scientific postulate of invariable sequence be admitted, and in
as far as it is admitted, the necessary outcome of its former condition;
and all the various forms of matter, whether living or inanimate, must
for the same reason and with the same limitation be the necessary
outcome of preceding forms of matter. This is the foundation of the
doctrine of Evolution.
Now stated in this abstract form this doctrine will be, and indeed if
Science be admitted at all must be, accepted by everybody. Even the
Roman Church, which holds that God is perpetually interfering with the
course of nature, either in the interests of religious truth or out of
loving kindness to His creatures, yet will acknowledge that the number
of such interferences almost disappears in comparison of the countless
millions of instances in which there is no reason to believe in any
interference at all. And if we look at the universe as a whole, the
general proposition as stated above is quite unaffected by the
infinitesimal exception which is to be made by a believer in frequent
miracles. But when this proposition is applied in detail it at once
introduces the possibility of an entirely new history of the material
universe. For this universe as we see it is almost entirely made up of
composite and not of simple substances. We have been able to analyse all
the substances that we know into a comparatively small number of simple
elements--some usually solid, some liquid, some gaseous. But these
simple elements are rarely found uncombined with others; most of those
which we meet with in a pure state have been taken out of combination
and reduced to simplicity by human agency. The various metals that we
ordinarily use are mostly found in a state of ore, and we do not
generally obtain them pure except by smelting. The air we breathe,
though not a compound, is a mixture. The water which is essential to our
life is a compound. And, if we pass from inorganic to organic
substances, all vegetables and animals are compound, sustained by
various articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how have
these compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, or
all of them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. If
Science could go back to the beginning of all things, which it obviously
cannot, it might find the composition already accomplished, and be
compelled to start with it as a given fact--a fact as incapable of
scientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on the
other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-day
experience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing through
these processes in our bodies; and by the same processes we prepare much
of our food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the time
when these processes had not yet begun? May not the starting-point of
the history of the universe be a condition in which the simple elements
were still uncombined? If Science could go back to the beginning of all
things, might we not find all the elements of material things ready
indeed for the action of the inherent forces which would presently unite
them in an infinite variety of combinations, but as yet still separate
from each other? Scattered through enormous regions of space, but drawn
together by the force of gravitation; their original heat, whatever it
may have been, increased by their mutual collision; made to act
chemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of
temperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by
the incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown;
these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own proper
nature, may be enough to account scientifically for all the phenomena
that we observe. We do not even then get back to regularity. Why these
elements, and no others; why in these precise quantities; why so
distributed in space; why endowed with these properties: still are
questions which Science cannot answer, and there seems no reason to
expect that any scientific answer will ever be possible. Nay, I know not
whether it may not be asserted that the impossibility of answering one
at least among these questions is capable of demonstration. For the
whole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the perpetual
rotation of the heavenly bodies; and without original irregularity in
the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever have
spontaneously arisen. And if this irregularity be thus original, Science
can give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to begin with
assuming certain facts for which it can never hope to account. But it
_may_ begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe was always
very much what we see it now, and that composition and decomposition
have always nearly balanced each other, and that there have been from
the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and stars in the sky,
the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the same vegetation, the
same minerals; and that though there have been incessant changes, and
possibly all these changes in one general direction, yet these changes
have never amounted to what would furnish a scientific explanation of
the forms which matter has assumed. Or, on the other hand, Science _may_
assert the possibility of going back to a far earlier condition of our
material system; may assert that all the forms of matter have grown up
under the action of laws and forces still at work; may take as the
initial state of our universe one or many enormous clouds of gaseous
matter, and endeavour to trace with more or less exactness how these
gradually formed themselves into what we see. Science has lately leaned
to the latter alternative. To a believer the alternative may be stated
thus: We all distinguish between the original creation of the material
world and the history of it ever since. And we have, nay all men have,
been accustomed to assign to the original creation a great deal that
Science is now disposed to assign to the history. But the distinction
between the original creation and the subsequent history would still
remain, and for ever remain, although the portion assigned to the one
may be less, and that assigned to the other larger, than was formerly
supposed. However far back Science may be able to push its beginning,
there still must lie behind that beginning the original act of
creation--creation not of matter only, but of the various kinds of
matter, and of the laws governing all and each of those kinds, and of
the distribution of this matter in space.
This application of the abstract doctrine of Evolution gives it an
enormous and startling expansion: so enormous and so startling that the
doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present grows by
regular law out of the past is one thing; to say that it has grown out
of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life upon the
earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and continents, the
very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made--and all this
also by regular law--that is quite another thing. And the bearings of
this new application of Science deserve study.
Now it seems quite plain that this doctrine of Evolution is in no sense
whatever antagonistic to the teachings of Religion, though it may be,
and that we shall have to consider afterwards, to the teachings of
revelation. Why then should religious men independently of its relation
to revelation shrink from it, as very many unquestionably do? The reason
is that, whilst this doctrine leaves the truth of the existence and
supremacy of God exactly where it was, it cuts away, or appears to cut
away, some of the main arguments for that truth.
Now, in regard to the arguments whereby we have been accustomed to prove
or to corroborate the existence of a Supreme Being, it is plain that, to
take these arguments away or to make it impossible to use them, is not
to disprove or take away the truth itself. We find every day instances
of men resting their faith in a truth on some grounds which we know to
be untenable, and we see what a terrible trial it sometimes is when they
find out that this is so, and know not as yet on what other ground they
are to take their stand. And some men succumb in the trial and lose
their faith together with the argument which has hitherto supported it.
But the truth still stands in spite of the failure of some to keep their
belief in it, and in spite of the impossibility of supporting it by the
old arguments.
And when men have become accustomed to rest their belief on new grounds
the loss of the old arguments is never found to be a very serious
matter. Belief in revelation has been shaken again and again by this
very increase of knowledge. It was unquestionably a dreadful blow to
many in the days of Galileo to find that the language of the Bible in
regard to the movement of the earth and sun was not scientifically
correct. It was a dreadful blow to many in the days of the Reformation
to find that they had been misled by what they believed to be an
infallible Church.
Such shocks to faith try the mettle of men's moral and spiritual
conviction, and they often refuse altogether to hold what they can no
longer establish by the arguments which have hitherto been to them the
decisive, perhaps the sole decisive, proofs.
And yet in spite of these shocks belief in revelation is strong still in
men's souls, and is clearly not yet going to quit the world.
But let us go on to consider how far it is true that the arguments
which have hitherto been regarded as proving the existence of a Supreme
Creator are really affected very gravely by this doctrine of Evolution.
The main argument, which at first appears to be thus set aside, is that
which is founded on the marks of design, and which is worked out in his
own way with marvellous skill by Paley in his Natural Theology. Paley's
argument rests as is well known on the evidence of design in created
things, and these evidences he chiefly finds in the frame-work of
organised living creatures. He traces with much most interesting detail
the many marvellous contrivances by which animals of various kinds are
adapted to the circumstances in which they are to live, the mechanism
which enables them to obtain their food, to preserve their species, to
escape their enemies, to remove discomforts. All nature thus examined,
and particularly all animated nature, seems full of means towards ends,
and those ends invariably such as a beneficent Creator might well be
supposed to have in view. And whilst there is undeniably one great
objection to his whole argument, namely that the Creator is represented
as an Artificer rather than a Creator, as overcoming difficulties which
stood in His way rather than as an Almighty Being fashioning things
according to His Will, yet the argument thus drawn from evidence of
design remains exceedingly powerful, and it has always been considered a
strong corroboration of the voice within which bids us believe in a God.
Now it certainly seems at first as if this argument were altogether
destroyed. If animals were not made as we see them, but evolved by
natural law, still more if it appear that their wonderful adaptation to
their surroundings is due to the influence of those surroundings, it
might seem as if we could no longer speak of design as exhibited in
their various organs; the organs we might say grow of themselves, some
suitable, and some unsuitable to the life of the creatures to which they
belonged, and the unsuitable have perished and the suitable have
survived.
But Paley has supplied the clue to the answer. In his well-known
illustration of the watch picked up on the heath by the passing
traveller, he points out that the evidence of design is certainly not
lessened if it be found that the watch was so constructed that, in
course of time, it produced another watch like itself. He was thinking
not of Evolution, but of the ordinary production of each generation of
animals from the preceding. But his answer can be pushed a step further,
and we may with equal justice remark that we should certainly not
believe it a proof that the watch had come into existence without design
if we found that it produced in course of time not merely another watch
but a better. It would become more marvellous than ever if we found
provision thus made not merely for the continuance of the species but
for the perpetual improvement of the species. It is essential to animal
life that the animal should be adapted to its circumstances; if besides
provision for such adaptation in each generation we find provision for
still better adaptation in future generations, how can it be said that
the evidences of design are diminished? Or take any separate organ, such
as the eye. It is impossible not to believe until it be disproved that
the eye was intended to see with. We cannot say that light was made for
the eye, because light subserves many other purposes besides that of
enabling eyes to see. But that the eye was intended for light there is
so strong a presumption that it cannot easily be rebutted. If indeed it
could be shown that eyes fulfilled several other functions, or that
species of animals which always lived in the dark still had fully-formed
eyes, then we might say that the connexion between the eye of an animal
and the light of heaven was accidental. But the contrary is notoriously
the case; so much the case that some philosophers have maintained that
the eye was formed by the need for seeing, a statement which I need take
no trouble to refute, just as those who make it take no trouble to
establish, I will not say its truth, but even its possibility. But the
fact, if it be a fact, that the eye was not originally as well adapted
to see with as it is now, and that the power of perceiving light and of
things in the light grew by degrees, does not show, nor even tend to
show, that the eye was not intended for seeing with.
The fact is that the doctrine of Evolution does not affect the substance
of Paley's argument at all. The marks of design which he has pointed out
remain marks of design still even if we accept the doctrine of
Evolution to the full. What is touched by this doctrine is not the
evidence of design but the mode in which the design was executed. Paley,
no doubt, wrote on the supposition (and at that time it was hardly
possible to admit any other supposition) that we must take animals to
have come into existence very nearly such as we now know them: and his
language, on the whole, was adapted to that supposition. But the
language would rather need supplementing than changing to make it
applicable to the supposition that animals were formed by Evolution. In
the one case the execution follows the design by the effect of a direct
act of creation; in the other case the design is worked out by a slow
process. In the one case the Creator made the animals at once such as
they now are; in the other case He impressed on certain particles of
matter which, either at the beginning or at some point in the history of
His creation He endowed with life, such inherent powers that in the
ordinary course of time living creatures such as the present were
developed. The creative power remains the same in either case; the
design with which that creative power was exercised remains the same.
He did not make the things, we may say; no, but He made them make
themselves. And surely this rather adds than withdraws force from the
great argument. It seems in itself something more majestic, something
more befitting Him to Whom a thousand years are as one day and one day
as a thousand years, thus to impress His Will once for all on His
creation, and provide for all its countless variety by this one original
impress, than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying
what He had previously made. It has often been objected to Paley's
argument, as I remarked before, that it represents the Almighty rather
as an artificer than a creator, a workman dealing with somewhat
intractable materials and showing marvellous skill in overcoming
difficulties rather than a beneficent Being making all things in
accordance with the purposes of His love. But this objection disappears
when we put the argument into the shape which the doctrine of Evolution
demands and look on the Almighty as creating the original elements of
matter, determining their number and their properties, creating the law
of gravitation whereby as seems probable the worlds have been formed,
creating the various laws of chemical and physical action, by which
inorganic substances have been combined, creating above all the law of
life, the mysterious law which plainly contains such wonderful
possibilities within itself, and thus providing for the ultimate
development of all the many wonders of nature.
What conception of foresight and purpose can rise above that which
imagines all history gathered as it were into one original creative act
from which the infinite variety of the Universe has come and more is
coming even yet?
And yet again, it is a common objection to Paley's and similar arguments
that, in spite of all the tokens of intelligence and beneficence in the
creation, there is so much of the contrary character. How much there is
of apparently needless pain and waste! And John Stuart Mill has urged
that either we must suppose the Creator wanting in omnipotence or
wanting in kindness to have left His creation so imperfect. The answer
usually given is that our knowledge is partial, and, could we see the
whole, the objection would probably disappear. But what force and
clearness is given to this answer by the doctrine of Evolution which
tells us that we are looking at a work which is not yet finished, and
that the imperfections are a necessary part of a large design the
general outlines of which we may already trace, but the ultimate issue
of which, with all its details, is still beyond our perception! The
imperfections are like the imperfections of a half-completed picture not
yet ready to be seen; they are like the bud which will presently be a
beautiful flower, or the larva of a beautiful and gorgeous insect; they
are like the imperfections in the moral character of a saint who
nevertheless is changing from glory to glory.
To the many partial designs which Paley's Natural Theology points out,
and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolution adds
the design of a perpetual progress. Things are so arranged that animals
are perpetually better adapted to the life they have to live. The very
phrase which we commonly use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival
of the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain and increase of
enjoyment for all creatures that can feel. If they are fitter for their
surroundings, most certainly they will find life easier to live. And, as
if to mark still more plainly the beneficence of the whole work, the
less developed creatures, as we have every reason to believe, are less
sensible of pain and pleasure; so that enjoyment appears to grow with
the capacity for enjoyment, and suffering diminishes as sensitivity to
suffering increases. And there can be no doubt that this is in many ways
the tendency of nature. Beasts of prey are diminishing; life is easier
for man and easier for all animals that are under his care: many species
of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those that
remain have far greater happiness in their lives. In fact, all the
purposes which Paley traces in the formation of living creatures are not
only fulfilled by what the Creator has done, but are better fulfilled
from age to age. And though the progress may be exceedingly slow, the
nature of the progress cannot be mistaken.
If the Natural Theology were now to be written, the stress of the
argument would be put on a different place. Instead of insisting wholly
or mainly on the wonderful adaptation of means to ends in the structure
of living animals and plants, we should look rather to the original
properties impressed on matter from the beginning, and on the beneficent
consequences that have flowed from those properties. We should dwell on
the peculiar properties that must be inherent in the molecules of the
original elements to cause such results to follow from their action and
reaction on one another. We should dwell on the part played in the
Universe by the properties of oxygen, the great purifier, and one of the
great heat-givers; of carbon, the chief light-giver and heat-giver; of
water, the great solvent and the storehouse of heat; of the atmosphere
and the vapours in it, the protector of the earth which it surrounds. We
should trace the beneficent effects of pain and pleasure in their
subservience to the purification of life. The marks of a purpose
impressed from the first on all creation would be even more visible than
ever before.
