MODERN SCEPTICISM.
MODERN SCEPTICISM.
A
COURSE OF LECTURES
DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE
CHRISTIAN EVIDENCE SOCIETY,
_WITH AN EXPLANATORY PAPER_
BY THE RIGHT REVEREND
C. J. ELLICOTT, D.D.,
LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND BRISTOL.
NEW YORK:
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH AND CO.,
770, BROADWAY.
MDCCCLXXI.
_Issued in this Country
by special arrangement with the English Publishers_,
MESSRS. HODDER AND STOUGHTON.
PREFACE.
The following Lectures, delivered at the request of the Christian
Evidence Society, are now, for the convenience of the reader, gathered
together into one volume, and earnestly commended to his serious
consideration.
A short account of the general designs of the Society, of the plan of
the Lectures, and the reasons for their appearing in a different order
from that in which they were delivered, will be found in an explanatory
paper which the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol has been kind enough
to draw up at the request of the Committee. Though placed, as last
written, at the end of the volume, the attention of the reader should
be early directed to this paper.
The Committee take this opportunity of offering their best thanks to
the eminent men who have found time, in the midst of their varied and
laborious avocations, to lend such able and efficient service to the
great cause in hand,--the maintenance of the truth of the Christian
Revelation.
HARROWBY,
_Chairman of Committee._
CONTENTS.
Page
DESIGN IN NATURE 1
BY THE MOST REVEREND THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK.
PANTHEISM 33
BY THE REV. J. H. RIGG, D.D., Principal of Westminster
Training College.
POSITIVISM 79
BY THE REV. W. JACKSON, M.A., F.S.A., late Fellow of
Worcester College, Oxford.
SCIENCE AND REVELATION 139
BY THE VERY REV. R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D., Dean of
Canterbury; late Regius Professor of Divinity, Oxford.
THE NATURE AND VALUE OF THE MIRACULOUS TESTIMONY TO
CHRISTIANITY 179
BY THE REV. JOHN STOUGHTON, D.D.
THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF REVELATION 229
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF CARLISLE.
THE ALLEGED HISTORICAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE OLD AND NEW
TESTAMENTS, AND THE LIGHT THROWN ON THEM BY MODERN
DISCOVERIES 265
BY THE REV. GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., Camden Professor of
Ancient History, Oxford.
MYTHICAL THEORIES OF CHRISTIANITY 305
BY THE REV. CHARLES ROW, M.A., of Pembroke College,
Oxford.
THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES 361
BY THE REV. STANLEY LEATHES, M.A., Professor of Hebrew,
King's College.
CHRIST'S TEACHING AND INFLUENCE ON THE WORLD 409
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF ELY.
THE COMPLETENESS AND ADEQUACY OF THE EVIDENCES OF
CHRISTIANITY 457
BY THE REV. CANON COOK, M.A., Canon of Exeter; Preacher
at Lincoln's Inn.
EXPLANATORY PAPER 503
BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND
BRISTOL.
NOTES 529
DESIGN IN NATURE.
BY THE MOST REVEREND
THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF YORK.
DESIGN IN NATURE.
"All things are full of God," said the father of Greek philosophy.
"We have no need of the hypothesis of God," said a modern French
astronomer. It is with the latter saying, which is descriptive of the
attitude of modern science at this time, that the present address will
have to do. Atheism no doubt exists; but far more common is the mode
of thinking which would dispense with all questions about the Divine
nature in dealing with the world and its phenomena; which considers
that the introduction of the name of God into scientific research,
complicates what is simple, obscures the rules of observation,
introduces controversies that are useless to science, restrains the
free course of inductive reasoning by an apprehension of consequences,
and entangles physical inquiry which leads to sure and clear results,
with mental and with spiritual inquiry which have produced nothing but
disputation. Those who hold such views would think it unphilosophical
to deny, just as they would regard it to affirm, the existence of God.
But the popular mind is not equal to nice distinctions; and it seems
almost the same thing to most people to deny the existence of God as to
exclude the thought of Him when exploring His creation.
I am not without hope that a few words delivered here upon "the
argument from design," as it is called, may tend to diminish the
growing estrangement between science and religion, and at the same
time to revindicate for religion her legitimate share in matters of
scientific interest.
I may undertake that the subject, however unworthily treated in other
respects, shall be discussed without bitterness, and with a fitting
respect for those who have done so much for physical science during the
present generation.
