Transcribed from the 1881 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price,
ccx074@pglaf.org
WESTMINSTER SERMONS.
WITH A PREFACE.
BY
CHARLES KINGSLEY.
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1881.
_The Right of Translation is Reserved_.
PREFACE.
I venture to preface these Sermons--which were preached either at
Westminster Abbey, or at one of the Chapels Royal--by a Paper read at
Sion College, in 1871; and for this reason. Even when they deal with
what is usually, and rightly, called "vital" and "experimental" religion,
they are comments on, and developments of, the idea which pervades that
paper; namely--That facts, whether of physical nature, or of the human
heart and reason, do not contradict, but coincide with, the doctrines and
formulas of the Church of England, as by law established.
* * * * *
Natural Theology, I said, is a subject which seems to me more and more
important; and one which is just now somewhat forgotten. I therefore
desire to say a few words on it. I do not pretend to teach: but only to
suggest; to point out certain problems of natural Theology, the further
solution of which ought, I think, to be soon attempted.
I wish to speak, be it remembered, not on natural religion, but on
natural Theology. By the first, I understand what can be learned from
the physical universe of man's duty to God and to his neighbour; by the
latter, I understand what can be learned concerning God Himself. Of
natural religion I shall say nothing. I do not even affirm that a
natural religion is possible: but I do very earnestly believe that a
natural Theology is possible; and I earnestly believe also that it is
most important that natural Theology should, in every age, keep pace with
doctrinal or ecclesiastical Theology.
Bishop Butler certainly held this belief. His _Analogy of Religion_,
_Natural and Revealed_, _to the Constitution and Course of Nature_--a
book for which I entertain the most profound respect--is based on a
belief that the God of nature and the God of grace are one; and that
therefore, the God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to
satisfy our reason also. To teach that was Butler's mission; and he
fulfilled it well. But it is a mission which has to be re-fulfilled
again and again, as human thought changes, and human science develops;
for if, in any age or country, the God who seems to be revealed by nature
seems also different from the God who is revealed by the then popular
religion: then that God, and the religion which tells of that God, will
gradually cease to be believed in.
For the demands of Reason--as none knew better than good Bishop
Butler--must be and ought to be satisfied. And therefore; when a popular
war arises between the reason of any generation and its Theology: then it
behoves the ministers of religion to inquire, with all humility and godly
fear, on which side lies the fault; whether the Theology which they
expound is all that it should be, or whether the reason of those who
impugn it is all that it should be.
For me, as--I trust--an orthodox priest of the Church of England, I
believe the Theology of the National Church of England, as by law
established, to be eminently rational as well as scriptural. It is not,
therefore, surprising to me that the clergy of the Church of England,
since the foundation of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century,
have done more for sound physical science than the clergy of any other
denomination; or that the three greatest natural theologians with which
I, at least, am acquainted--Berkeley, Butler, and Paley--should have
belonged to our Church. I am not unaware of what the Germans of the
eighteenth century have done. I consider Goethe's claims to have
advanced natural Theology very much over-rated: but I do recommend to
young clergymen Herder's _Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of
Man_ as a book--in spite of certain defects--full of sound and precious
wisdom. Meanwhile it seems to me that English natural Theology in the
eighteenth century stood more secure than that of any other nation, on
the foundation which Berkeley, Butler, and Paley had laid; and that if
our orthodox thinkers for the last hundred years had followed steadily in
their steps, we should not be deploring now a wide, and as some think
increasing, divorce between Science and Christianity.
But it was not so to be. The impulse given by Wesley and Whitfield
turned--and not before it was needed--the earnest minds of England almost
exclusively to questions of personal religion; and that impulse, under
many unexpected forms, has continued ever since. I only state the fact:
I do not deplore it; God forbid. Wisdom is justified of all her
children; and as, according to the wise American, "it takes all sorts to
make a world," so it takes all sorts to make a living Church. But that
the religious temper of England for the last two or three generations has
been unfavourable to a sound and scientific development of natural
Theology, there can be no doubt.
We have only, if we need proof, to look at the hymns--many of them very
pure, pious, and beautiful--which are used at this day in churches and
chapels by persons of every shade of opinion. How often is the tone in
which they speak of the natural world one of dissatisfaction, distrust,
almost contempt. "Change and decay in all around I see," is their key-
note, rather than "O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and
magnify Him for ever." There lingers about them a savour of the old
monastic theory, that this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, accursed,
goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful
or even safe for man. An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn
a paraphrase of the mediaeval monk's "Hic breve vivitur," and in which
stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their chapel-worship to tell
the Almighty God of Truth that they lie awake weeping at night for joy at
the thought that they will die and see "Jerusalem the Golden," is
doubtless a pious and devout age: but not--at least as yet--an age in
which natural Theology is likely to attain a high, a healthy, or a
scriptural development.