And we could not overlook the beauty of Nature and of all created things
as part of that purpose coming in many cases out of that very survival
of the fittest of which Darwin has spoken, and yet a distinct object in
itself. For this beauty there is no need in the economy of nature
whatever. The beauty of the starry heavens, which so impressed the mind
of Kant that he put it by the side of the Moral Law as proving the
existence of a Creator, is not wanted either for the evolution of the
world or for the preservation of living creatures. Our enjoyment of it
is a super-added gift certainly not necessary for the existence or the
continuance of our species. The beauty of flowers, according to the
teaching of the doctrine of Evolution, has generally grown out of the
need which makes it good for plants to attract insects. The insects
carry the pollen from flower to flower, and thus as it were mix the
breed; and this produces the stronger plants which outlive the
competition of the rest. The plants, therefore, which are most
conspicuous gain an advantage by attracting insects most. That
successive generations of flowers should thus show brighter and brighter
colours is intelligible. But the beauty of flowers is far more than mere
conspicuousness of colours even though that be the main ingredient. Why
should the wonderful grace, and delicacy, and harmony of tint be added?
Is all this mere chance? Is all this superfluity pervading the whole
world and perpetually supplying to the highest of living creatures, and
that too in a real proportion to his superiority, the most refined and
elevating of pleasures, an accident without any purpose at all? If
Evolution has produced the world such as we see and all its endless
beauty, it has bestowed on our own dwelling-place in lavish abundance
and in marvellous perfection that on which men spend their substance
without stint, that which they value above all but downright
necessities, that which they admire beyond all except the Law of Duty
itself. We cannot think that this is not designed, nor that the Artist
who produced it was blind to what was coming out of His work.
Once more, the doctrine of Evolution restores to the science of Nature
the unity which we should expect in the creation of God. Paley's
argument proved design, but included the possibility of many designers.
Not one design, but many separate designs, all no doubt of the same
character, but all worked out independently of one another, is the
picture that he puts before us. But the doctrine of Evolution binds all
existing things on earth into one. Every mineral, every plant, every
animal has such properties that it benefits other things beside itself
and derives benefit in turn. The insect developes the plant, and the
plant the insect; the brute aids in the evolution of the man, and the
man in that of the brute. All things are embraced in one great design
beginning with the very creation. He who uses the doctrine of Evolution
to prove that no intelligence planned the world, is undertaking the
self-contradictory task of showing that a great machine has no purpose
by tracing in detail the marvellous complexity of its parts, and the
still more marvellous precision with which all work together to produce
a common result.
To conclude, the doctrine of Evolution leaves the argument for an
intelligent Creator and Governor of the world stronger than it was
before. There is still as much as ever the proof of an intelligent
purpose pervading all creation. The difference is that the execution of
that purpose belongs more to the original act of creation, less to acts
of government since. There is more divine foresight, there is less
divine interposition; and whatever has been taken from the latter has
been added to the former.
Some scientific students of Nature may fancy they can deduce in the
working out of the theory results inconsistent with religious belief;
and in a future Lecture these will have to be examined; and it is
possible that the theory may be so presented as to be inconsistent with
the teaching of Revelation. But whatever may be the relation of the
doctrine of Evolution to Revelation, it cannot be said that this
doctrine is antagonistic to Religion in its essence. The progress of
Science in this direction will assuredly end in helping men to believe
with more assurance than ever that the Lord by wisdom hath founded the
earth, by understanding hath He established the heavens.
LECTURE V.
REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.
The evolution of Knowledge. Does not affect the truth of Science. Nor of
Religion. Special characteristic of evolution of Religious Knowledge,
that it is due to Revelation. All higher Religions have claimed to be
Revelations. The evolution of Religious Knowledge in the Old Testament;
yet the Old Testament a Revelation. Still more the New Testament. The
miraculous element in Revelation. Its place and need. Harmony of this
mode of evolution with the teaching of the Spiritual Faculty.
LECTURE V.
REVELATION THE MEANS OF DEVELOPING AND COMPLETING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.
'God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past
to the Fathers by the Prophets, hath in these last days spoken to
us by His Son.' _Hebrews_ i. 1.
The doctrine of Evolution has been applied not only to the formation of
all created things, but to the development of human knowledge; and this
with perfect justice, though with some risk of misunderstanding. It is
certain, and, indeed, it is obvious, that knowledge grows. The ordinary
experience of mankind becomes larger and clearer in the course of time,
and the systematised experience which we call Science makes the same
progress in still greater measure and with more assurance.
Our Science has been built on the labours of scientific men in past
ages. New generalisations imagined by one thinker, new crucial
experiments devised by another, new instruments of observation invented
by another,--these have been the steps by which Science has grown and
established its authority and enlarged its dominion. When or by whom the
first steps were made we have no record. No mathematician that ever
lived showed greater natural power of intellect than he, whoever he was,
who first saw that the singular contained the universal; but we know
neither his name nor his age, nor his birthplace nor his race. But after
those first steps had been taken, we know who have been the leaders in
scientific advance. And we know what they have done, and what they are
doing; and we can conjecture the direction in which further advances
will be made. And so we can trace the development of this kind of
knowledge, and in a certain and very real sense this development may be
called an evolution.
But there is this difference between the evolution of nature and the
evolution of the science of nature. The evolution of nature results in
the existence of forms which did not exist before; the evolution of
knowledge results in the perception of laws which were already in
existence.
The knowledge grows, but the things known remain. The knowledge is not
treated as if independent of the things known or believed to be known,
as a phenomenon belonging merely to the human mind, with beginnings and
laws and consequences and history of its own. And, consequently, its
having a regular growth is not used as an argument against its
substantial truth.
The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has a history; but no
mathematician will admit that the fact that it has a history affects its
claims to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how men have been brought to
believe the deductions of the higher mathematics, and we may answer our
own question by tracing the steps; but our conviction is not shaken that
these deductions are true.
And so, too, we can trace the steps by which the great generalisations
of Science have been reached, and we may show that Kepler grew out of
Copernicus, and Newton out of Kepler; but the proof that the knowledge
of one truth has been evolved out of the knowledge of another, and that
out of the knowledge of another, is not used to show that all this
Science has nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a natural
growth of human thought. Science has grown through all manner of
mistakes--mistakes made by the greatest thinkers and observers, mistakes
which men ignorantly laugh at now, as their own mistakes will be no
doubt laughed at in turn hereafter. But we do not, therefore, treat
scientific thought as nothing more than one of the phenomena of
humanity; ways of thinking which necessarily grew out of the conditions
in which men have existed, but sufficiently accounted for by their
origin and mode of growth having been shown, and having no solidity of
their own.
What has been said of Science may be said also of Religion. Religion
also has had its development, and in some respects a development
parallel to that of Science.
It is possible to trace the steps by which men have obtained an ever
larger and fuller knowledge of the Supreme Law of Right, a clearer
perception of its application, of its logical results, of its relation
to life, to conduct, to belief. It has grown through mistakes as Science
has. There has been false Religion, as there has been false Science.
Unsound principles of conduct have been inculcated in Religion as
unsound generalisations have been set up in Science. There have been
improper objects of reverence in Religion, as there have been impossible
aims proposed for scientific investigation. Ezekiel rises above the
doctrine that the children are punished for the sins of their parents,
just as Galileo rises above the doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum.
The parallel is all the more complete in that in many cases false
religions have been also false sciences. The prayer to the fetish for
rain is as contrary to true religion as it is contrary to true science.
Many false religions are most easily overthrown by scientific
instruction. Many false sciences begin to totter when the believers in
them are taught true religion. The ordinary superstitions which have so
strong a hold on weak characters and uninstructed minds, are as
inconsistent with true faith in God as with reasonable knowledge of
nature. Science grows, but the facts, whether laws or instances of the
operations of those laws, are not affected by that growth. And Religion
grows, but the facts of which it takes cognisance are not affected by
that growth. Neither in the one case nor in the other is the fact that
there has been a development any argument to show that the belief thus
developed has no real foundation. The pure subjectivity of Religion, to
use technical language, is no more proved by this argument than the pure
subjectivity of Science.
But there is one most important particular in which the development of
Religion entirely differs from the development of Science. The leaders
of scientific thought, from the time that Science has been conscious of
itself, have never claimed direct divine instruction. For a long time,
indeed, scientific thought rested largely on tradition, and that
tradition was handed on from generation to generation without any
examination into its foundations. The stores of past observations seemed
so very much larger in quantity than any that men could add in their own
day, that it was natural to give more weight to what was received than
to what was newly observed. The experience of each generation in
succession seemed nothing in comparison with the accumulated experience
of all preceding generations. And in many cases old traditions stopped
the growth of Science by preventing the acceptance of observations
inconsistent with them. But such old traditions never claimed to rest on
a revelation from God; or, if such a claim was made here and there, it
never had strength enough to root itself in Science and form part of the
recognised authority on which Science stood.
Science, from the time when it recognised itself as Science, has owed
its development to observation of nature, and long before it shook off
the fetters of unexamined tradition it had disclaimed, even for that
tradition, any other basis than this. But not so Religion. Many
religions, and among them the purer and higher religions, in proportion
to their nearer approach to perfection, have claimed to rest on a Divine
Revelation, and to be something more than either speculations of
philosophic observers of nature, or deductions from innate principles of
reason or conscience. Not thinkers, but prophets, or men claiming to be
prophets, have given the purest religions to their disciples among
mankind. It has always been possible to bring all religious teaching to
the bar of conscience; it has been possible to put all religious
teaching to logical examination; to systematise its precepts, whether of
faith or conduct; to inquire into its fundamental principles, and to ask
for the authority on which the whole teaching rests. But these
applications of our intellectual faculties to Religion have always been
admitted as coming after, not as preceding, the teaching to which they
are made. The prophet does sometimes reason when he is deducing from
principles already accepted, new precepts, or new prohibitions; but he
does not confine himself to such reasoning in the fulfilment of his
mission. He professes to have a message to give. He will accredit it by
such means as He supplies Who has sent him with this message. He will,
in order to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to past
revelations which they have already received, and with which his new
message is in thorough harmony; but he often appeals also to his power
over nature to bear witness that the Lord of nature has sent him. The
Hebrew prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, will repeat the
old revelation with its old unshaken and unshakeable precepts, but he
will not stop there: he will also give signs from the Lord to prove that
he has a right to the title of prophet which he claims. Armed with this
title, he will go on to predict the coming of the Great Restorer, the
Messiah; he will insist on the judgment of all things, sure to be passed
in its appointed day; he will hint at the immortality of the soul, and
the execution of the Almighty justice on every man that lives.
It is probable enough that many of the inferior religions have grown up
with no such claim at all. The worship of ancestors, where it has
prevailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, grown out of dreams,
in which loving memory has brought back in sleep vivid images of the
dead who were reverenced while they lived, and cannot be readily
forgotten after death. Such worship barely attains to what may be called
in strictness a religion. Its connexion with the spiritual faculty, the
true seat of religion, is weak and vague. It is like the honour paid to
a sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only the difference
that those who receive this worship are supposed to reside not in a
distant capital, but in another world. So, too, the worship of fetishes,
of trees, of serpents, of the heavenly bodies, while they have some of
the inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly deserve to be
called religions. There is in them the sentiment of fear, the
acknowledgment of persons or some resemblance of persons imperceptible
by the senses; the acknowledgment of powers possessed by these persons.
But the central idea of a rule of holiness is either altogether wanting,
or so very feeble and indistinct as to contain no promise of developing
into ultimate supremacy. These religions do not often lay claim to a
revelation from a supreme authority. And they have withered away with
the growth of knowledge and with clearer perceptions of what Religion
must be if it is to exist at all.
All the higher religions have claimed to rest on a divine revelation,
and the Christian Religion on a series of such revelations. The
Christian Religion does not profess (as does for instance the
Mahommedan) to be wrapped up in one divine communication made to one
man and admitting thereafter of no modifications. Though resting on
divine revelation it is professedly a development, and is thus in
harmony with the Creator's operations in nature. Whether we consider
what is taught concerning the heavenly Moral Law, or concerning human
nature and its moral and spiritual needs, or concerning Almighty God and
His dealings with us His creatures, it is undeniable that the teaching
of the Bible is quite different at the end from what it is at the
beginning.
The New Testament considered by itself as a body of teaching is such an
advance on all that preceded it as to be quite unique in the history of
the world. The ideas conveyed in the Old Testament are absorbed,
transformed, completed, so as to make them as a whole entirely new; and
to these are added entirely new ideas sufficient by themselves to form a
whole system of doctrine. And because of this it is difficult to speak
of the new teaching as having grown out of the old.
But the Old Testament covers many centuries, and within its range we
can trace a steady growth, and that growth always of the same character,
and always pointing towards what the Gospel finally revealed. The
strength of the moral sentiment in the earlier books is always assigned
to the belief in, and reverence for, Almighty God. It is evidently held
to be more important to believe in God and to fear Him than to see the
perfection of His holiness. If we distinguish between Religion and
Morality, Religion is made the more important of the two. It is more
important to recognise that the holy God exists and reigns than to see
clearly in what His holiness, and indeed all holiness, consists. The
sentiment of reverence is more important than the perception of that
universality which we now know to be the essential characteristic of the
Moral Law. In analysing the origin and nature of Religion in the second
of these Lectures, it was necessary to follow the order of thought, and
beginning with Duty to end with God. But the order of fact is not the
same. In actual fact man began with God and ends with a clearer
perception of Duty. Hence in all the earlier stages the morality is
imperfect. The profaneness of Esau is a serious offence. The ungenerous
temper, the unfairness and duplicity of Jacob are light in comparison.