It is necessary to sketch in a few sentences that field of creation
with which the argument from design has to do. The world presents to
us four kingdoms or classes of facts. One of these, and the first in
point of order, is the mineral kingdom. A few so-called elements, as
metals, earthy bases, and the like, acted upon by certain forces,
known to us as gravitation, motion, heat, electricity, magnetism,
chemical affinity, have formed the mountain and the valley, the wind
and the clouds, the sea margin and the cave; in a word, all the grand
substructure on which the higher kingdoms are to take their places.
Modern science has discovered however, that these physico-chemical
forces are interchangeable or convertible; that retarded motion turns
to heat, as in the railway break, that heat generates electricity, and
the electric current magnetises the iron round which it passes. Not
only this, but each force generates a certain equivalent of another--so
much and no more; and no force is lost, though a force may pass from an
active to a potential state. For example, two tuns of water are raised
by evaporation from the sea, and one of them falls in rain in a valley
drained by a river, and in its downward motion back to the sea it will
turn the water-wheel, lift the tilt-hammer, bear the barge swiftly in
its current, leap over the rocky ledge a foaming cataract, and in all
these it is only sending back a portion of the force which was spent
upon its evaporation; and the real source of all this work is, and
must be, the sun's heat. And ere the water rests again in the sea it
will have accounted for the whole of the force, neither less nor more,
that had operated upon it; part of it in friction on its bed and in
consequent heat; part of it in tasks imposed by human skill. The other
tun of water shall fall into some land-locked tarn, high in the hills,
where it cannot at once render back its force in work or duty, but the
force is there, held in suspense or in reserve. Water lifted from the
sea level to the valley of the Engadine, a mile higher, has used much
of the sun's heat; it will restore that heat or some equivalent force,
as soon as you make a way for it to the sea level again; and it will
have parted with all the force, neither more nor less, which raised it
to that height. That forces are convertible, and that whether converted
or not they are conserved, so that nothing is lost, are propositions
demonstrated. It is not, I believe, demonstrated, but it is a probable
supposition, that all forces are but one force manifested in different
modes.
Then as to the material elements on which these forces work; the
hydrogen, carbon, iron, lime, and the like, the name of elements must
be held to mean no more than that they have not as yet been resolved
into simpler substances. Of their ultimate composition we know nothing.
They may be so many modifications of an ultimate matter; but whether
this ultimate matter exists, whether it be, as modern materialists
tell us with such confidence, eternal and indestructible, whether
impenetrability be one of its properties, whether it be not a kind of
polar opposite to the physico-chemical forces, and engendered with
them, so that in a different universe, with other forces at work,
there must have been different elements, these are all questions of
mere speculation, incapable of proof. The physical enquirer has bound
himself to consider only the facts which he can observe; and when
he tells us that matter is eternal, and that therefore creation is
impossible, he is deserting the ground where alone he is strong.
Bishop Berkeley's and Collier's denial that matter truly exists is
quite as probable as this affirmation. But both alike are speculative
guesses and not science.
There is a second kingdom to add to the first. The world is not a
mere agglomeration of rocks and mountains, seas and lakes. Before the
physical forces had completed their work, a new force had been added
to them; that of life. The bare rocks became clothed with living
moss. In marshy places, warm and moist, a rich vegetation grew and
decayed. Along the slopes the interlacing roots of grasses detained the
particles of soil which would otherwise have been washed down to some
lower bed. The vegetable world, with thousands of varieties, clothed
and adorned the stony earth. England's greatness in the present was
taken order for in those ages when her coal measures were formed out
of the forests which grew rank and died in a climate different in all
respects from that which forms the subject of our daily animadversion.
Third in order comes the Animal Kingdom. I do not attempt to define
life, whether animal or vegetable, with exactness. Every one has
failed in that attempt. As a rough description of animal life, it
may, perhaps, suffice to say that the living being is one endowed
with sensation and spontaneous motion, of which each of the parts
contributes something to the continuance of the whole, and is in
turn preserved or defended by the whole. If those who find fault with
this, look for another definition in Dr. Whewell's comprehensive
work,[1] they will find my excuse in the variety and the inadequacy of
the definitions there collected. The animal life spread out over the
globe from the first is profuse, is beautiful and various. The oolitic
limestone and the white chalk are almost wholly made up of shells of
Foraminifera. On the river Columbia is a bed of clay 500 feet thick,
which consists largely of the shells of Diatoms, if, indeed, these are
to be ranked in the animal kingdom. The shells of the Foraminifera,
which can only be examined by the microscope, exhibit wonderful variety
and beauty. Still more remarkable in this respect are the Polycystina,
whose shells, as figured in Mr. Ponton's book, recall censers and
vases, jewelled crosses and stars, pendants and tripods, such as a
London goldsmith would do well to reproduce. Until the microscope was
invented no eye can have explored this wonderful dust. The shells of
both these humble tribes, the Foraminifera and Polycystina resemble the
shells of other animals much higher in the scale of organization; but
nearly as they are related in organization to each other, the forms
are very different, and each in itself presents a wonderful diversity
of forms. In higher families of animals there are the same characters.