Not a scriptural development. Let me press on you, my clerical brethren,
most earnestly this one point. It is time that we should make up our
minds what tone Scripture does take toward nature, natural science,
natural Theology. Most of you, I doubt not, have made up your minds
already; and in consequence have no fear of natural science, no fear for
natural Theology. But I cannot deny that I find still lingering here and
there certain of the old views of nature of which I used to hear but too
much some five-and-thirty years ago--and that from better men than I
shall ever hope to be--who used to consider natural Theology as useless,
fallacious, impossible; on the ground that this Earth did not reveal the
will and character of God, because it was cursed and fallen; and that its
facts, in consequence, were not to be respected or relied on. This, I
was told, was the doctrine of Scripture, and was therefore true. But
when, longing to reconcile my conscience and my reason on a question so
awful to a young student of natural science, I went to my Bible, what did
I find? No word of all this. Much--thank God, I may say one continuous
undercurrent--of the very opposite of all this. I pray you bear with me,
even though I may seem impertinent. But what do we find in the Bible,
with the exception of that first curse? That, remember, cannot mean any
alteration in the laws of nature by which man's labour should only
produce for him henceforth thorns and thistles. For, in the first place,
any such curse is formally abrogated in the eighth chapter and 21st verse
of the very same document--"I will not again curse the earth any more for
man's sake. While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, cold and
heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." And next: the
fact is not so; for if you root up the thorns and thistles, and keep your
land clean, then assuredly you will grow fruit-trees and not thorns,
wheat and not thistles, according to those laws of nature which are the
voice of God expressed in facts.
And yet the words are true. There is a curse upon the earth: though not
one which, by altering the laws of nature, has made natural facts
untrustworthy. There is a curse on the earth; such a curse as is
expressed, I believe, in the old Hebrew text, where the word
"_admah_"--correctly translated in our version "the ground"--signifies,
as I am told, not this planet, but simply the soil from whence we get our
food; such a curse as certainly is expressed by the Septuagint and the
Vulgate versions: "Cursed is the earth"--[Greek text]; "in opere tuo,"
"in thy works." Man's work is too often the curse of the very planet
which he misuses. None should know that better than the botanist, who
sees whole regions desolate, and given up to sterility and literal thorns
and thistles, on account of man's sin and folly, ignorance and greedy
waste. Well said that veteran botanist, the venerable Elias Fries, of
Lund:--
"A broad band of waste land follows gradually in the steps of
cultivation. If it expands, its centre and its cradle dies, and on the
outer borders only do we find green shoots. But it is not impossible,
only difficult, for man, without renouncing the advantage of culture
itself, one day to make reparation for the injury which he has inflicted:
he is appointed lord of creation. True it is that thorns and thistles,
ill-favoured and poisonous plants, well named by botanists rubbish
plants, mark the track which man has proudly traversed through the earth.
Before him lay original nature in her wild but sublime beauty. Behind
him he leaves a desert, a deformed and ruined land; for childish desire
of destruction, or thoughtless squandering of vegetable treasures, has
destroyed the character of nature; and, terrified, man himself flies from
the arena of his actions, leaving the impoverished earth to barbarous
races or to animals, so long as yet another spot in virgin beauty smiles
before him. Here again, in selfish pursuit of profit, and consciously or
unconsciously following the abominable principle of the great moral
vileness which one man has expressed--'Apres nous le Deluge,'--he begins
anew the work of destruction. Thus did cultivation, driven out, leave
the East, and perhaps the deserts long ago robbed of their coverings;
like the wild hordes of old over beautiful Greece, thus rolls this
conquest with fearful rapidity from East to West through America; and the
planter now often leaves the already exhausted land, and the eastern
climate, become infertile through the demolition of the forests, to
introduce a similar revolution into the Far West."
As we proceed, we find nothing in the general tone of Scripture which can
hinder our natural Theology being at once scriptural and scientific.
If it is to be scientific, it must begin by approaching Nature at once
with a cheerful and reverent spirit, as a noble, healthy, and trustworthy
thing; and what is that, save the spirit of those who wrote the 104th,
147th, and 148th Psalms; the spirit, too, of him who wrote that Song of
the Three Children, which is, as it were, the flower and crown of the Old
Testament, the summing up of all that is most true and eternal in the old
Jewish faith; and which, as long as it is sung in our churches, is the
charter and title-deed of all Christian students of those works of the
Lord, which it calls on to bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for
ever?