Truth is not an essential. Blood-shedding and impurity when in horrible
excess are treated as most grievous sins; but restrained within limits
are easily condoned. Women are placed below their true and natural
place; polygamy if not distinctly allowed is certainly condoned; divorce
is permitted on one side, not on the other. Slavery is allowed though
put under regulation. But the unity and spirituality of God are guarded
with the strongest sanctions, and nothing could be said against idolatry
and polytheism now, in sterner and clearer language than was used then.
The reverence for God required then was as great as the reverence
required now. But the conception of the holiness which is the main
object of that reverence has changed; has in fact been purified and
cleared. And the change is traceable in the Old Testament. The prophets
teach a higher morality than is found in the earlier books. Cruelty is
condemned as it had not been before. The heathen are not regarded as
outside God's love, and the future embraces them in His mercy even if
the present does not. Conscience begins to be recognised and appealed
to. Idolatry is not merely forbidden, its folly is exposed; it is
treated not only with condemnation, but with scorn. Individual
responsibility is insisted on. Children are not held responsible for
their fathers, though the inheritance of moral evil and of the
consequences of moral evil is never denied. And even trust in God rises
to a higher level in Habakkuk's declaration that that trust shall never
be shaken by any calamity that may befall him, than in the earlier
belief that calamities would never befall those who held fast that
trust.
If we review this progress in moral teaching we recognise that it
corresponds to the natural and for the most part unconscious working of
that instinctive test which, as was pointed out before, we apply to all
moral questions, the test of universality. The pivots of all the
prophetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy;
justice which requires us to recognise the rights of others side by
side with our own; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings of
other creatures that can feel.
We are bound to recognise the claims of others to equal treatment with
ourselves, and any refusal or apparent refusal to do so must be
justified by a universal rule applicable to all alike. The perpetual
attempt to justify exceptions in this way is sure to end in diminishing
the number of those exceptions. If we are compelled to think much of the
position of woman in marriage, we are sure at last to come to Malachi's
declaration that God hateth putting away. If we are compelled to think
of the position of slaves, we cannot continue for ever to believe that
there are some beings with consciences and free wills, who nevertheless,
because of the accidents of their lives, have no rights at all; and we
acknowledge the righteousness of Jeremiah's denunciation of the breach
of covenant when the nobles of Judah re-enslaved those whom they had
solemnly emancipated. If we think of the nature of responsibility and
the justification of punishment, we find it impossible to believe that
an innocent man shall be rightly punished for the wrong-doing of
another, even if that other be his father or his mother; and we are
convinced that Ezekiel is speaking God's words when he proclaims on
God's behalf that 'the soul that sinneth it shall die; the son shall not
bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the
iniquity of the son.' And once more, whatever divine purpose gave the
chosen people a priority among all peoples in knowledge of divine will
and possession of divine favour, it is impossible to find any rule by
which this priority shall for ever exclude all other peoples from being
within the range of God's manifested love; and conscience cannot but
accept as a divine message that the Gentiles also shall come to the
Heavenly 'Light, and their kings to the brightness of His rising.' So
again, to turn from justice to mercy, we recognise that we are bound to
spare pain to all creatures that can feel, and this duty can only be set
aside by some higher duty which makes that pain the means to a higher
moral end. And if we are set by our consciences to seek for some rule
of universal application for this purpose, it becomes perpetually
clearer that nothing can excuse cruel punishments inflicted on criminals
or enemies, or hard-hearted indifference to the poor and the weak. Our
own nature cries out for kindness in our pain, and that very cry from
within compels our consciences to listen to the cry from without. And
the denunciations of cruelty and oppression we recognise as we hear them
to be the voice of God.
But however true it be that this progress corresponds exactly throughout
with the necessary working of the great moral principles implanted in
the spiritual faculty, it nevertheless remains true also that all this
teaching in its successive stages is given by men who did not profess to
be working out a philosophical system, but who claimed to bring a
message from God, to speak by His authority, and in many cases to be
trusted with special powers in proof of possessing that authority.
Looking back over it afterwards we can see that the teaching in its
successive stages was a development, but it always took the form of a
revelation. And its life was due to that fact. As far as it is possible
to judge, that union between Morality and Religion, between duty and
faith, without which both religion and morality soon wither out of human
consciences, can only be secured--has only been secured--by presenting
spiritual truth in this form of a Revelation.
When we pass to the New Testament, all that has previously been taught
in the Old, in so far as it is related to the new teaching at all, is
related as the bud to the flower. The development, if it be indeed a
development, is so great, so sudden, so strange, that it seems difficult
to recognise that it is a development at all.
First, the morality is in form, if not in substance, absolutely new. The
duty of justice and mercy is pushed at once to its extreme limits, even
to the length of entire self-surrender. The disciple has his own rights
no doubt, as every other man has his; but he is required to leave his
rights in God's hands and to think of the rights of others only. The
highest place is assigned to meekness in conduct and humility in spirit.
The humility of the Sermon on the Mount may possibly by careful
analysis be shown to be identical at bottom with the magnanimity of
Aristotle's Ethics. But the presentation of the two is so utterly
opposed that in the effect on life the identity is altogether lost. And
as justice and mercy, so too self-discipline is pushed as far as it can
go. Instead of the enjoyment of life being an integral part of the aim
set before the will, hunger and thirst for righteousness, and penitence
for failure in keeping to it, are to fill up the believer's hopes for
himself. Of inward satisfaction and peace he is often assured; but
these, and these only, are the means to that peace. The disciple's life
is to consist in bearing the cross, and bearing it cheerfully; in
returning good for evil, and love for indifference and even for hatred;
in detaching his affections from all the pleasures to be obtained from
external things; in fixing his trust and his love on his Eternal Father.
Taken as a whole, this is quite unlike all moral teaching that preceded
it, and there is no indication that any philosophy could ever have
evolved it. It has fastened on the human conscience from the day that
it was uttered; and whatever moral teaching since has not been inspired
from this source has soon passed out of power and been forgotten. We
find when we examine that it exactly agrees with the fundamental
teaching of the spiritual faculty when that teaching is applied to such
creatures as we are, and to such a God as the New Testament sets before
us. But we find it impossible to assert that by any working of human
thought this morality could have been obtained by the spiritual faculty
unaided. On the contrary, it seems more near the truth to say that we
could never have obtained so clear a conception of the great Moral Law,
if the teaching of the New Testament had not enlightened and purified
the spiritual faculty itself. And to this is to be added that the moral
teaching of the New Testament recognises what we may now almost consider
a proved necessity of our nature, or at least a sure characteristic of
the government of the world, that perpetual progress without which
nothing human seems to keep sweet and wholesome. Perfect as the New
Testament morality is in spirit, it is nevertheless imperfect in actual
precepts. It leaves questions to be solved some of which have not been
solved yet. It left slavery untouched, though assuredly doomed. It said
nothing of patriotism. It gave no clear command concerning the right use
of wealth. It laid down no principles for the government of states,
though such principles must have a moral basis. There has been a
perpetual growth in the understanding and in the application of this
perfect teaching, and there will yet be a growth. Of no philosophical
system of morals is it possible to say the same.
But in the second place, the New Testament contains not only a new
morality, it contains also a new account of human nature. The mystery of
that discord which makes the noblest and best of human souls a scene of
perpetual internal conflict is acknowledged and its counterpart in God's
dealings with mankind is set forth. The struggle between the spiritual
faculty asserting its due supremacy, and the lower passions and
appetites, impulses and inclinations, is so described by Saint Paul that
none have ever since questioned his description with any effect. And our
Lord's teaching of our absolute dependence on God and helplessness
without Him; and Saint John's teaching that the whole world, outside
Christ, 'lieth in the wicked one,' lay down the same truth. And as the
mystery of moral evil in mankind is thus set forth, so too the mystery
of the remedy for that evil. In the love of God shown in the Cross of
Christ, in our union with God through that same Death upon the Cross is
the power which conquers evil in the soul and carries a man ever upward
to spiritual heights. And as all profounder thinkers have confessed the
truth of the account thus given of the internal contradiction of man's
moral nature, so have all believers borne witness (and only they could
bear witness) to the account thus given of the solution of that
contradiction and the renovation of that nature. Millions have lived and
died in the Christian faith since the teaching recorded in the New
Testament was given, and among them have been the purest, the justest,
the most self-sacrificing, the most heavenly-minded of mankind. And they
all concur in saying that the one stay of all their spiritual lives has
been communion with God through Christ.
Thirdly, the New Testament affirms with a clearness previously unknown
the immortality of the soul and the future gift of that spiritual body
which shall in some way spring from the natural body as the plant grows
from the seed. There had grown up, no doubt quite naturally,
anticipations of this doctrine and ever stronger and more deeply-rooted
persuasion that it must be true. But it is revealed in the New Testament
as it is taught nowhere else, and it is sealed by the Resurrection of
our Lord, ever since then the historical centre of the Christian Faith.
How exactly it harmonises with the teaching of the spiritual faculty I
have pointed out before.
And, lastly, the New Testament not only tells us what never was told
before of man's nature as a spiritual being and of his destiny
hereafter; it tells also what was never told elsewhere of the nature of
God and of the relations between Him and His creature man. The unity and
spirituality of the Godhead so strenuously insisted on in the Old
Testament, is no less insisted on in the New. But the mysterious
complexity embraced within that unity, though darkly hinted at in the
older teaching, is nowhere clearly set forth, but in the latter. We may
find anticipations of the teaching of St. Paul and St. John, and of our
Lord Himself as recorded by St. John, in the Book of Proverbs, in the
Prophets, in the Rabbinical writers between the Prophets and the New
Testament, and we can see in Philo to what this finally came unaided by
Revelation. But the Christian teaching on our Lord's nature and on the
Incarnation is distinct from all this. And it is in the Christian form,
and only in that form, that the doctrine has satisfied the spiritual
needs of the great mass of believers.
Now there cannot be any doubt that the hold which this teaching has had
upon mankind has depended entirely on the extraordinary degree in which
the teaching of the Bible has satisfied the conscience. Without that no
miracles however overwhelmingly attested, no external evidence of
whatever kind, could have compelled intellects of the highest rank, side
by side with the most uncultivated and the most barren, to accept it as
divine, nor could anything else have so often rekindled its old fire at
times when faith in it had apparently withered away. The teaching of
the Bible has always found and must always find its main evidence within
the human soul.
And the fact that the teaching of the Bible, though when examined
afterwards it turns out to be development or evolution, yet was always
given at the time as a revelation, so far from diminishing the force of
this internal evidence adds to it still more force than it would
otherwise have. For what underlies the very conception of revelation is
the doctrine that all progress in higher spiritual knowledge is bound up
with conscious communion with God. Now it is an experience common to all
believers that in that communion is to be found not only all strength
but all enlightenment also. The believer knows that he learns spiritual
truth in proportion as he refers his life to God's judgment, prays to
God for clearer vision of what is duty and what is right faith, and
makes it his one great aim to do God's will. He uses all the faculties
that God has given him to understand the great divine law; but he
perpetually looks to God for instruction, and whatever else may be said
of that instruction his experience tells him that his advance in
spiritual knowledge is in proportion to his nearness in thought and
feeling to God Himself. That the progress of the human race in spiritual
knowledge, unlike progress in scientific knowledge, should be due not to
thinkers intellectually gifted, but to Prophets and Apostles inspired by
God, thus exactly corresponds with what the spiritually-minded man finds
within his own soul. And so too does it correspond with what he sees in
others. Often and often the unlearned and untrained by sheer goodness of
life attain to wonderful perception of spiritual truth, and the holiness
of the unlettered peasant reveals to his conscience the law of right
conduct in circumstances which perplex the disciplined and well
informed. As the human race has learnt the highest spiritual truth by
direct communication from God, so too on communion with God far more
than on intellectual power, depends the progress of spiritual knowledge
in every human soul.
But though the hold of the Bible on the faith of believers
unquestionably depends on its satisfying the conscience in every stage
of its enlightenment, it is equally certain that those who gave the
messages recorded in the Bible claimed something more as proof of their
authority than the approval of the conscience of their hearers. They
professed to prove their mission by the evidence of supernatural powers;
and the teaching of the Bible cannot be dissociated from the miraculous
element in it which is connected with that teaching. If, indeed, the Old
Testament stood alone we might acknowledge that the miraculous element
in it occupied comparatively so small a place, and was so separable from
the rest, and the evidence for it was so rarely, if ever,
contemporaneous, that it might be left out of count. But we cannot say
this of the New Testament, nor in particular of the account that has
reached us of the sayings and doings of our Lord. The miracles are
embedded in, are indeed intertwined with, the narrative. Many of our
Lord's most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of
miracles that the two cannot be torn apart: 'I have not seen so great
faith, no, not in Israel;' 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work;'
'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee;' 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees
and the Sadducees;' 'It is not meet to take the children's bread and
cast it to dogs;' 'This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting;'
'Were there not ten cleansed, but where are the nine?' 'Sin no more,
lest a worse thing come unto thee.' In fact, there can be no real doubt
that our Lord believed that He could work miracles, and professed to
work them, and that His disciples believed that He worked many, and
included that fact in their meaning when they spoke of Him as going
about doing good. And these disciples professed to work miracles
themselves and believed that they did work them. It is of course true
that they had no strictly scientific conception of a miracle, and would
often have called by that name what was in reality extraordinary but not
miraculous. And it is true too that, if we take each miracle by itself,
there is but one miracle, namely our Lord's Resurrection, for which
clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence is given. But while the
exclusion of any one miracle as insufficiently attested is possible, the
exclusion of the miraculous element altogether is not possible without a
complete surrender of the position taken by the first Christian
teachers. As they claimed to be inspired and to have enlightenment which
was not shared by mankind at large, so did they claim, if not each for
himself, yet certainly for our Lord, power not shared by ordinary men,
power to step out of the ordinary course of natural events, and, whether
by virtue of some higher law operative only in rare instances, or by
direct interference of the Almighty, to prove a divine mission by
exhibiting in fact what is an essential part of the supremacy of the
Moral Law, the dominion of that Law over the physical world.
The teachers of other religions besides the Christian have claimed
supernatural powers, and have professed to give a supernatural message.