The globe teems with life in earth, and air, and water. If you will
permit me, so early in my argument, to speak of the Maker of them all,
I will say that the creative power is inexhaustible in invention, both
of useful and beautiful parts. And in the ceaseless activity of these
creatures, great and small, we recognise the physical happiness which
accompanies so much life. It is a chorus of thanksgiving and praise,
from pool and jungle, from treetop and soft grass, from the creatures
that revel in the life that God has given them.
In demanding the right to regard man as the fourth kingdom of nature, I
am aware that some may demur to the claim. No doubt he must take rank
in the kingdom of the animals, by reason of his identity with animals
in all the vital functions. Disparaging things have been said of his
brain; and Moleschott has remarked, I think, that all its finest things
are but modified phosphorus after all. "No phosphorus, no thinking!"
The slight projection on the outer margin of the ear has lately assumed
portentous proportions. The possession of that precious relic, which
has turned up suddenly like the locket of the long lost child in a
stimulating novel, proves our kinship to the Simian race, from some
balder specimens of which we are supposed to have descended, and gives
us a place on an unsuspected family tree. But, after all that has been
said by the naturalists to teach us humility, there do remain some
facts, which entitle man to a separate place, to one at least of which
the modern school have given greater prominence than before. They are
these. Man can control nature. He can read nature and understand it. He
has a power of self-regulation, which we call conscience. And he can
and does think much about God.
As to the power of man to control nature, I prefer to employ the
words of Mr. Wallace, one of the first to put forward what is called
"the law of natural selection," who will not be suspected of claiming
any transcendental place or privilege for man. "With a naked and
unprotected body," he says, man's intelligence "gave him clothing
against the varying inclemencies of the seasons. Though unable to
compete with the deer in swiftness, or with the wild bull in strength,
it has given him weapons wherewith to capture and overcome both. Though
less capable than most other animals, of living on the herbs and the
fruits which unaided nature supplies, this wonderful faculty taught
him to govern and direct nature to his own benefit, and to make her
produce food for him when and where he pleased. From the moment when
the first skin was used as a covering, when the first rude spear was
formed to assist in the chase, the first seed sown or root planted, a
grand revolution was effected in nature, a revolution which in all the
previous ages of the world had had no parallel, for a being had arisen
who was no longer necessarily subject to change with the changing
universe, a being who was, in some degree, superior to nature, inasmuch
as he knew how to control and regulate her action, and could keep
himself in harmony with her, not by a change in body, but by an advance
in mind. Here, then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man. On
this view of his special attributes we may admit that even those who
claim for him a position and an order a class or a sub-kingdom by
himself, have some reason on their side. He is indeed a being apart,
since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify
all other organic beings. Nay, more, this victory which he has gained
for himself gives him a directing influence over other existences. Man
has not only escaped natural selection himself, but he is actually able
to take away some of that power from nature which before his appearance
she universally exercised. We can anticipate the time when the earth
will produce only cultivated plants and domestic animals; when man's
selection shall have supplanted natural selection; and when the ocean
will be the only domain in which that power can be exerted, which for
countless cycles of ages ruled supreme over the earth."[2]
Thus eloquently and forcibly speaks Mr. Wallace; and I do not stop
now to criticise the exaggeration of language which treats the law of
natural selection as supreme ruler of the earth. Let me say a few words
next upon man's power to reflect on, and to understand nature. For this
was the second mark by which man was distinguished from the animal
creation, with which he has so much in common.