What next will be demanded of us by physical science? Belief, certainly,
just now, in the permanence of natural laws. That is taken for granted,
I hold, throughout the Bible. I cannot see how our Lord's parables,
drawn from the birds and the flowers, the seasons and the weather, have
any logical weight, or can be considered as aught but capricious and
fanciful "illustrations"--which God forbid--unless we look at them as
instances of laws of the natural world, which find their analogues in the
laws of the spiritual world, the kingdom of God. I cannot conceive a
man's writing that 104th Psalm who had not the most deep, the most
earnest sense of the permanence of natural law. But more: the fact is
expressly asserted again and again. "They continue this day according to
Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee." "Thou hast made them fast
for ever and ever. Thou hast given them a law which shall not be
broken--"
Let us pass on. There is no more to be said about this matter.
But next: it will be demanded of us that natural Theology shall set forth
a God whose character is consistent with all the facts of nature, and not
only with those which are pleasant and beautiful. That challenge was
accepted, and I think victoriously, by Bishop Butler, as far as the
Christian religion is concerned. As far as the Scripture is concerned,
we may answer thus--
It is said to us--I know that it is said--You tell us of a God of love, a
God of flowers and sunshine, of singing birds and little children. But
there are more facts in nature than these. There is premature death,
pestilence, famine. And if you answer--Man has control over these; they
are caused by man's ignorance and sin, and by his breaking of natural
laws:--What will you make of those destructive powers over which he has
no control; of the hurricane and the earthquake; of poisons, vegetable
and mineral; of those parasitic Entozoa whose awful abundance, and awful
destructiveness, in man and beast, science is just revealing--a new page
of danger and loathsomeness? How does that suit your conception of a God
of love?
We can answer--Whether or not it suits our conception of a God of love,
it suits Scripture's conception of Him. For nothing is more clear--nay,
is it not urged again and again, as a blot on Scripture?--that it reveals
a God not merely of love, but of sternness; a God in whose eyes physical
pain is not the worst of evils, nor animal life--too often miscalled
human life--the most precious of objects; a God who destroys, when it
seems fit to Him, and that wholesale, and seemingly without either pity
or discrimination, man, woman, and child, visiting the sins of the
fathers on the children, making the land empty and bare, and destroying
from off it man and beast? This is the God of the Old Testament. And if
any say--as is too often rashly said--This is not the God of the New: I
answer, But have you read your New Testament? Have you read the latter
chapters of St Matthew? Have you read the opening of the Epistle to the
Romans? Have you read the Book of Revelation? If so, will you say that
the God of the New Testament is, compared with the God of the Old, less
awful, less destructive, and therefore less like the Being--granting
always that there is such a Being--who presides over nature and her
destructive powers? It is an awful problem. But the writers of the
Bible have faced it valiantly. Physical science is facing it valiantly
now. Therefore natural Theology may face it likewise. Remember
Carlyle's great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: "Infinite
pity: yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is
so Dante discerned that she was made."
There are two other points on which I must beg leave to say a few words.
Physical science will demand of our natural theologians that they should
be aware of their importance, and let--as Mr Matthew Arnold would
say--their thoughts play freely round them. I mean questions of
Embryology, and questions of Race.
On the first there may be much to be said, which is, for the present,
best left unsaid, even here. I only ask you to recollect how often in
Scripture those two plain old words--beget and bring forth--occur; and in
what important passages. And I ask you to remember that marvellous essay
on Natural Theology--if I may so call it in all reverence--namely, the
119th Psalm; and judge for yourself whether he who wrote that did not
consider the study of Embryology as important, as significant, as worthy
of his deepest attention, as an Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I will
go further still, and say, that in those great words--"Thine eyes did see
my substance, yet being imperfect; and in Thy book all my members were
written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none
of them,"--in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated that
realistic view of embryological questions to which our most modern
philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, half unconsciously, but still
inevitably, returning.
Next, as to Race. Some persons now have a nervous fear of that word, and
of allowing any importance to difference of races. Some dislike it,
because they think that it endangers the modern notions of democratic
equality. Others because they fear that it may be proved that the Negro
is not a man and a brother. I think the fears of both parties
groundless.
As for the Negro, I not only believe him to be of the same race as
myself, but that--if Mr Darwin's theories are true--science has proved
that he must be such. I should have thought, as a humble student of such
questions, that the one fact of the unique distribution of the hair in
all races of human beings, was full moral proof that they had all had one
common ancestor. But this is not matter of natural Theology. What is
matter thereof, is this.
Physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race;
the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary
habits, in all organized beings, from the lowest plant to the highest
animal. She is proving more and more the omnipresent action of the
differences between races: how the more "favoured" race--she cannot avoid
using the epithet--exterminates the less favoured; or at least expels it,
and forces it, under penalty of death, to adapt itself to new
circumstances; and, in a word, that competition between every race and
every individual of that race, and reward according to deserts, is, as
far as we can see, an universal law of living things. And she says--for
the facts of History prove it--that as it is among the races of plants
and animals, so it has been unto this day among the races of men.