This is a strong evidence of the deep-seated need in the human soul for
such a direct communication from God to man. Men seem to need it so much
that without it they are unable to accept the truth, or to hold it long
if they do accept it. All who thus claim supernatural authority must, of
course, justify their claim. They must justify their message to the
human conscience. What they teach must be an advance towards, and
finally an expression of, the Supreme Moral Law. And if they profess to
have miraculous power they must give reasonable evidence that such power
is really theirs. But if they fail in this, still the fact remains that
their very claim must answer to something in the spiritual nature of
man, or it would not be so invariably made nor so largely successful.
It seems as if, whatever may be the ground of belief when once
revelation has penetrated into the soul, the exercise of supernatural
power was needed to procure that access in the first instance. We
believe because we find our consciences satisfied, and we bring up our
children in such discipline of conscience that they too shall have
sufficient training to recognise and hold fast divine truth. And if we
had lived at the time and could have had our eyes opened to see the
spiritual power of the Christian Faith, we might have believed without
any external evidence at all. But the first receivers of the message, to
whom the revelation was new, and, as must have often happened and we
actually know did happen, to whom it was hard to reconcile that
revelation with previous teaching, how sure were they to need some
other and outer evidence that it really came from God. The supernatural
in the form of miracles can never be the highest kind of evidence, can
never stand alone as evidence; but it seems to have been needed for the
first reception. And there seem to be minds that need it still, and to
all it is a help to find that reasonable ground can be shown for holding
that such evidence was originally given.
Revelation, in short, takes a higher stand than belongs to all other
teaching, and except for its having taken that higher stand it does not
appear that the highest teaching would have been possible. To look back
afterwards and say that we find a development or an evolution is easy.
And at first sight it seems to follow that, being an evolution, it may
well be no more than the outcome of the working of the natural forces.
But look closer and you see the undeniable fact that all these
developments by the working of natural forces have perished. Not
Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor the Stoics, nor Philo have been
able to lay hold of mankind, nor have their moral systems in any large
degree satisfied our spiritual faculty. Revelation, and revelation
alone, has taught us; and it is from the teaching of revelation that men
have obtained the very knowledge which some now use to show that there
was no need of revelation. That altruism which is now to displace the
command of God is nothing but the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount
robbed of its heavenly power, robbed of the great doctrine which
underlies the whole sermon. For that doctrine is the Fatherhood of God
which has been shown most especially in this, that from the beginning He
has never forgotten His children.
LECTURE VI.
APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.
Evolution examined. The formation of the habitable world. The formation
of the creatures which inhabit it. Transmission of characteristics.
Variations perpetually introduced. Natural selection. On the other side,
life not yet accounted for by Evolution. Cause of variations not yet
examined. Moral Law incapable of being evolved. Account given in Genesis
not at variance with doctrine of Evolution. Evolution of man not
inconsistent with dignity of humanity.
LECTURE VI.
APPARENT COLLISION BETWEEN RELIGION AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.
'Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He that hath made us, and
not we ourselves.' _Psalm_ c. 3.
Religion is rooted in our spiritual nature and its fundamental truths
are as independent of experience for their hold on our consciences as
the truths of mathematics for their hold on our reason.
But as a matter of fact Religion has taken the form of a revelation. And
this introduces a new contact between Religion and Science, and of
necessity a new possibility of collision. There is not only possible
opposition or apparent opposition of Science in what is revealed, in
what we may call the actual substance of the revelation; but also in the
accessories and evidences of the revelation, which may be no actual part
of the revelation itself, but nevertheless are, to all appearance,
inseparably bound up with it. It is therefore no more than might have
been expected that the general postulate of the uniformity of nature
should appear to be contravened by the claim to supernatural power made
on behalf of revelation, and that the special, but just at present
leading scientific doctrine, the doctrine of Evolution, should be found
inconsistent with parts, or what appear to be parts, of the revelation
itself. And we have to consider the two questions, What has Revelation
to say concerning Evolution? and what has Science to say concerning
Miracles?
Concerning Evolution, we have first to consider how much in this
direction has been made fairly probable, and what still remains to be
determined.
It cannot then be well denied that the astronomers and geologists have
made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been
brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of
changes from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even
from a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as the
planet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed,
that such a body as the moon represents a stage toward which it is
tending; that it has shrunk as it cooled, and as it shrank has formed
the elevations which we call mountains, and the depressions which
contain the seas and oceans; that it has been worn by the action of heat
from within and water from without, and in consequence of this action
presents the appearance when examined below the surface of successive
strata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have
followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are
found in these strata now; and that all this has taken enormous periods
of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in
which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well-established scientific
laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the
radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would necessarily change. And the
whole solar system may and probably did come into its present condition
in this way. It certainly could have been so formed, and there is no
reason for supposing that it was formed in any other way.
Once more, if we begin, as it were, at the other end, and trace things
backwards from the present, instead of forwards from the remote past, it
cannot be denied that Darwin's investigations have made it exceedingly
probable that the vast variety of plants and animals have sprung from a
much smaller number of original forms.
In the first place, the unity of plan which can be found pervading any
great class of animals or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry.
Why, for instance, should the vertebrate animals be formed on a common
plan, the parts of the framework being varied from species to species,
but the framework as a whole always exhibiting the same fundamental
type? If they all descended from a common ancestor, and the variations
were introduced in the course of that descent, this remarkable fact is
at once accounted for. But, in the second place, observation shows that
slight variations ARE perpetually being introduced with every
successive generation, and many of these variations are transmitted to
the generations that follow. In the course of time, therefore, from any
one parent stock would descend a very large variety of kinds. But if, in
the third place, it be asked why this variety does not range by
imperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extreme
forms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormous
prodigality and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures.
Plants and animals produce far more descendants than ever come even to
such maturity as to reproduce their kind. And this is particularly the
case with the lower forms of life. Eggs and seeds and germs are
destroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportion
are the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. There
is no waste like the waste of life that is to be seen in nature. Living
creatures are destroyed by lack of fit nourishment, by lack of means of
reproduction, by accidents, by enemies. The inevitable operation of this
waste, as Darwin's investigation showed, has been to destroy all those
varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep
those that were. One species of animal has been preserved by length of
neck, which enabled it to reach high-growing fruits and leaves; another
by a thicker skin, which made it difficult for enemies to devour;
another by a colour which made it easier to hide. One plant has been
preserved by a bright flower which attracted insects to carry its pollen
to other flowers of its kind; another by a sweet fruit which attracted
birds to scatter its seed. Meanwhile other animals and plants that had
not these advantages perished for the lack of them. The result would be
to maintain, and perpetually, though with exceeding slowness, more and
more to adapt to the conditions of their life, those species whose
peculiarities gave them some advantage in the great struggle for
existence.
Here again we have the working of known laws of life, capable of
accounting for what we see. And the high probability cannot be denied
that by evolution of this kind the present races of living creatures
have been formed. And to these arguments the strongest corroboration is
given by the frequent occurrence, both in plants and animals, of useless
parts which still remain as indications of organs that once were useful
and have long become useless. Animals that now live permanently in the
dark have abortive eyes which cannot see, but indicate an ancestor with
eyes that could see. Animals that never walk have abortive legs hidden
under their skin, useless now but indicating what was useful once. Our
knowledge no doubt in this as in any other province of nature is but the
merest fraction of what may be known therein. But there is no evidence
whatever to show that what we have observed is not a fair sample of the
whole. And so taking it, we find that the mass of evidence in favour of
the evolution of plants and animals is enormously great and increasing
daily.
Granting then the high probability of the two theories of Evolution,
that which begins with Laplace and explains the way in which the earth
was fitted to be the habitation of living creatures, and that which owes
its name to Darwin and gives an account of the formation of the living
creatures now existing, we have to see what limitations and
modifications are necessarily attached to our complete acceptance of
both.
First, then, at the very meeting point of these two evolutions we have
the important fact that all the evidence that we possess up to the
present day negatives the opinion that life is a mere evolution from
inorganic matter. We know perfectly well the constituents of all living
substances. We know that the fundamental material of all plants and all
animals is a compound called protoplasm, or that, in other words,
organic matter in all its immense variety of forms is nothing but
protoplasm variously modified. And we know the constituent elements of
this protoplasm, and their proportions, and the temperatures within
which protoplasm as such can exist. But we are quite powerless to make
it, or to show how it is made, or to detect nature in the act of making
it. All the evidence we have points to one conclusion only, that life is
the result of antecedent life, and is producible on no other conditions.
Repeatedly have scientific observers believed that they have come on
instances of spontaneous generation, but further examination has
invariably shown that they have been mistaken. We can put the necessary
elements together, but we cannot supply the necessary bond by which
they are to be made to live. Nay, we cannot even recall that bond when
it has once been dissolved. We can take living protoplasm and we can
kill it. It will be protoplasm still, so far as our best chemistry can
discover, but it will be dead protoplasm, and we cannot make it live
again; and as far as we know nature can no more make it live than we
can. It can be used as food for living creatures, animals or plants, and
so its substance can be taken up by living protoplasm and made to share
in the life which thus consumes it; but life of its own it cannot
obtain. Now here, as it seems, the acceptance of the two evolutions
lands us in acceptance of a miracle. The creation of life is unaccounted
for. And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle than
it did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made a
scientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of living
creatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or other
inorganic substances. It was part of that beginning which had to be
taken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domain
of Science altogether. But if we accept the two evolutions, the
creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a direct
interference in the actual history of the world. There could have been
no life when the earth was nothing but a mass of intensely heated fluid.
There came a time when the earth became ready for life to exist upon it.
And the life came, and no laws of inorganic matter can account for its
coming. As it stands this is a great miracle. And from this conclusion
the only escape that has been suggested is to suppose that life came in
on a meteoric stone from some already formed habitable world; a
supposition which transfers the miracle to another scene, but leaves it
as great a miracle as before.
Nor, if it was a miracle, can we deny that there was a purpose in it
worthy of miraculous interference. For what purpose can rank side by
side with the existence and development of life, the primary condition
of all moral and spiritual existence and action in this world? In the
introduction of life was wrapped up all that we value and all that we
venerate in the whole creation. The infinite superiority, not in degree
only, but in kind, of the living to the lifeless, of a man to a stone,
justifies us in believing that the main purpose of the creation that we
see was to supply a dwelling-place and a scene of action for living
beings. We cannot say that the dignity of the Moral Law requires that
creatures to be made partakers in the knowledge of it, and even
creatures of a lower nature but akin to them, must have been the results
of a separate and miraculous act of creation. But we can say that there
is a congruity in such a miracle, with the moral purpose of all the
world, of which we are a part, that removes all difficulty in believing
it. Science, as such, cannot admit a miracle, and can only say, 'Here is
a puzzle yet unsolved.' Nor can the most religious scientific man be
blamed as undutiful to religion if he persists in endeavouring to solve
the puzzle. But he has no right to insist beforehand that the puzzle is
certainly soluble; for that he cannot know, and the evidence is against
him.
Secondly, if we look at the Darwinian theory by itself, we see at once
that it is incomplete, and the consideration of this incompleteness
gravely modifies the conclusion which would otherwise be rightly drawn
from it, and which, indeed, Darwin himself seems disposed to draw. For
the theory rests on two main pillars, the transmission of
characteristics from progenitor to progeny, and the introduction of
minute variations in the progeny with each successive generation. Now,
the former of these may be said to be well established, and we recognise
it as a law of life that all plants and animals propagate their own
kind. But the latter has, as yet, been hardly examined at all. Each new
generation shows special slight variations. But what causes these
variations? and what determines what they shall be? In Darwin's
investigations these questions are not touched. The variations are
treated as if they were quite indefinite in number and in nature. He
concerns himself only with the effect of these variations after they
have appeared. Some have the effect of giving the plant or animal an
advantage in the struggle of life; some give no such advantage; some are
hurtful. And hence follows the permanent preservation or speedy
destruction of the plants and animals themselves. But we are bound to
look not only to their effects but to their causes, if the theory is to
be completed. And then we cannot fail to see that these variations in
the progeny cannot be due to something in the progenitors, or otherwise
the variations would be all alike, which they certainly are not. They
must, therefore, be due to external circumstances. These slight
variations are produced by the action of the surroundings, by the food,
by the temperature, by the various accidents of life in the progenitors.
Now, when we see this, we see also how gravely it modifies the
conclusions which we have to draw concerning the ancestry of any species
now existing. Let us take, for instance, the great order of vertebrate
animals. At first sight the Darwinian theory seems to indicate that all
these animals are descended from one pair or one individual, and that
their unity of construction is due to that fact; but if we go back in
thought to the time at which the special peculiarities were introduced
which really constituted the order and separated it from other animals,
we see that it is by no means clear that it originated with one pair or
with one individual, and that, on the contrary, the probabilities are
the other way. Although the separation of this order from the rest must
have taken place very early, it cannot well have taken place until
millions of animals had already come into existence. The prodigality of
nature in multiplying animal life is fully acknowledged by Darwin, and
that prodigality is apparently greatest in the lowest and most formless
type of animal. There being, then, these many millions of living
creatures in existence, the external surroundings introduce into them
many variations, and among these the special variations to which the
vertebrate type is due. It is quite clear that wherever the external
surroundings were the same or nearly the same, the variations introduced
would be the same or nearly the same. Now, it is far more probable that
external surroundings should be the same or nearly the same in many
places than that each spot should be absolutely unlike every other spot
in these particulars. The beginnings of the vertebrate order would show
themselves simultaneously, or at any rate independently, in many places
wherever external conditions were sufficiently similar. And the unity of
the plan in the vertebrata would be due, not to absolute unity of
ancestry, but to unity of external conditions at a particular epoch in
the descent of life. Hence it follows that the separation of animals
into orders and genera and even into species took place, if not for the
most part yet very largely, at a very early period in the history of
organic evolution. Of course the descendants of any one of the original
vertebrata might, and probably in not a few cases did, branch off into
new subdivisions and yet again into further subdivisions, and we are
always justified in looking for unity of ancestry among all the species.