Man alone is capable of an unselfish interest in the world around him;
that is, an interest that does not bear immediately on his bodily
wants. How far he has carried this interest, let modern science bear
witness. The common feat of foretelling all the eclipses of sun and
moon for a given year, is performed for our almanack yearly, without
exciting surprise or gratitude. Yet it means that man can so follow
the heavenly bodies in their path, for years and years to come, for
all the years that are gone, that he can tell, without fear of error,
on what day the cone of shadow thrown by the sun-lighted earth into
space, shall sweep over the face of the moon and blot out her light,
completely or a little. But this is an old triumph, hardly worth
quoting, but for its aptness to impress all kinds of minds. A clerk
in one of our public offices, using only such leisure as official
work allowed, has told us lately wonders about the composition of
the sun; and here in London, armed with a little instrument (the
spectroscope), this distinguished man has been able to ascertain that
in yonder photosphere the same elements are found which the chemist
seeks and finds in the crust of our little earth. What proofs can be
more convincing of the fitness of man to play his part in the scene
in which he is placed? His senses are adapted to the facts he is to
observe; his eye to light, his ear to sonorous vibrations, his touch
to resistance and to weight. But the naked organ soon falls short of
his wishes. And soon the microscope unfolds the beautiful forms of the
Polycystina shells, the minute fibril of the muscle, and the components
of the blood of life. The telescope brings near the world of stars, and
resolves the bright mist into clusters of distinct orbs. The balance
weighs quantities of matter too small for the touch to appreciate.
And lastly, the spectroscope takes the picture, so to speak, of
chemical phenomena too distant to be realised by these means; and so
the composition of the heavenly bodies, about which the most sanguine
observer twenty years ago would have admitted that we should never
know anything firmer than conjecture, is already the subject of exact
observation.
The names of Homer, Plato, and Shakspeare remind us how marvellously
the world is imaged and reproduced in the minds of some great men, and
of the share which we smaller men can take in their work by an admiring
sympathy. A production of art, whether literary, pictorial, or
plastic, is a creation. The things of Troy were not so touching nor so
grand in their reality as they became in the form which the poet gave
them. Legend enters largely into the stories of Macbeth and Hamlet. The
histories are shadowy, but the plays are substantial; they contain some
touch of truth. Old and young read them, and lend to the author all
their feelings to work on as he will. Weigh this fact well. It seems
to me to show so plainly that man's constitution has been fitted by
foresight and preparation for the place in earth that he was to fill.
Supposing that Moleschott was right in his startling aphorism,
"Without phosphorus there is no thought," what a wonder are we forced
to recognise here. The rage of Achilles, the death of Socrates, the
resolute wickedness of Lady Macbeth, the character of her husband,
so weak in his crime, so grand in his remorse and ruin; the refined
and gentle Hamlet, forced by a preternatural command to assume the
character of an avenger; to all these the presence of phosphorus in
the brain is indispensable. How comes so small a cause to work such
grand effects. It is sufficiently wonderful to hear Joachim discourse
eloquent music upon the simplest of instruments, a violin; take away
the violin and substitute a bit of wood; if the music still continues,
what was before a wonderful exercise of skill is now miraculous. If
great thoughts are but phosphorus burnt in the closed stove of a poet's
brain, I am more ready than ever to admire that creative wisdom which
could bring this out of that, which could so dispense with ordinary
means in His highest productions. But the aphorism is not true as it
stands. I believe there is no free phosphorus in the brain. "Without
lime, no thought; without oxygen, no thought; without water, no
thought." All these are true, and they import a well-known fact, that
man who thinks is a creature in a material world, and that certain
forms of matter are needful to his existence as an organised being.[3]
"Two things are awful to me," said Kant, "the starry firmament and the
sense of responsibility in man." In his "Metaphysics of Ethics" he
has treated this sense of responsibility with singular logical power.
It is one of the marks that separate man from all other creatures. No
doubt this principle has allowed men to come to very wrong and absurd
conclusions. Because the savage practises cannibalism, and knows no
rules of chastity but those which flow from the husband's right of
property in the wife, it is inferred that the savage has no moral
sense. It would be as fair to infer that because England once traded
in slaves, fought cocks, baited bulls, and oppressed the native races
in India and her colonies, therefore there was no sense of right
and wrong in England. It is for the existence of the principle that
I contend, and not for its perfect education and enlightenment. The
principle is that something is right to will and to do, and something
is not right. The existence of the principle is proved if the poor
savage of whom I spoke would consider his manhood disgraced by fleeing,
even for his life's sake, before the foe, or by suffering one cry to
escape him under the tortures, wherewith his captors are doing him
to death. The education of this principle is a different matter; no
one could say that even now his conscience was completely educated.
"So act that your principle of action would bear to be made a law for
the whole world,"[4] is a noble maxim; but it requires knowledge and
light, as well as right intention. If you twit us with the fact that
men have been cruel, impure, capricious, and absurd in their conduct,
we answer that they had still a right and a wrong. One who has the
sense of sight may find himself compelled to live in some narrow cleft
or ravine, where there is little to see, but the sense is there still.