The natural Theology of the future must take count of these tremendous
and even painful facts. She may take count of them. For Scripture has
taken count of them already. It talks continually--it has been blamed
for talking so much--of races; of families; of their wars, their
struggles, their exterminations; of races favoured, of races rejected; of
remnants being saved, to continue the race; of hereditary tendencies,
hereditary excellencies, hereditary guilt. Its sense of the reality and
importance of descent is so intense, that it speaks of a whole tribe or a
whole family by the name of its common ancestor; and the whole nation of
the Jews is Israel, to the end. And if I be told this is true of the Old
Testament, but not of the New: I must answer,--What? Does not St Paul
hold the identity of the whole Jewish race with Israel their forefather,
as strongly as any prophet of the Old Testament? And what is the central
historic fact, save One, of the New Testament, but the conquest of
Jerusalem; the dispersion, all but destruction of a race, not by miracle,
but by invasion, because found wanting when weighed in the stern balances
of natural and social law?
Think over this. I only suggest the thought: but I do not suggest it in
haste. Think over it, by the light which our Lord's parables, His
analogies between the physical and social constitution of the world,
afford; and consider whether those awful words--fulfilled then, and
fulfilled so often since--"The kingdom of God shall be taken from you,
and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof," may not be the
supreme instance, the most complex development, of a law which runs
through all created things, down to the moss which struggles for
existence on the rock.
Do I say that this is all? That man is merely a part of nature, the
puppet of circumstances and hereditary tendencies? That brute
competition is the one law of his life? That he is doomed for ever to be
the slave of his own needs, enforced by an internecine struggle for
existence? God forbid. I believe not only in nature, but in Grace. I
believe that this is man's fate only as long as he sows to the flesh, and
of the flesh reaps corruption. I believe that if he will
Strive upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die;
if he will be even as wise as the social animals; as the ant and the bee,
who have risen, if not to the virtue of all-embracing charity, at least
to the virtues of self-sacrifice and patriotism: then he will rise
towards a higher sphere; towards that kingdom of God of which it is
written--"He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him."
Whether that be matter of natural Theology, I cannot tell as yet. But as
for all the former questions; and all that St Paul means when he talks of
the law, and how the works of the flesh bring men under the law, stern
and terrible and destructive, though holy and just and good,--they are
matter of natural Theology; and I believe that here, as elsewhere,
Scripture and Science will be ultimately found to coincide.
But here we have to face an objection which you will often hear now from
scientific men, and still oftener from non-scientific men; who will
say--It matters not to us whether Scripture contradicts or does not
contradict a scientific natural Theology; for we hold such a science to
be impossible and naught. The old Jews put a God into nature; and
therefore of course they could see, as you see, what they had already put
there. But we see no God in nature. We do not deny the existence of a
God. We merely say that scientific research does not reveal Him to us.
We see no marks of design in physical phenomena. What used to be
considered as marks of design can be better explained by considering them
as the results of evolution according to necessary laws; and you and
Scripture make a mere assumption when you ascribe them to the operation
of a mind like the human mind.
Now on this point I believe we may answer fearlessly--If you cannot see
it, we cannot help you. If the heavens do not declare to you the glory
of God, nor the firmament show you His handy-work, then our poor
arguments will not show them. "The eye can only see that which it brings
with it the power of seeing." We can only reassert that we see design
everywhere; and that the vast majority of the human race in every age and
clime has seen it. Analogy from experience, sound induction--as we
hold--from the works not only of men but of animals, has made it an all
but self-evident truth to us, that wherever there is arrangement, there
must be an arranger; wherever there is adaptation of means to an end,
there must be an adapter; wherever an organization, there must be an
organizer. The existence of a designing God is no more demonstrable from
nature than the existence of other human beings independent of ourselves;
or, indeed, than the existence of our own bodies. But, like the belief
in them, the belief in Him has become an article of our common sense. And
that this designing mind is, in some respects, similar to the human mind,
is proved to us--as Sir John Herschel well puts it--by the mere fact that
we can discover and comprehend the processes of nature.
But here again, if we be contradicted, we can only reassert. If the old
words, "He that made the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear,
shall he not hear?" do not at once commend themselves to the intellect of
any person, we shall never convince that person by any arguments drawn
from the absurdity of conceiving the invention of optics by a blind man,
or of music by a deaf one.
So we will assert our own old-fashioned notion boldly: and more; we will
say, in spite of ridicule--That if such a God exists, final causes must
exist also. That the whole universe must be one chain of final causes.