But it is also quite possible that any species may be regularly
descended, without branching off at all, from one of the originals, and
that other species that resemble it may owe the resemblance simply to
very great similarity of external conditions. To find, for instance, the
unity of ancestry between man and the other animals, it will certainly
be necessary to go back to a point in the history of life when living
creatures were as yet formless, undeveloped--the materials, as we may
call them, of the animal creation as we now see it, and not in any but a
strictly scientific sense, what we mean when we ordinarily speak of
animals. The true settlement of such questions as these can only be
obtained when long and patient study shall have completed Darwin's
investigations by determining under what laws and within what limits the
slight variations which characterise each individual animal or plant are
congenitally introduced into its structure. As things stand the
probabilities certainly are that a creature with such especial
characteristics as man has had a history altogether of his own, if not
from the beginning of all life upon the globe, yet from a very early
period in the development of that life. He resembles certain other
animals very closely in the structure of his body; but the part which
external conditions had to play in the earliest stages of evolution of
life must have been so exceedingly large that identity or close
similarity in these external conditions may well account for these
resemblances. And the enormous gap which separates his nature from that
of all other creatures known, indicates an exceedingly early difference
of origin.
Lastly, it is quite impossible to evolve the Moral Law out of anything
but itself. Attempts have been made, and many more will no doubt be
made, to trace the origin of the spiritual faculty to a development of
the other faculties. And it is to be expected that great success will
ultimately attend the endeavours to show the growth of all the
subordinate powers of the soul. That our emotions, that our impulses,
that our affections should have had a history, and that their present
working should be the result of that history, has nothing in it
improbable. There can be no question that we inherit these things very
largely, and that they are also very largely due to special
peculiarities of constitution in each individual. That large part of us
which is rightly assigned to our nature as distinct from our own will
and our own free action, it is perfectly reasonable to find subject to
laws of Evolution. Much of this nature, indeed, we share with the lower
animals. They, too, can love; can be angry or pleased; can put affection
above appetite; can show generosity and nobility of spirit; can be
patient, persevering, tender, self-sacrificing; can take delight in
society: and some can even organise it, and thus enter on a kind of
civilisation. The dog and the horse, man's faithful servants and
companions, show emotions and affections rising as far as mere emotions
and affections can rise to the human level. Ants show an advance in the
arts of life well comparable to our own. If the bare animal nature is
thus capable of such high attainments by the mere working of natural
forces, it is to be expected that similar forces in mankind should be
found to work under similar laws. We are not spiritual beings only, we
are animals, and whatever nature has done for other animals we may
expect it to have done and to be doing for us. And if their nature is
capable of evolution, so too should ours be. And the study of such
evolution of our own nature is likely to be of the greatest value. This
nature is the main instrument, put into the grasp as it were of that
spiritual faculty which is our inmost essence, to be used in making our
whole life an offering to God. It is good to know what can be done with
this instrument and what cannot; how it has been formed in the past, and
may be still further formed for the future. It is good to study the
evolution of humanity. But all this does not touch the spiritual faculty
itself, nor the Moral Law which that faculty proclaims to us. The
essence of that law is its universality; and out of all this
development, when carried to its very perfection, the conception of such
universality cannot be obtained. Nothing in this evolution ever rises to
the height of a law which shall bind even God Himself and enable Abraham
to say, 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' The very word
right in this, its fulness of meaning, cannot be used.
Evolution may lead the creature to say what is hateful and what is
loveable, what is painful and what is delightful, what is to be feared
and what is to be sought; it may develope the sentiment which comes
nearest of all to the sentiment of reverence, namely, the sentiment of
shame; but it cannot reveal the eternal character of the distinction
between right and wrong. Nay, there may be, as was pointed out in the
last Lecture, an evolution in our knowledge even of the Moral Law, just
as there is an evolution in our knowledge of mathematics. The fulness of
its meaning can become clearer and ever clearer as generation learns
from generation. But the principle of the Moral Law, its universality,
its supremacy, cannot come out of any development of human nature any
more than the necessity of mathematical truth can so come. It stands not
on experience, and is its own evidence. Nor indeed have any of the
attempts to show that everything in man (religion included) is the
product of Evolution ever touched the question how this conception of
universal supremacy comes in. It is treated as if it were an
unauthorised extension from our own experience to what lies beyond all
experience. This, however, is to deny the essence of the Moral Law
altogether: that Law is universal or it is nothing.
Now, when we compare the account of the creation and of man given by the
doctrine of Evolution with that given in the Bible, we see at once that
the two are in different regions. The purpose of giving the accounts is
different; the spirit and character of the accounts is different; the
details are altogether different. The comparison must take note of the
difference of spirit and aim before it can proceed at all.
It is then quite certain, and even those who contend for the literal
interpretation of this part of the Bible will generally admit, that the
purpose of the revelation is not to teach Science at all. It is to teach
great spiritual and moral lessons, and it takes the facts of nature as
they appear to ordinary people. When the creation of man is mentioned
there is clearly no intention to say by what processes this creation was
effected, or how much time it took to work out those processes. The
narrative is not touched by the question, Was this a single act done in
a moment, or a process lasting through millions of years? The writer of
the Book of Genesis sees the earth peopled, as we may say, by many
varieties of plants and animals. He asserts that God made them all, and
made them resemble each other and differ from each other. He knows
nothing and says nothing of the means used to produce their resemblances
or their differences. He takes them as he sees them, and speaks of their
creation as God's work. Had he been commissioned to teach his people the
science of the matter, he would have had to put a most serious obstacle
in the way of their faith. They would have found it almost impossible to
believe in a process of creation so utterly unlike all their own
experience. And it would have been quite useless to them besides, since
their science was not in such a condition as to enable them to
coordinate this doctrine with any other. As science it would have been
dead; and as spiritual truth it would have been a hindrance.
But he had, nevertheless, great ideas to communicate, and we can read
them still.
He had to teach that the world as we see it, and all therein contained,
was created out of nothing; and that the spiritual, and not the
material, was the source of all existence. He had to teach that the
creation was not merely orderly, but progressive; going from the
formless to the formed; from the orderless to the ordered; from the
inanimate to the animate; from the plant to the animal; from the lower
animal to the higher; from the beast to the man; ending with the rest of
the Sabbath, the type of the highest, the spiritual, life. Nothing,
certainly, could more exactly match the doctrine of Evolution than
this. It is, in fact, the same thing said from a different point of
view. All this is done by casting the account into the form of a week of
work with the Sabbath at the end. In so constructing his account, the
writer made use of a mode of teaching used commonly enough in the Bible.
The symbolical use of the number seven is common in other inspired
writers. The symbolical use of periods of time is not without example.
That the purpose of the account was not to teach great truths, but to
give men information upon scientific questions, is incredible. And, in
fact, if we look in this account for literal history, it becomes very
difficult to give any meaning to what is said of the seventh day, or to
reconcile the interpretation of it with our Lord's words concerning the
Sabbath, 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' There is no more
reason for setting aside Geology, because it does not agree in detail
with Genesis, than there is for setting aside Astronomy because all
through the Old Testament the sun is spoken of as going round the earth.
And when the writer of Genesis passes from creation in general to man
in particular, it is still clear that he has no mission to tell those
for whom he was writing by what processes man was formed, or how long
those processes lasted. This was as alien from his purpose as it would
have been to tell what every physiologist now knows of the processes by
which every individual man is developed from a small germ to a breathing
and living infant. He takes men--and he could not but take men as he
sees them--with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual
capacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of family.
He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the
subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the
original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and
distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot
be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the
Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that
crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so
many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church
downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained
in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such
as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such
as he is before the narrative begins.
It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's
nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was
effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of
evolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he became
a man.
But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yet
assert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, that
man became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts and
inclinations, appetites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as we
see other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man is
now. His body may have been developed according to the theory of
Evolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own; but at
any rate it branched off from other animals at a very early point in
the descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assert
that life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by a
direct creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it is
tolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, the
spiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not
given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to
be the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had been
sufficiently developed to receive it. That the body should have been
first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either
have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of
God,--this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what the
Bible tells nor with what Science has up to this time proved.
And to this must be added that it is out of place for us to define what
is consistent or inconsistent with the dignity of man in the process or
method by which he was created to be what he is. His dignity consists in
his possession of the spiritual faculty, and not in the method by which
he became possessed of it. We cannot tell, we never can tell, and the
Bible never professes to tell, what powers or gifts are wrapped up in
matter itself, or in that living matter of which we are made. How
absolutely nothing we know of the mode by which any single soul is
created! The germ which is to become a man can be traced by the
physiologist through all the changes that it has to undergo before it
comes to life. Is the future soul wrapped up in it from the first, and
dormant till the hour of awakening comes? or is it given at some moment
in the development? We see in the infant how its powers expand, and we
know that the spiritual faculty, the very essence of its being, has a
development like the other faculties. It has in it the gift of speech,
and yet it cannot speak. Judgment, and taste, and power of thought;
self-sacrifice and unswerving truth; science and art, and spiritual
understanding, all may be there in abundant measure and yet may show no
sign. All this we know; and because it is common and well known we see
nothing inconsistent with the dignity of our nature in this concealment
of all that dignity, helpless and powerless, within the form of an
infant in arms. With this before us it is impossible to say that
anything which Science has yet proved, or ever has any chance of
proving, is inconsistent with the place given to man in Creation by the
teaching of the Bible.
In conclusion, we cannot find that Science, in teaching Evolution, has
yet asserted anything that is inconsistent with Revelation, unless we
assume that Revelation was intended not to teach spiritual truth only,
but physical truth also. Here, as in all similar cases, we find that the
writer of the Book of Genesis, like all the other writers in the Bible,
took nature as he saw it, and expressed his teaching in language
corresponding to what he saw. And the doctrine of Evolution, in so far
as it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail the
declaration that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are
Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.' There is nothing in all
that Science has yet taught, or is on the way to teach, which conflicts
with the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of the
creation around us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of a
Revelation from a Father in Heaven, and responsible to judgment by His
Law. We know not how the first human soul was made, just as we know not
how any human soul has been made since; but we know that we are, in a
sense in which no other creatures living with us are, the children of
His special care.
LECTURE VII.
APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER.
The claim to work miracles parallel to the freedom of the will. The
miracles of Revelation need not be miracles of Science. Our Lord's
Resurrection, and His miracles of healing, possibly not miraculous in
the scientific sense. Different aspect of miracles now and at the time
when the Revelation was given. Miracles attested by the Apostles, by our
Lord's character, by our Lord's power. Nature of evidence required to
prove miracles; not such as to put physical above spiritual evidence;
not such as to be unsuited to their own day. Impossibility of
demonstrating universal uniformity. Revelation no obstacle to the
progress of Science.
LECTURE VII.
APPARENT COLLISION OF SCIENCE WITH THE CLAIM TO SUPERNATURAL POWER.
'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else
believe Me for the very works' sake.' _St. John_ xiv. 11.
Science and Religion come into apparent collision on the question of the
freedom of the will. Science and Revelation come into a similar apparent
collision on the possibility of miracles. The cases are precisely
parallel. In each individual man the uniformity of nature is broken to
leave room for the moral force of the will to assert its independent
existence. This breach of uniformity is within very narrow limits, and
occurs much more rarely than appears at first sight. But the demand to
admit not only the possibility but the fact of this breach is
imperative, and to deny it is to turn the command of the Moral Law as
revealed in the conscience into a delusion. So, too, Revelation asserts
its right to set aside the uniformity of nature to leave room for a
direct communication from God to man. It is an essential part of the
Divine Moral Law to claim supremacy over the physical world. Unless
somehow or other the moral ultimately rules the physical, the Moral Law
cannot rightly claim our absolute obedience. Revelation as given to us
maintains that this superiority has been asserted in fact here in the
world of phenomena. To deny this is very nearly equivalent to denying
that any revelation has been made. In this way Revelation asserts, for
God's message to the human race precisely the same breach of uniformity
which every man's conscience claims for himself in regard to his own
conduct.
It is, however, necessary to point out that when we speak of a breach of
uniformity we are never in a position to deny that the breach of
uniformity may be physical only and perhaps apparent only. It may be
found, it probably will be found, at last that the Moral Law has in
some way always maintained its own uniformity unbroken. The Moral Law
has in its essence an elasticity which the physical law has not. It
often takes the form, that, given certain conduct, there will follow
certain consequences; and the law is kept though the conduct is free. It
is further possible, and Revelation has no interest in denying it, that
the intervention which has apparently disturbed the sequence of
phenomena is, after all, that of a higher physical law as yet unknown.
For instance, the miraculous healing of the sick may be no miracle in
the strictest sense at all. It may be but an instance of the power of
mind over body, a power which is undeniably not yet brought within the
range of Science, and which nevertheless may be really within its
domain. In other ways what seems to be miraculous may be simply unusual.
And it must therefore be always remembered that Revelation is not bound
by the scientific definition of a miracle, and that if all the
miraculous events recorded in the Bible happened exactly as they are
told, and if Science were some day able to show that they could be
accounted for by natural causes working at the time in each case, this
would not in any way affect their character, as regards the Revelation
which they were worked to prove or of which they form a part. Revelation
uses these events for its own purposes. Some of these events are spoken
of as evidences of a divine mission. Some of them are substantive facts
embraced in the message delivered. And if for these purposes they have
served their turn, if they have arrested attention which would not
otherwise have been arrested, if they have overcome prejudices, if they
have compelled belief, the fact that they are afterwards discovered to
be no breach of the law of uniformity has no bearing at all on the
Revelation to which they belong. The miracle would in that case consist
in the precise coincidence in time with the purpose which they served,
or in the manner and degree in which they marked out the Man who wrought
them from all other men, or in the foreshadowing of events which are in
the distant future.
Thus, for instance, it is quite possible that our Lord's Resurrection
may be found hereafter to be no miracle at all in the scientific sense.
It foreshadows and begins the general Resurrection; when that general
Resurrection comes we may find that it is, after all, the natural issue
of physical laws always at work.
There is nothing at present to indicate anything of the sort; but a
general resurrection in itself implies not a special interference but a
general rule. If, when we rise again, we find that this resurrection is
and always was a part of the Divine purpose, and brought about at last
by machinery precisely the same in kind as that which has been used in
making and governing the world, we may also find that our Lord's
Resurrection was brought about by the operation of precisely the same
machinery. We may find that even in the language of strict science 'He
was the first fruits of them that slept,' and that His Resurrection was
not a miracle, but the first instance of the working of a law till the
last day quite unknown, but on that last day operative on all that ever
lived.