That if there be a Supreme Reason, he must have reason, and that a good
reason, for every physical phenomenon.
We will tell the modern scientific man--You are nervously afraid of the
mention of final causes. You quote against them Bacon's saying, that
they are barren virgins; that no physical fact was ever discovered or
explained by them. You are right: as far as regards yourselves. You
have no business with final causes; because final causes are moral
causes: and you are physical students only. We, the natural Theologians,
have business with them. Your duty is to find out the How of things:
ours, to find out the Why. If you rejoin that we shall never find out
the Why, unless we first learn something of the How, we shall not deny
that. It may be most useful, I had almost said necessary, that the
clergy should have some scientific training. It may be most useful--I
sometimes dream of a day when it will be considered necessary--that every
candidate for Ordination should be required to have passed creditably in
at least one branch of physical science, if it be only to teach him the
method of sound scientific thought. But our having learnt the How, will
not make it needless, much less impossible, for us to study the Why. It
will merely make more clear to us the things of which we have to study
the Why; and enable us to keep the How and the Why more religiously apart
from each other.
But if it be said--After all, there is no Why. The doctrine of
evolution, by doing away with the theory of creation, does away with that
of final causes,--Let us answer boldly,--Not in the least. We might
accept all that Mr Darwin, all that Professor Huxley, all that other most
able men, have so learnedly and so acutely written on physical science,
and yet preserve our natural Theology on exactly the same basis as that
on which Butler and Paley left it. That we should have to develop it, I
do not deny. That we should have to relinquish it, I do.
Let me press this thought earnestly on you. I know that many wiser and
better men than I have fears on this point. I cannot share in them.
All, it seems to me, that the new doctrines of evolution demand is
this:--We all agree--for the fact is patent--that our own bodies, and
indeed the body of every living creature, are evolved from a seemingly
simple germ by natural laws, without visible action of any designing will
or mind, into the full organization of a human or other creature. Yet we
do not say on that account--God did not create me: I only grew. We hold
in this case to our old idea, and say--If there be evolution, there must
be an evolver. Now the new physical theories only ask us, it seems to
me, to extend this conception to the whole universe; to believe that not
individuals merely, but whole varieties and races; the total organized
life on this planet; and, it may be, the total organization of the
universe, have been evolved just as our bodies are, by natural laws
acting through circumstance. This may be true, or may be false. But all
its truth can do to the natural Theologian will be to make him believe
that the Creator bears the same relation to the whole universe, as that
Creator undeniably bears to every individual human body.
I entreat you to weigh these words, which have not been written in haste;
and I entreat you also, if you wish to see how little the new theory,
that species may have been gradually created by variation, natural
selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory of design,
contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the fullest admission of
benevolent final causes--I entreat you, I say, to study Darwin's
"Fertilization of Orchids"--a book which, whether his main theory be true
or not, will still remain a most valuable addition to natural Theology.
For suppose that all the species of Orchids, and not only they, but their
congeners--the Gingers, the Arrowroots, the Bananas--are all the
descendants of one original form, which was most probably nearly allied
to the Snowdrop and the Iris. What then? Would that be one whit more
wonderful, more unworthy of the wisdom and power of God, than if they
were, as most believe, created each and all at once, with their minute
and often imaginary shades of difference? What would the natural
Theologian have to say, were the first theory true, save that God's works
are even more wonderful that he always believed them to be? As for the
theory being impossible: we must leave the discussion of that to physical
students. It is not for us clergymen to limit the power of God. "Is
anything too hard for the Lord?" asked the prophet of old; and we have a
right to ask it as long as time shall last. If it be said that natural
selection is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety: that,
again, is a question to be settled exclusively by physical students. All
we have to say on the matter is--That we always knew that God works by
very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that the whole universe, as far
as we could discern it, was one concatenation of the most simple means;
that it was wonderful, yea, miraculous, in our eyes, that a child should
resemble its parents, that the raindrops should make the grass grow, that
the grass should become flesh, and the flesh sustenance for the thinking
brain of man. Ought God to seem less or more august in our eyes, when we
are told that His means are even more simple than we supposed? We held
him to be Almighty and All-wise. Are we to reverence Him less or more,
if we hear that His might is greater, His wisdom deeper, than we ever
dreamed? We believed that His care was over all His works; that His
Providence watched perpetually over the whole universe. We were
taught--some of us at least--by Holy Scripture, to believe that the whole
history of the universe was made up of special Providences. If, then,
that should be true which Mr Darwin eloquently writes--"It may be
metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and hourly
scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up that which is good,
silently and incessantly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers
at the improvement of every organic being,"--if that, I say, were proven
to be true: ought God's care and God's providence to seem less or more
magnificent in our eyes? Of old it was said by Him without whom nothing
is made, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." Shall we quarrel with
Science, if she should show how those words are true? What, in one word,
should we have to say but this?--We knew of old that God was so wise that
He could make all things: but, behold, He is so much wiser than even
that, that He can make all things make themselves.
But it may be said--These notions are contrary to Scripture. I must beg
very humbly, but very firmly, to demur to that opinion. Scripture says
that God created. But it nowhere defines that term. The means, the How,
of Creation is nowhere specified. Scripture, again, says that organized
beings were produced, each according to their kind. But it nowhere
defines that term. What a kind includes; whether it includes or not the
capacity of varying--which is just the question in point--is nowhere
specified. And I think it a most important rule in Scriptural exegesis,
to be most cautious as to limiting the meaning of any term which
Scripture itself has not limited, lest we find ourselves putting into the
teaching of Scripture our own human theories or prejudices. And
consider--Is not man a kind? And has not mankind varied, physically,
intellectually, spiritually? Is not the Bible, from beginning to end, a
history of the variations of mankind, for worse or for better, from their
original type? Let us rather look with calmness, and even with hope and
goodwill, on these new theories; for, correct or incorrect, they surely
mark a tendency towards a more, not a less, Scriptural view of Nature.
Are they not attempts, whether successful or unsuccessful, to escape from
that shallow mechanical notion of the universe and its Creator which was
too much in vogue in the eighteenth century among divines as well as
philosophers; the theory which Goethe, to do him justice--and after him
Mr Thomas Carlyle--have treated with such noble scorn; the theory, I
mean, that God has wound up the universe like a clock, and left it to
tick by itself till it runs down, never troubling Himself with it; save
possibly--for even that was only half believed--by rare miraculous
interferences with the laws which He Himself had made? Out of that
chilling dream of a dead universe ungoverned by an absent God, the human
mind, in Germany especially, tried during the early part of this century
to escape by strange roads; roads by which there was no escape, because
they were not laid down on the firm ground of scientific facts. Then, in
despair, men turned to the facts which they had neglected; and said--We
are weary of philosophy: we will study you, and you alone. As for God,
who can find Him? And they have worked at the facts like gallant and
honest men; and their work, like all good work, has produced, in the last
fifty years, results more enormous than they even dreamed. But what are
they finding, more and more, below their facts, below all phenomena which
the scalpel and the microscope can show? A something nameless,
invisible, imponderable, yet seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent,
retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve: namely,
the life which shapes and makes; that which the old schoolmen called
"forma formativa," which they call vital force and what not--metaphors
all, or rather counters to mark an unknown quantity, as if they should
call it _x_ or _y_. One says--It is all vibrations: but his reason,
unsatisfied, asks--And what makes the vibrations vibrate? Another--It is
all physiological units: but his reason asks--What is the "physis," the
nature and innate tendency of the units? A third--It may be all caused
by infinitely numerous "gemmules:" but his reason asks him--What puts
infinite order into these gemmules, instead of infinite anarchy? I
mention these theories not to laugh at them. I have all due respect for
those who have put them forth. Nor would it interfere with my
theological creed, if any or all of them were proven to be true
to-morrow. I mention them only to show that beneath all these theories,
true or false, still lies that unknown _x_. Scientific men are becoming
more and more aware of it; I had almost said, ready to worship it. More
and more the noblest-minded of them are engrossed by the mystery of that
unknown and truly miraculous element in Nature, which is always escaping
them, though they cannot escape it. How should they escape it? Was it
not written of old--"Whither shall I go from Thy presence, or whither
shall I flee from Thy Spirit?"
Ah that we clergymen would summon up courage to tell them that! Courage
to tell them, what need not hamper for a moment the freedom of their
investigations, what will add to them a sanction--I may say a
sanctity--that the unknown _x_ which lies below all phenomena, which is
for ever at work on all phenomena, on the whole and on every part of the
whole, down to the colouring of every leaf and the curdling of every cell
of protoplasm, is none other than that which the old Hebrews called--by a
metaphor, no doubt: for how can man speak of the unseen, save in
metaphors drawn from the seen?--but by the only metaphor adequate to
express the perpetual and omnipresent miracle; The Breath of God; The
Spirit who is The Lord, and The Giver of Life.
In the rest, let us too think, and let us too observe. For if we are
ignorant, not merely of the results of experimental science, but of the
methods thereof: then we and the men of science shall have no common
ground whereon to stretch out kindly hands to each other.
But let us have patience and faith; and not suppose in haste, that when
those hands are stretched out it will be needful for us to leave our
standing-ground, or to cast ourselves down from the pinnacle of the
temple to earn popularity; above all, from earnest students who are too
high-minded to care for popularity themselves.