Let us compare the general resurrection with the first introduction of
life into the world. As far as scientific observation has yet gone that
first introduction of life was a miracle. No one has ever yet succeeded
in tracing it to the operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle it
is a miracle precisely similar in kind to the miracle which believers
are expecting at the last day. And assuredly if a miracle was once
worked to introduce life into this habitable world, there is very good
reason to expect that another miracle will be worked hereafter to
restore life to those that have lived. But there are scientific men who
think that the introduction of life was not a miracle, that it came at
the fitting moment by the working of natural laws; or, in other words,
that such properties are inherent in the elements of which protoplasm is
made that in certain special circumstances these elements will not only
combine but that the product of their combination will live. If this be
so, it is assuredly no such very strange supposition that there may be
such properties inherent in our bodies or in certain particles, whether
particles of matter or not, belonging to our bodies, that in certain
special circumstances these particles will return to life. And if this
be so the general resurrection may be no miracle, but the result of the
properties originally inherent in our bodies and of the working of the
laws of those properties. And as the general resurrection so our Lord's
Resurrection may in this way turn out to be no breach of the uniformity
of nature.
But this new discovery, if then made, would not affect the place which
our Lord's Resurrection holds in the records of Revelation. It is not
the purpose of Revelation to interfere with the course of nature; if
such interference be needless, and the work of revealing God to man can
be done without it, there is no reason whatever to believe that any such
interference would take place.
Or, take again any of our Lord's miracles of healing. There is no
question at all that the power of mind over body is exceedingly great,
and has never yet been thoroughly examined. We know almost nothing of
the extent of this power, of its laws, of its limits. Marvellous
recoveries often astonish the physician, and he cannot account for them
except by supposing that in some way the powers of the mind have been
roused to interfere with the working of the nervous system. And some
men, on the other hand, have died or their health has been shattered by
mere imaginations. Some men of note have attributed the recoveries
claimed for homoeopathy to this cause. Some have assigned to this
cause the extraordinary cures that have been undeniably wrought at the
shrines, or on sight or touch of the relics, of Roman Catholic saints.
The different impostures that have on many occasions prevailed for a
time and then lost their reputation and passed out of fashion, are
generally supposed to have owed their short-lived success to the same
obscure working of unknown natural laws. They have been tested by their
successes and their failures. They have succeeded, and for a time
continued to succeed; but at last they have ceased to work because faith
in them for some reason or other has been shaken down. Their falsehood
has thus been detected; but nevertheless their genuine success for a
time has been enough to show that they rested on a reality, and that
reality seems to have consisted in the strange power of mind over body.
In this region all is at present unexamined; and all operations are
tentative, and for that reason most are only successful for a time. Now
our Lord's miracles are never tentative; that is not the character given
to them either by friend or by foe. Nor is there any instance recorded
either by friend or by foe of an attempted miracle not accomplished.
Nowhere is there any record given us by the assailants of the Gospel of
any instance of His action parallel to the record given in the Acts of
the Apostles of the seven sons of Sceva the Jew. The accounts of his
enemies charge Him with deceit, which is identical with saying that they
did not believe Him. But they do not ever charge Him with failure.
Nevertheless it is quite conceivable that many of His miracles of
healing may have been the result of this power of mind over body which
we are now considering. It is possible that they may be due not to an
interference with the uniformity of nature, but to a superiority in His
mental power to the similar power possessed by other men. Men seem to
possess this power both over their own bodies and over the bodies of
others in different degrees. Some can influence other men's bodies
through their minds more; some less. Possibly He may have possessed this
power absolutely where others possessed it conditionally. He may have
possessed it without limit; others within limits. If this were so, these
acts of healing would not be miracles in the strictly scientific sense.
They would imply very great superiority in Him to other men. But they
would be in themselves under the law of uniformity. Now it is clear that
if this should turn out to be so, though these acts would not be
miracles for the purposes of Science, they would still be miracles for
the purposes of Revelation. They would do their work in arresting
attention, and still more in accrediting both the message and the
Messenger. They would separate Him from ordinary men. They would prove
Him to be possessed of credentials worth examining. To the believer it
would make no difference whether Science called them miracles or not. To
him it would still remain the fact that here was a Messenger whom God
had seen fit to endow with powers which no other man ever possessed in
such degree and such completeness, though others may have possessed some
touch of them greater or less.
Further, it is necessary to repeat what was briefly remarked in a
previous Lecture, that the position which miracles take as regards us
who read them many centuries after, and as regards those who witnessed
and recorded them at the time, is quite different. To them the miracles
were the first and often the chief proof that the man who wrought them
had been sent by God, and that His message was a revelation, not an
imposture; to us they are, if accepted at all, accepted as a part of the
revelation itself. There are no doubt a few minds that are convinced by
Paley's argument, and beginning with accepting the miracles as proved by
sufficient external evidence, go on to accept the conclusion that
therefore the teaching that was thus accompanied must be divine. But
most men are quite unable to take to pieces in this way the records in
which Revelation is contained, and to go from external evidence taken
alone to the messengers who thus proved their mission, and thence to the
substance of the message which they taught. To most of us, on the
contrary, the Revelation is a whole, capable of being looked at from
many sides, and found to be divine from whatever side it is seen; and
one of its aspects is this supernatural character by which it appears
to assert its identity with that Moral Law which claims absolute
supremacy over all the physical world. The main evidence of the
Revelation to us consists in its harmony with the voice of the spiritual
faculty within us; and the claim which it asserts to have come through
teachers endowed with supernatural power is so far corroborative
evidence as it falls in with the essential character of the Moral Law.
That eternal law claims supremacy over the physical world and actually
asserts it in the freedom of the human will; and a Revelation which
comes from Him Who in His own essential Being is that very law
personified, might be expected to exhibit the same claim in actual
manifestation in its approach to men.
Bearing these limitations and characteristics of the miraculous element
in the Bible in mind, let us ask how that miraculous element is therein
presented.
First, in the account of the creation, it is taught that the original
existence of all matter flows from a spiritual source. We do not define
God as the cause, meaning that that is His essence, and that except as
causing other things to exist He does not exist Himself. But we
describe Him as the Cause, meaning that all things exist by His Will,
and that without His Will nothing could ever have existed. And as the
Revelation tells us that He is the source of all existence, the Creator
of the substance of things, so too does it assert that He gave all
things their special properties and the laws of those properties, and
that not only the original creation, but all the subsequent history of
all things has been the outcome of His design, and that He has thus
prescribed the government of the whole universe. And yet again the
Revelation from the beginning to the end maintains His living Presence
in and over all things that He has thus formed, and denies that He has
parted with His power to do fresh acts of creation, fresh acts of
government, whenever and wherever He sees fit. For He is necessarily
free and cannot be restrained by anything but His own holiness. And
unless He expressly revealed to us that His own holiness prevented Him
from interfering with His own creation, we could not put limits to what
He could do. The Revelation that He has given us says just the contrary,
and from end to end implies that He is present in the government of the
creation which He has made.
What evidence, then, is there in the world of phenomena that He has ever
thus interfered? Putting aside as untenable all idea of _a priori_
impossibility, admitting that God can work a miracle if He will,
admitting that a miracle avowedly worked in the interest of a divine
revelation stands on a totally different footing from a miracle avowedly
worked in any other interest, putting the breach of the law of
uniformity made by a miracle on the same footing as the breach of the
same law made by a human will; we have to ask what evidence can be given
that any such miracles as are recorded in the Bible have ever been
worked?
It is plain at once that the answer must be given by the New Testament.
No _such_ evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles in the
Old Testament. The times are remote; the date and authorship of the
Books not established with certainty; the mixture of poetry with history
no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts; and, if the New
Testament did not exist, it would be impossible to show such a distinct
preponderance of probability as would justify us in calling on any to
accept the miraculous parts of the narrative as historically true.
But in the New Testament we stand on different ground. And we have here
first the evidence which Paley has put together to show that the early
Christians spent their lives and finally surrendered their lives as
witnesses to a Gospel which included miracles both among its evidences
and as part of its substance. It is not possible to get rid of miracles
nor the belief in miracles from the history of the Apostles. They
testify to our Lord's Resurrection as to an actual fact, and make it the
basis of all their preaching. They testify to our Lord's miracles as
part of the character of His life. It is necessary to maintain that they
were mere fanatics with no claim to respect but rather to the pity which
we feel for utterly ignorant goodness, if we are to hold that no miracle
was ever wrought by our Lord. It is difficult to maintain even their
honesty if they preached the Resurrection of our Lord without any basis
of fact to rest on. No man who is not determined to uphold an opinion
at all hazards can question that St. Paul and St. Peter believed that
our Lord rose from the dead, and that they died for and in that belief.
But, in the second place, behind the Apostles stands our Lord Himself,
and whatever may be said of the documents that compose the New
Testament, they are at any rate sufficient to show that our Lord was
universally believed by His disciples to have the power of working
miracles and to have often worked them. There is no hesitation in regard
to this; no hint of any doubt. But not only so, there is no hint of any
disclaimer on His part. He must have known whether He could work
miracles or not. He must have known that His disciples believed Him to
possess the power. There is not the slightest trace of His ever having
implied that this was a misconception. He did sometimes disclaim what
was ascribed to Him, even when what was ascribed to Him was truly His,
but was ascribed to Him without real knowledge of what it implied. 'Why
callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God,' we
DO find. But 'Why askest thou Me to do this? There is none
that can do this but One, that is God,' we do NOT find. It is
plain that He accepted the belief that assigned Him powers above those
of other men--powers given Him by His Father in heaven--and never
discouraged it. Nay, He demanded it. Take the lowest ground, and admit
for argument's sake that the New Testament contains a legendary element,
and still you cannot cut the miracles out of the Gospels and Epistles
without altering them beyond recognition. The Jesus Christ presented to
us in the New Testament would become a different person if the miracles
were removed. And if He claimed to possess and exercise this power, the
evidence becomes the evidence of One Who must have known and Whom we
cannot disbelieve.
And this claim, which He has thus made, and which was thus accepted by
His disciples, is corroborated by the power, different in form but
similar in kind, which He exerted then on the men of His own day, and
has ever since continued to exert on all succeeding generations. The
first disciples were under His absolute dominion. They preached Christ
and not themselves. They referred everything to Him, and professed to
have no power but from Him. St. Paul with all his genius and marvellous
power of influence, yet professes to be nothing without Christ and to be
everything in Christ. Our Lord left no writing behind Him, but committed
His Revelation to His Apostles, and we only know Him through them. But
they are not like ordinary disciples of a great teacher; philosophers
succeeding a philosopher; prophets succeeding a prophet. To no one of
them does it occur for a moment to teach anything except as from Him.
St. Paul gives advice sometimes which he does not profess to be giving
by our Lord's command, but when he does so, he puts the mark of his own
inferiority on what he says, and claims for it no such authority as
belongs to a word from Christ. A word from Christ was final on all
subjects.
And this power over men has never weakened from that day to this. There
is no other power like it in the world. Science proceeds in far the
majority of cases by trial of some theory as a working hypothesis. Such
too has been the procedure of Christian Faith. Trust Christ; stake your
happiness on Him; stake your hope of satisfying all spiritual
aspirations on Him; stake your power of winning the victory over
temptation on Him--this is the exhortation of Apostle, and martyr, and
saint, and evangelist, and pastor, and teacher. And those who have thus
tried the strength of the Christian hypothesis have not failed. The
Christian Church has been stained with many a blot. Ill deeds have been
wrought in the name of Christ. Evil laws have been passed. Strange
superstitions have prevailed. But no other body can show such saints, no
other body can produce so great a cloud of witnesses. It is certain that
the lives and the deaths, the characters and the aims, of those who have
trusted their all to Christ have made them what He bade them be, the
salt of the earth. And they testify with one voice that they know no
other power which has upheld them but the power of Christ whom they have
taken for their Lord. Others have sometimes been set up as in some sort
rivals to Him as teachers or as examples; but here there is no rival
even pretended. In no other man have men been called on to believe as a
living present power, able to give strength and victory in the
conflicts of the soul. The Church, too, has passed through times of
spiritual depression, we may almost say of degradation. And in the worst
of times within the Church there has always remained a wonderful
recuperative power, which has shaken off inconsistencies and defects in
the past, and will do so yet more in the future. But this recuperative
power has always shown itself in one form, and in one form only, namely,
a return to Christ and to trust in Him, a trust which has never been
falsified.
The martyrdom of our Lord's disciples is enough to prove that belief in
His supernatural powers and in His exercise of those powers was no
gradual growth of later times, but from the very beginning rooted in the
convictions of those who must have known the truth. The character of our
Lord as revealed in the Gospels makes it impossible to disbelieve His
claims whatever they may be. His power attested by generations of
believers ever since corroborates those claims by the persistent
evidence of eighteen centuries.
Against this evidence what is to be said?
It is said that the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so
overwhelming that nothing can set it aside. And further it is said,
that, even if it be conceded that it might be set aside, no evidence
sufficient for the purpose has yet been produced.
Now to deal with this second assertion first, we must ask what is the
nature of the evidence that would be deemed sufficient? If the inquirer
does not believe that God created and still governs the world, assuredly
no evidence will ever be sufficient to convince him that God has worked
a miracle. The existence of God is certainly not to be proved by His
interference with nature. Had He desired to reveal Himself to us
primarily in that way, He would have wrought many more miracles than we
now know of, and would have kept our faith alive by perpetual and
unmistakeable manifestations of His presence and power. But He has not
so willed. He has made our belief in Him rest mainly on the voice within
ourselves, in order that we might walk by faith and not by sight. It
will be a hopeless task to convince men that there is a God by
pointing, not to His creation but to His interference with creation. But
if a man do believe there is a God, what kind of evidence ought he to
expect to show him that God has interfered in the course of the
creation?
In the first place, he must not expect that the physical evidence, that
is the miraculous evidence, for Revelation should be of such a character
as to stand above the spiritual evidence. Just as the fundamental
evidence for the existence of a God is to be found in the voice of
conscience, and the arguments from design and from the order and beauty
and visible purpose of the creation are secondary--corroborative not
demonstrative--so too the primary evidence of a Revelation from God must
be found in the harmony of that Revelation with the voice of conscience,
and only the secondary and corroborative evidence is to be looked for in
miracles. And in both cases the reason is the same. For it is not God's
purpose to win the intellectually gifted, the wise, the cultivated, the
clever, but to win the spiritually gifted, the humble, the
tender-hearted, the souls that are discontented with their own
shortcomings, the souls that have a capacity for finding happiness in
self-sacrifice. It would defeat the purpose of the Revelation made to us
if the hard-headed should have an advantage in accepting it over the
humble-minded. The evidence must be such that spiritual character shall
be an element in the acceptance of it. There would be a contradiction,
if the faculty whereby we mainly recognised God were the spiritual
faculty, and the faculty whereby we mainly recognised His Revelation
were the scientific faculty.
And, in the second place, we have no right to expect that the evidence
for miracles wrought in one age should be such evidence as properly
belongs to another age. It is sometimes urged that the evidence supplied
by the testimony of the early Christians is of little value because it
was never cross-examined. No such precautions surrounded the evidence as
would now be required to give any value to evidence of similar events.
The witnesses gave up their lives to attest what they taught; but there
was no one to scrutinise what they asserted. St. Paul's evidence on our
Lord's Resurrection cannot now be put to the test of searching
questions. But to make such objections as these is to make what is on
the face of it an absurd demand. It is to ask that the scientific
processes of the nineteenth century should have been anticipated in the
first, that men should be miraculously guided to supply a kind of
evidence which would be utterly superfluous at the time in order to be
convincing eighteen hundred years afterwards. This would indeed have put
the miraculous incidents in the New Testament narrative altogether out
of place, and made the miracles more important than the Revelation which
they were worked to introduce.
Now, if these two conditions are borne in mind, it is difficult to see
what better evidence could be obtained of a miraculous life than we
possess concerning the life of our Lord.
The moral and spiritual evidence is His own character which
intentionally overshadows all the rest, and it is inconceivable that He
should have made a false claim. And the material evidence is the
testimony of men who freely gave their lives in proof of what they said.
Nor has anything yet been said or written to shake Paley's argument on
this point.
But, if we pass on to the other objection, that no evidence can ever be
sufficient to prove a miracle because the evidence for the uniformity of
nature is so overwhelming, we can only see in such an assertion an
instance of that inability to get out of an accustomed groove against
which Science has perpetually to guard. In Science the uniformity of
nature is so indispensable a postulate, that without it we cannot stir a
step. And if the student of Science is to admit a breach, it can only be
by stepping outside of his science for the time and conceiving the
possibility that there is some other truth beside scientific truth, and
some other kind of evidence beside scientific evidence. We have all
heard of the need of guarding against the bondage in which custom binds
the mind. We have heard of the student who when first he saw a
locomotive looked perseveringly for the horses that impelled it, because
he had never known, and consequently could not imagine any other mode of
producing such motion. But this danger attends not only the separate
investigations which Science makes into phenomena; it attends Science as
a whole. And it is necessary repeatedly to insist on the fact that
Science has not proved and cannot prove that the scientific domain is
co-extensive with nature itself.
The evidence for the uniformity of nature consists in the fact that from
the beginning of Science the known reign of physical law has been
steadily extending without a check; that instance after instance of
apparent exception has been brought by further examination within its
province; that the hypothesis of uniformity has now been long on trial
and has never yet been found to fail; that no one who has so tried it
has the slightest hesitation in trusting it for the future, as he has
proved it in the past. But clearly as this evidence proves a general, it
never gets beyond a general, uniformity. It has not succeeded in showing
that the human will comes under the same rule. It has not succeeded in
silencing the voice within us, which claims superiority for the moral
over the physical. And when the utmost extent of human knowledge is
compared with the vastness of nature, the claim to extend the induction
from generality to universality is seen to be utterly untenable. So
much as this, indeed, Science has rendered highly probable, that the
uniformity of nature is never broken except for a moral purpose. It is
only for such a purpose that the will is ever free. It is only for such
a purpose that Revelation has ever claimed to be superior to nature. But
beyond this Science cannot go. Let it be granted that the claim for
freedom of the will has been often unduly pushed far beyond this limit,
and let it be granted that religions professing to be revelations have
included records of miracles which had no moral purpose. This does not
affect the general conclusion that the evidence for uniformity has never
succeeded, and can never succeed in showing, that the God who made and
rules the universe never sets aside a physical law for a moral purpose,
either by working through the human will or by direct action on external
nature.
Science will continue its progress, and as the thoughts of men become
clearer it will be perpetually more plainly seen that nothing in
Revelation really interferes with that progress. It will be seen that
devout believers can observe, can cross-question nature, can look for
uniformity and find it, with as keen an eye, with as active an
imagination, with as sure a reasoning, as those who deny entirely all
possibility of miracles and reject all Revelation on that account. The
belief that God can work miracles and has worked them, has never yet
obstructed the path of a single student of Science; nor has any student
who repudiated that belief found any aid in his study from that
repudiation. The rush of Science of late years has for the time made
many men fancy that Science is everything; and believers in Revelation
have helped this fancy by insisting on their part that Revelation is
everything; but such waves of opinion, resting really on feeling, are
sure to pass away, and scientific men will learn that there are other
kinds of knowledge besides scientific knowledge, as believers are
already learning that God teaches us by other methods besides the method
of Revelation. The students of the Bible will certainly learn that
Revelation need not fear the discoveries of Science, not even such
doctrines as that of Evolution. And the students of nature will
certainly learn that Science has nothing to fear from the teaching of
Revelation, not even from the claim to miraculous power. For most
certainly both Science and Revelation come from one and the same God;
'the heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showeth His handywork;
His law is perfect, converting the soul; His testimony is sure, making
wise the simple.'
LECTURE VIII.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.
Uniformity of nature not demonstrated, but established, except in two
cases; the interference of human will and of Divine Will. The exception
no bar to the progress of Science. Unity to be found not in the physical
world, but in the physical and moral combined. The Moral Law rests on
itself. Our recognition of it on our own character and choice. But we
expect it to show its marks in the physical world: and these are the
purpose visible in Creation, the effects produced by Revelation.
Nevertheless a demand for more physical evidence; but the physical
cannot be allowed to overshadow the spiritual. Dangers to believers from
leaning this way: superstition; blindness; stagnation. The guarantee for
spiritual perceptiveness: to take Jesus as the Lord of the conscience,
the heart, the will.
LECTURE VIII.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE ARGUMENT.
'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.'
1 _Cor._ xii. 3.
It is now the proper time to review the argument of these Lectures, and
to endeavour to trace, if possible, the source of the estrangement which
just at present separates Religion and Science.
The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformity
of nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist in
an induction from the facts which nature presents and our senses
observe. Uniformity is quickly noticed, and after it has been noticed
for some time it is instinctively used as a working hypothesis. So used
it accumulates perpetually increasing evidence of its truth, and if we
except two great classes of facts, we never find any instance of its
failure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the acts
of the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of them
instances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with the
physical. To complete the induction and to deprive the denial of
universal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary
is to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of these
exceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postulate
was demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in its
favour and absolutely no evidence against it. And although scientific
belief would then still rank below mathematical belief, it would
nevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible. Science would not
thereby gain in power of progress, in practical acceptance, or in
utility to man. But men are so constituted that completeness gives a
special kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way. If Science
could but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in
nothing else. And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for this
completeness until every attempt to question it is resented. I have
seen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider the
effect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanical
problems; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any
entrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it.
And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students of
Science at the very thought of there being anything in the world not
under the dominion of the great scientific postulate. The world which
thus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronounced
forthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which we
are concerned; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge our
imagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at any
time before or after. And yet the freedom of the human will and the
sense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to all
human conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we live
contains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to the
scientific law, but will have a course of its own. The sense of
responsibility is a rock which no demand for completeness in Science
can crush. All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of an
unbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silenced
telling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we know
that they will for ever fail.
If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was really
barred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assert
the unbroken uniformity of all nature; if it could be said that any
uncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or
misleading lights thus held up to draw inquirers from the true path, it
would undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiously,
whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelessly
at variance with each other, the scientific faculty, imposing on us one
belief, and the spiritual faculty another, and the two practically
irreconcileable. But there is no reason whatever for thinking this.
Newton's investigations were unquestionably pursued, as all true
scientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth
of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightest
hindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and often expressly
acknowledged that God had reserved to Himself the power of setting this
uniformity aside, and indeed believed that He had used this power. The
believer who asserts the universality of a law except when God works a
miracle to set it aside is certainly at no real disadvantage in
comparison with an unbeliever who makes the same assertion with no
qualification at all. It is granted on all hands that miracles are, and
ever have been, exceedingly rare, and for that reason need not be taken
into account in the investigation of nature. It is granted that the
freedom of the human will works within narrow limits, and very slowly
and slightly affects the great mass of human conduct and what depends on
human conduct. And Science has often to deal with approximations when
nothing but approximations can be obtained. We perpetually meet in
nature with quantities and relations that cannot be accurately expressed
nor accurately ascertained, and we have to be content with
approximations, and we know how to use them in Science. Many chemical
properties can only be so expressed; many primary facts, such as the
distances, the volumes, the weights of heavenly bodies; and yet the
approximations serve our purpose. And so too, if there be a reserve
still uncovered by the scientific postulate, that will not in any degree
affect our investigation of what is so covered.
In short, the unity of all things which Science is for ever seeking will
be found not in the physical world alone, but in the physical and
spiritual united. That unity embraces both. And the uniformity which is
the expression of that unity is not a uniformity complete in nature,
taken by itself, but complete when the two worlds are taken together.
And this Science ought to recognise.
Let us turn from the physical to the spiritual.
The voice within us which demands our acceptance of religion makes no
direct appeal to the evidence supplied by the senses. We are called on
to believe in a supreme law of duty on pain of being lowered before our
own consciences. And this law of duty goes on to assert its own
supremacy over all things that exist, and that not as an accidental
fact, but as inherent in its essence. And this supremacy cannot be other
than an accidental fact unless it be not only actual but intended. And
intention implies personality; and the law thus shows itself to be a
Supreme Being, claiming our reverence, and asserting Himself to be the
Creator, the Ruler, and the Judge of all things that are. And this same
voice within us asserts that we are responsible to Him for all our
conduct, and are capable of that responsibility because free to choose
what that conduct shall be. We are to believe not because the truth of
this voice is proved independently of itself, but simply because we are
commanded. Corroborative evidence may be looked for elsewhere, but the
main, the primary evidence is within the soul.
Hence the strength of this belief depends on ourselves and on our own
character. To every man the voice speaks. But its authority is felt in
proportion to the spirituality of each who hears. Its acceptance is
bound up in some way with our own wills. How far it is a matter of
choice to believe or to disbelieve it is not possible to define. The
will lies hidden as it were behind the emotions, the affections, the
nobler impulses. The conscience shades off into the other faculties, and
we cannot always isolate it from the rest. But though it be impossible
to say precisely how the will is concerned in the spiritual belief,
there can be no doubt that it always takes its part in such belief. It
is the keen conscience, it is the will that can be moved to its depths
by the conscience, that grasp most strongly the certainty of the law of
duty. It is the man with the strongest and noblest aspirations, the man
who sees the beauty of humility, the man who feels most strongly the
deep peace of self-sacrifice, _that_ is the man who finds the voice
within most irresistible. It is not by any means always the man who
lives the most correct life; correctness of life may be due to natural
and not to spiritual causes. And the man whom we should find faultless
in point of morals may yet be wanting in spiritual depth, and not have
as yet, and perhaps may not have to the last, the spiritual faculty
strong within him. But the man, even if he have many and grievous
faults, who nevertheless is keenly susceptible of higher things, is the
one to whom the voice within speaks with authority not to be gainsaid,
and to him that voice is final.
It is this fact that the perception of things spiritual varies from man
to man, and depends on character, and involves action of the will, that
makes it always possible to represent our knowledge of the law of duty
as in itself standing on a less sure foundation than our knowledge of
scientific truth. Whether a man has or has not the necessary power of
mind to comprehend scientific reasoning is tested with comparative ease.
And if he have that power, the reasoning is certain in course of time to
be understood, and when it is understood it compels assent so long as it
keeps within its own proper domain. But the perception of spiritual
truth depends on a faculty whose power or weakness it is far more
difficult to test; and it involves the will which may be exerted on
either side. And for this reason men sometimes dismiss this truth as
being no more than an imagination, needed by some men to satisfy an
emotional nature, but having no substance that can be brought to an
external test. The believer in God knows that the truth which he holds
is as certain as the axioms of mathematics; but he cannot make others
know this whose spiritual faculty is not awake; and he is liable to be
asked for proof not of the spiritual but of the physical kind.
Now this much must be acknowledged, that we cannot but expect the claim
to supremacy over all things to show itself in some way in the creation
which has come from Him who makes that claim. It would, no doubt, be a
serious difficulty if things physical and things spiritual were cut off
from one another by an absolute gulf; if we were required to believe
that God had created and now ruled everything, and yet we could trace
not the slightest evidence of His hand either in the creation or in the
history of the world.
There are then two ways in which we are able to recognise Him even in
this world of phenomena. For in the first place, the creation in its
order and its beauty and its marvellous adaptation of means to ends,
confirms the assertion of the spiritual faculty that it owes its origin
to an intelligent and benevolent purpose, exhibited in the form in which
purpose is always exhibited. It works towards ends which we should
expect a holy and benevolent Creator to have in view, and it
accomplishes those ends in so large a proportion that, making allowance
for the limited range of our knowledge, the general aim of the whole is
seen with sufficient clearness. The argument is not strong enough to
compel assent from those who have no ears for the inward spiritual
voice, but it is abundantly sufficient to answer those who argue that
there cannot be a Creator because they cannot trace His action. And the
scientific doctrine of Evolution, which at first seemed to take away the
force of this argument, is found on examination to confirm it and expand
it. The doctrine of Evolution shows that with whatever design the world
was formed, that design was entertained at the very beginning and
impressed on every particle of created matter, and that the appearances
of failure are not only to be accounted for by the limitation of our
knowledge, but also by the fact that we are contemplating the work
before it has been completed.