True, if we have an intelligent belief in those Creeds and those
Scriptures which are committed to our keeping, then our philosophy cannot
be that which is just now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is
to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from
Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme
effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges:
and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only
wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a
mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a
really eloquent passage of his book on the _Emotions and the Will_, {0a}
then the end of that philosophy is very near; and an older, simpler, more
human, and, as I hold, more philosophic explanation of that natural
phenomenon, and of all others, may get a hearing.
Only wait: and fret not yourselves; else shall you be moved to do evil.
Remember the saying of the wise man--"Go not after the world. She turns
on her axis; and if thou stand still long enough, she will turn round to
thee."
SERMON I. THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS. A GOOD FRIDAY SERMON.
PHILIPPIANS II. 5-8.
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in
the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made
Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a slave, and
was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man,
He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of
the Cross.
The second Lesson for this morning's service, and the chapter which
follows it, describe the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, both God and
Man. They give us the facts, in language most awful from its perfect
calmness, most pathetic from its perfect simplicity. But the passage of
St Paul which I have chosen for my text gives us an explanation of those
facts which is utterly amazing. That He who stooped to die upon the
Cross is Very God of Very God, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe,
is a thought so overwhelming, whenever we try to comprehend even a part
of it in our small imaginations, that it is no wonder if, in all ages,
many a pious soul, as it contemplated the Cross of Christ, has been rapt
itself into a passion of gratitude, an ecstasy of wonder and of love,
which is beautiful, honourable, just, and in the deepest sense most
rational, whenever it is spontaneous and natural.
But there have been thousands, as there may be many here to-day, of
colder temperament; who would distrust in themselves, even while they
respected in others, any violence of religious emotion: yet they too have
found, and you too may find, in contemplating the Passion of Christ, a
satisfaction deeper than that of any emotion; a satisfaction not to the
heart, still less to the brain, but to that far deeper and diviner
faculty within us all--our moral sense; that God-given instinct which
makes us discern and sympathise with all that is beautiful and true and
good.
And so it has befallen, for eighteen hundred years, that thousands who
have thought earnestly and carefully on God and on the character of God,
on man and on the universe, and on their relation to Him who made them
both, have found in the Incarnation and the Passion of the Son of God the
perfect satisfaction of their moral wants; the surest key to the facts of
the spiritual world; the complete assurance that, in spite of all seeming
difficulties and contradictions, the Maker of the world was a Righteous
Being, who had founded the world in righteousness; that the Father of
Spirits was a perfect Father, who in His only-begotten Son had shewn
forth His perfectness, in such a shape and by such acts that men might
not only adore it, but sympathise with it; not only thank Him for it, but
copy it; and become, though at an infinite distance, perfect as their
Father in heaven is perfect, and full of grace and truth, like that Son
who is the brightness of His Father's glory, and the express image of His
person. Such a satisfaction have they found in looking upon the
triumphal entry into Jerusalem of Him who knew that it would be followed
by the revolt of the fickle mob, and the desertion of His disciples, and
the Cross of Calvary, and all the hideous circumstances of a Roman
malefactor's death.
But there have been those, and there are still, who have found no such
satisfaction in the story which the Gospel tells, and still less in the
explanation which the Epistle gives; who have, as St Paul says, stumbled
at the stumblingblock of the Cross.
It would be easy to ignore such persons, were they scoffers or
profligates: but when they number among their ranks men of virtuous
lives, of earnest and most benevolent purposes, of careful and learned
thought, and of a real reverence for God, or for those theories of the
universe which some of them are inclined to substitute for God, they must
at least be listened to patiently, and answered charitably, as men who,
however faulty their opinions may be, prove, by their virtue and their
desire to do good, that if they have lost sight of Christ, Christ has not
lost sight of them.
To such men the idea of the Incarnation, and still more, that of the
Passion, is derogatory to the very notion of a God. That a God should
suffer, and that a God should die, is shocking--and, to do them justice,
I believe they speak sincerely--to their notions of the absolute majesty,
the undisturbed serenity, of the Author of the universe; of Him in whom
all things live and move and have their being; who dwells in the light to
which none may approach. And therefore they have, in every age, tried
various expedients to escape from a doctrine which seemed repugnant to
that most precious part of them, their moral sense. In the earlier
centuries of the Church they tried to shew that St John and St Paul
spoke, not of one who was Very God of Very God, but of some highest and
most primeval of all creatures, Emanation, AEon, or what not. In these
later times, when the belief in such beings, and even their very names,
have become dim and dead, men have tried to shew that the words of
Scripture apply to a mere man. They have seen in Christ--and they have
reverenced and loved Him for what they have seen in Him--the noblest and
purest, the wisest and the most loving of all human beings; and have
attributed such language as that in the text, which--translate it as you
will--ascribes absolute divinity, and nothing less, to our Lord Jesus
Christ--they have attributed it, I say, to some fondness for Oriental
hyperbole, and mystic Theosophy, in the minds of the Apostles. Others,
again, have gone further, and been, I think, more logically honest. They
have perceived that our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as His words are
reported, attributed divinity to Himself, just as much as did His
Apostles. Such a saying as that one, "Before Abraham was, I am," and
others beside it, could be escaped from only by one of two methods. To
the first of them I shall not allude in this sacred place, popular as a
late work has made it in its native France, and I fear in England
likewise. The other alternative, more reverent indeed, but, as I
believe, just as mistaken, is to suppose that the words were never
uttered at all; that Christ--it is not I who say it--possibly never
existed at all; that His whole story was gradually built up, like certain
fabulous legends of Romish saints, out of the moral consciousness of
various devout persons during the first three centuries; each of whom
added to the portrait, as it grew more and more lovely under the hands of
succeeding generations, some new touch of beauty, some fresh trait, half
invented, half traditional, of purity, love, nobleness, majesty; till men
at last became fascinated with the ideal to which they themselves had
contributed; and fell down and worshipped their own humanity; and
christened that The Son of God.
If I believed that theory, or either of the others, I need not say that I
should not be preaching here. I will go further, and say, that if I
believed either of those theories, or any save that which stands out in
the text, sharp-cut and colossal like some old Egyptian Memnon, and like
that statue, with a smile of sweetness on its lips which tempers the
royal majesty of its looks,--if I did not believe that, I say--I should
be inclined to confess with Homer of old, that man is the most miserable
of all the beasts of the field.
For consider but this one argument. It is no new one; it has lain, I
believe, unspoken and instinctive, yet most potent and inspiring, in many
a mind, in many an age. If there be a God, must He not be the best of
all beings? But if He who suffered on Calvary were not God, but a mere
creature; then--as I hold--there must have been a creature in the
universe better than God Himself. Or if He who suffered on Calvary had
not the character which is attributed to Him,--if Christ's love,
condescension, self-sacrifice, be a mere imagination, built up by the
fancy of man; then has Christendom for 1800 years been fancying for
itself a better God than Him who really exists.
Thousands of the best men and women in the world through all the ages of
Christendom have agreed with this argument, under some shape or other.
Thousands there have been, and I trust there will be thousands hereafter,
who have felt, as they looked upon the Cross of the Son of God, not that
it was derogatory to Christ to believe that He had suffered, but
derogatory to Him to believe that He had not suffered: for only by
suffering, as far as we can conceive, could He perfectly manifest His
glory and His Father's glory; and shew that it was full of grace.
Full of grace. Think, I beg you, over that one word.
We all agree that God is good; all at least do so, who worship Him in
spirit and in truth. We adore His majesty, because it is the moral and
spiritual majesty of perfect goodness. We give thanks to Him for His
great glory, because it is the glory, not merely of perfect power,
wisdom, order, justice; but of perfect love, of perfect magnanimity,
beneficence, activity, condescension, pity--in one word, of perfect
grace.
But how much must that last word comprehend, as long as there is misery
and evil in this world, or in any other corner of the whole universe?
Grace, to be perfect, must shew itself by graciously forgiving penitents.
Pity, to be perfect, must shew itself by helping the miserable.
Beneficence, to be perfect, must shew itself by delivering the oppressed.
The old prophets and psalmists saw as much as this; and preached that
this too was part of the essence and character of God.
They saw that the Lord was gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of
great kindness, and repented Him of the evil. They saw that the Lord
helped them to right who suffered wrong, and fed the hungry; that the
Lord loosed men out of prison, the Lord gave sight to the blind; that the
Lord helped the fallen, and defended the fatherless and widow. They saw
too a further truth, and a more awful one. They saw that the Lord was
actually and practically King of kings and Lord of lords: that as such He
could come, and did come at times, rewarding the loyal, putting down the
rebellious, and holding high assize from place to place, that He might
execute judgment and justice; beholding all the wrong that was done on
earth, and coming, as it were, out of His place, at each historic crisis,
each revolution in the fortunes of mankind, to make inquisition for
blood, to trample His enemies beneath His feet, and to inaugurate some
progress toward that new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth
righteousness, and righteousness alone. That vision, in whatsoever
metaphors it may be wrapped up, is real and true, and will be so as long
as evil exists within this universe. Were it not true, there would be
something wanting to the perfect justice and the perfect benevolence of
God.