And in the second place, while the creation, the more closely it is
examined the more distinctly shows the marks of the wisdom and goodness
of the Creator, so the history of the world exhibits in the Revelation
made to man clear proofs of that heavenly love which corresponds to the
character of Him who has put love at the head of all the requirements of
His law. The Revelation given to us has undeniably made a real mark on
the world. It has upheld millions of men in a holiness of life
corresponding in a very real degree to the holiness required by the law
of duty. It has perpetually more and more cleared up the true teaching
of that law. It is still continuing the same process, and generation
after generation is better able to understand that teaching. Its fruits
have been a harvest of saints and martyrs, some known and reverenced,
some quite unnoticed. It has leavened all literature and all
legislation. It has changed the customs of mankind and is still changing
them. And if it be replied that all this is nothing but one form of the
development of humanity and shows no proof of a Divine Ruler, we have a
right to ask what then could be the source of such a development, and
how is it that so great a power should always have worked in the name of
God and should have always referred everything to His command? That
fanaticism should plead God's authority without any right to do so is
intelligible. But is it intelligible that all this truth and justice and
purity and self-sacrificing love, all this obedience to the Supreme Law,
should be the fruit of believing a lie? If there be a God, it is to be
expected that He would communicate with His creatures if those creatures
were capable of receiving the communication; and if He did communicate
with His creatures it is to be expected that His communication would be
such as we find in the Bible. The purpose of the Bible, the form of it,
the gradual formation of it, the steadily-growing Revelation contained
in it, these harmonise with the moral law revealed originally in the
conscience. And the effect which the Revelation has produced on human
history is real and great. The power which God's Revelation has exerted
on the world is an undeniable fact among phenomena. It is not a
demonstration of His existence; but it is a full answer to those who
say, 'If God made and rules the world why do we find no signs of His
hand in its course?'
And thirdly, this Revelation has not merely taken the form of a message
or a series of messages, but has culminated in the appearance of a
person who has always satisfied and still satisfies the conception
formed by our spiritual faculty of a human representation of the divine
law. Our Lord's life is that law translated into human action, and all
the more because human faculties had not first framed the conception
which He then came to fulfil, but He exhibited the ideal, and our
conception rose as it were to correspond to it. And, as He includes in
Himself all the teaching, so does He give from Himself all the power of
the Revelation which He came to crown. And every true disciple of Christ
can bear witness to the reality of that power in sustaining the soul.
Thus has the God, whom our spiritual faculty commands us to worship and
to reverence, shown Himself in the world of phenomena. And He has given
proofs of His existence and His character precisely corresponding to
the conception which He has enabled, and indeed commanded, us to form of
Him. And it is because the proofs that He has given are of this nature
that we are tempted to ask for more proofs of a different kind.
For it is undeniable that believers and unbelievers alike are
perpetually asking for proofs that shall have more of the scientific and
less of the religious character, proofs that shall more distinctly
appeal to the senses. Believers in all ages have longed for external
support to their faith; unbelievers have refused to believe unless
supplied with more physical evidence. Believers shrink from being thrown
inwards on themselves; they fear the wavering of their own faith; they
are alarmed at the prospect of the buttresses of their belief being
taken from them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual evidence,
if they can first find much physical evidence. They wish (to use the
Apostle's words) to walk by sight and not by faith. And unbelievers want
a tangible proof that shall compel their understanding before it awakes
their conscience. They demand a Revelation, not only confirmed by
miracles at the time, but confirmed again and again by repeated miracles
to every succeeding generation. They want miracles in every age adapted
to the science of the age, miracles which no hardness of heart would be
able to deny, which would convince the scientific man through his
Science independently of his having any will to make holiness his aim
when he had been convinced. This kind of evidence it has not pleased God
to give. It is not the scientific man that God seeks as such, any more
than it is the ignorant man that He seeks as such. And the proofs that
He gives are plainly in all cases conditioned by the rule that the
spiritually minded shall most easily and most keenly perceive their
force.
And, as far as unbelievers are concerned, I do not see that more need be
said except to tell them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is by
another way that they must look to find God, and not by the way that
they insist on choosing. But believers who are in the same case need to
be warned of some very real dangers that always attend a faith which
makes too much of things not spiritual.
For, first, there is a real and great danger that the spiritual may be
altogether obscured by the literal and the physical. We look back with
astonishment on the Rabbinical interpretations of the Old Testament, and
all the more because of the really great and true thoughts that are
sometimes to be found in the midst of their fanciful conceits. We can
trace the mischief they did to true Religion by the perverted reverence
with which they regarded the words and even the letters, and the very
shapes of the letters, in which their sacred books were written. Their
perversions of the law of God, their subtle refinements of
interpretation, their trivial conceits, their false and misleading
comments and inferences, all certainly tended to encourage the hypocrisy
which our Lord rebuked, and against which St. Paul contended. But we
still see something of the same spirit in the attempt to maintain a
verbal and even literal inspiration of the whole Bible, filling it not
with the breath of a Divine Spirit, but with minute details of doctrine
and precept often questionable, and, whenever separated from the
principles of the eternal law, valueless or even mischievous. God's
Word, instead of leading us to Him, is made to stand between and hide
His face.
But, secondly, there is a serious risk that if the mind be fastened on
things external in some way connected with, but yet distinct from the
substance of Revelation, it may turn out that these external things
cannot hold the ground on which they have been placed. They have to be
given up by force at last, when they ought to have been given up long
before. And when given up they too often tear away with them part of the
strength of that faith of which they had previously been not only the
buttress outside but a part of the living framework. It is distinctly
the fault of religious, not of scientific men, that there was once a
great contest between the Bible and Astronomy, that there has since been
a great contest between the Bible and Geology, that there is still a
great contest between the Bible and Evolution. In no one of these cases
was the Revelation contained in the Bible in danger, but only the
interpretation commonly put on the Bible. It is easy long afterwards to
condemn the opponents of Galileo and speak of their treatment of him
and his teaching as fanaticism and bigotry; and such condemnation has
not unfrequently been heard from the very lips that nevertheless
denounced the teaching of the geologists. But in all these cases the
principle has been the same, and believers have insisted that the Bible
itself was gone unless their interpretation of it was upheld. And the
mischief is double. For many believers, and more especially unlearned
believers, instead of gently helping one another to form the necessary
modification of their view of the Bible teaching, instead of
endeavouring to find the way out of the perplexity and to disentangle
the true spiritual lesson from the accessories which are no part of
itself, insisted that it must be all or nothing, and prepared for
themselves a very severe trial. There was no doctrine involved whatever;
there was nothing at stake on which the spiritual life depended. The
duty to be patient, to enquire carefully, to study the other side, to
wait for light, was as plain as any duty could be. But all this was
forgotten in a somewhat unreasoning impulse to resist an assault on the
faith. And there cannot be a doubt that on all these occasions many
believers have been seriously shaken by slowly finding out that the
position they have taken is untenable. When men have to give up in such
circumstances they generally give up far more than they need, and in
some cases an unreasonable resistance has been followed by an equally
unreasonable surrender. And while believers have thus prepared a
stumblingblock for themselves they have put quite as great a
stumblingblock before others. For students of Science, informed by
instant voices all around that they must choose between their Science
and the Bible, knowing as they did that their Science was true, and
supposing that the lovers and defenders of the Bible best knew what its
teaching was, had no choice as honest men but to hold the truth as far
as they possessed it and to give up the Bible in order to maintain their
Science. It was a grievous injury inflicted on them; and though some
among them might deserve no sympathy, there were some whom it was a
great loss to lose.
But in the third place, the result of this clinging to externals is to
shut out Science and all its correlative branches of knowledge from
their proper office of making perpetually clearer the true and full
meaning of the Revelation itself. It is intended that Religion should
use the aid of Science in clearing her own conceptions. It is intended
that as men advance in knowledge of God's works and in power of handling
that knowledge, they should find themselves better able to interpret the
message which they have received from their Father in Heaven. Our
knowledge of the true meaning of the Bible has gained, and it was
intended that it should gain, by the increase of other knowledge.
Science makes clearer than anything else could have made it the higher
level on which the Bible puts what is spiritual over what is material. I
do not hesitate to ascribe to Science a clearer knowledge of the true
interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, and to scientific
history a truer knowledge of the great historical prophets. The advance
of secular studies, as they are called, clears up much in the Psalms,
and much in the other poetical Books of Scripture. I cannot doubt that
this was intended from the beginning, and that as Science has already
done genuine service to Religion in this way, so will it do still better
service with process of time.
On this side also, as on the scientific side, the teaching of the
spiritual faculty and the teaching of Revelation indicate that the
physical and the spiritual worlds are one whole, and that neither is
complete without the other. Science enters into Religion, and is its
counterpart, and has its share to take in the conduct of life and in the
formation of opinion. And the believer is bound to recognise its value
and make use of its services.
In conclusion, it is plain that the antagonism between Science and
Religion arises much more from a difference of spirit and temper in the
students of each than from any inherent opposition between the two. The
man of Science is inclined to shut out from consideration a whole body
of evidence, the moral and spiritual; the believer is inclined to shut
out the physical. And each, from long looking at that evidence alone
which properly belongs to his own subject, is inclined to hold the other
cheap, and to charge on those who adduce it either blindness of
understanding or wilful refusal to accept the truth. And when such a
conflict arises it is the higher and not the lower, it is Faith and not
Science that is likely to suffer. For the physical evidence is tangible,
and the perception of it not much affected by the character of the man
who studies it; the spiritual evidence stands unshaken in itself, but it
is hid from eyes that have no spiritual perception, and that perception
necessarily varies with the man.
By what means then can a man keep his spiritual perception in full
activity? And is there any test by which a man may know whether his
spiritual faculty is in contact with the source of all spiritual life
and is deriving from that source the full flow of spiritual power?
Revelation, if it tells us anything, ought to tell us this. And the
answer which Revelation makes is expressed in the words of St. Paul, 'No
man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.' This
doctrine runs through the New Testament, and it implies that one main
purpose of our Lord's appearance among men was to give them in His
life, His character, His example, His teaching, at once a touchstone by
which they could always try their own spirits, and judge of the real
condition of their own spiritual faculty, and also a vivid presentation
of the supreme spiritual law by which they could for ever more and more
elevate and purify and strengthen their own spiritual power and
knowledge.
Let a man study the Jesus of the Gospels. Let him put before his
_conscience_ the teaching that Jesus gives; the picture drawn of our
Father in Heaven whose holiness cannot allow a stain upon a single soul,
and whose tenderness cannot endure that a single soul should perish; Who
ruleth all the universe, and yet without whom not a sparrow falleth to
the ground; the picture drawn of the ideal human life, the humility, the
hunger and thirst after righteousness, the utter self-sacrifice, the
purity; the picture drawn of human need, the helplessness, the
hopelessness of man without God. Let him ponder on all this and on the
many touching expressions, the truth, the depth, the force, the
superhuman sweetness and gentleness with which all is presented. And if
his conscience bows before it, and can say without reserve and in
unalloyed sincerity, 'This is my Lord; He shall be my teacher; here I
recognise the fulness of the eternal law; at His feet will I henceforth
sit and learn; through Him will I drink of the well-springs of eternal
truth; His voice will I trust to the very utmost;' then may that man be
sure that his conscience is in contact with the Father of spirits, and
that his study will guide him into fuller and clearer knowledge, and
more certain conviction that he is grasping the truth of God.
Let a man put before his _heart_ our Lord's own character. Let him think
of the life of privation without complaint, of service to His kind
without a thought of self; of His unfailing sympathy with the unhappy,
of His tenderness to the penitent; of His royal simplicity and humility;
of His unwearied perseverance in the face of angry opposition; of His
deep affection for the friends of His choice even when they deserted Him
in His hour of darkness; of His death on the Cross and the unearthly
love that breathed in every word He uttered and everything He did. Let
him read all this many times; and if his heart goes out to the Man whom
he is thus beholding, if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord;
here is the supreme object of my affection; Him will I love with all my
strength; from Him I will never, if I can help it, let my heart swerve;
no other do I know more worthy to be loved; no other will I keep more
steadily before my eyes; no other will I more earnestly desire to
imitate; no other shall be my example, my trust, my strength, my
Saviour; if a man can say this, it is certain that his heart is touched
by God, and the heavenly fire is kindled in his soul.
Let a man put before his _will_ the Lord's commands; the aims, the
self-restraints, the aspirations that the Lord required in His
disciples. Let him ponder on the call to heavenly courage in spite of
all that earth can inflict or can take away; the call to take up the
Cross and follow Him that was crucified; the warnings and the promises,
the precepts and the prohibitions; let him think of the Leader who never
flinched, of the Lawgiver who outdid His own law; let him think on the
nobleness of the aims to which He pointed; of the promise of inward
peace made to those who sacrificed themselves, made by our Lord and
re-echoed from the very depths of our spiritual being; let him think of
the sure help promised in return for absolute trust, tried by millions
of saints and never yet known to fail. Let a man put this before his
will, and if he can say with all his soul, This is my Lord; here I
recognise Him who has a right to my absolute obedience; here is the
Master that I mean to serve and follow; and in spite of my own weakness
and blindness, in spite of my sins, in spite of stumbling and weariness
of resolution, in spite of temptations and in spite of falls, I will not
let my eyes swerve, nor my purpose quit my will; through death itself I
will obey my Lord and trust to Him to carry me through whatever comes;
that man most certainly is moving in the strength of God, and the power
of the Eternal Spirit lives within him.
Our Lord is the crown, nay, the very substance of all Revelation. If He
cannot convince the soul, no other can. The believer stakes all faith on
His truth; all hope on His _power_. If the man of Science would learn
what it is that makes believers so sure of what they hold, he must study
with an open heart the Jesus of the Gospels; if the believer seeks to
keep his faith steady in the presence of so many and sometimes so
violent storms of disputation, he will read of, ponder on, pray to, the
Lord Jesus Christ.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: The Data of Philosophy.]
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