The bathing-men at Pfeffers, with the earth closed almost over their
heads, see little of the scenery of Switzerland: but they have eyes not
the less. We are claiming for men now, not the fine sweep of moral
prospect, but the moral sense of sight; and this is never wanting. Upon
this sense every artifice has been used to make it look like something
else;[5] for until it can be so transformed, it is a powerful witness
for another world than this. The commonest explanation is that it is
only a principle of enlightened self-interest. Study it for yourself
in the savage, in the little child; you will find that these two
principles run on different lines.
The last mark of man, that distinguishes him from all animals is, that
he believes in God. One half the human race at this moment profess
some creed in which God is the great first cause, the Creator and
Governor of the world. Of the other half, hardly any are quite without
religion. "Obliged as I am," says M. Quatrefages, in words which I have
had occasion to quote elsewhere,[6] "even by my education, to pass in
review the races of men, I have sought for atheism in the lowest and in
the highest, but nowhere have I met with it, except in an individual,
or at most in some school of men, more or less known, as we have seen
in Europe in the last century, and as we see at the present day.
Everywhere and always the masses of the people have escaped it." But
for my present argument it is not necessary to insist that a right
belief in God prevails. There is a belief in God, and it cannot have
come from experience or observation of visible facts. You may lower the
position of man, by comparing him to the apes, and by chemical analysis
of his brain; all the more wonderful is it that a creature in such
sorry case should pretend to hold communion with the divine. His feet
are in the earthy clay, but his head is lifted up towards heaven. Heir
to a hundred maladies, the sport of a hundred passions, holding on this
life, so chequered in its complexion, but for a few days, this creature
cries out of his trouble: "God exists; and he can see and hear me."
Man, if I have proved my position, stands quite alone at the head of
the kingdoms of nature, alone in his power of controlling it, alone
in his appreciation of its beauty, alone in the self-government of
conscience, the first of all the creatures of God, to pronounce the
name of Him who had made all things, in a world which for ages had been
blind to its Maker, and thankless because blind.
Now it has become, and will probably continue to be, a question of the
deepest interest to mankind, how these four kingdoms came into being.
And at present there is a tendency towards a theory purely material
and mechanical. It is so in Germany, the country of Büchner, Vogt, and
Moleschott; it is so in France, where Comte and Littré have written;
it is so here in England, where it is needless to quote distinguished
names. I purpose, in the remainder of this lecture, to attempt an
interpretation of the facts before us, quite different from this
prevalent notion; and also to show how vicious and how inadequate in a
scientific point of view the system known as materialism appears to be.
The time is all too short for such a purpose: but any address like this
can only aim to scatter germs of thought, not to present a system.
That the creation was gradual, appears alike from the account of the
Bible and from scientific observation. Matter and motion must have
existed before the ball of earth was formed; and the physico-chemical
forces must have been in full play when the first lichen clothed the
rocks, or the first plants were formed in the sea. The first appearance
of life on the globe was a mighty step in creation, and from this point
the question of design becomes a very urgent one. Observe: the plant
world is a new world, with a series of wonders all its own. There was
nothing in the heat of the sun, nor in the earth's motion or magnetic
currents, to give any promise or presage of the marvels of the forest.
Supposing that we admit that these were evolved by law, that is to
say, that as a matter of fact plants only appeared where certain
conditions of light and heat and moisture combined to favour them,
and that wherever these conditions were combined they never failed
to appear. The question next arises whether matter and force evolved
them from their own inherent nature, or force and matter were created
with the intention to produce them, so that the plant was intended and
prepared then when the other forces began to stir the formless void.
Is the plant world the accidental or necessary outcome of the forces
that made the mineral world? or must we say that it bears marks of
design? Here we must observe that it is a wider and richer world than
that which preceded it: more full by far of forms of beauty and grace,
each of them sustained by a vascular system of which the mineral world
affords no parallel. You stand before the gnarled and twisted oak that
rises out of the feathering ferns; you never think that this giant of
two centuries, endued with a certain power of self-protection against
the storms of two hundred years, is an accidental product. It is so
grandly strong, so richly clothed with a myriad leaves, alike but
yet in something different each from each. The cattle count upon its
friendly shade; the fowls of the air make it their resting-place. This
a result of certain motions in the universe and certain properties
of matter, not designed at all, foreseen by no eye? To no one would
such a thought naturally occur. The world, full in its first stage of
marks of order and purpose, shows more of the same marks in its second
and more complicated state. The change that has taken place is not
towards confusion and exhaustion from unforeseen defects in mechanism,
but a higher development. The mineral kingdom was wonderful; that it
should be able to clothe itself with a mantle of verdure, and pass
into another kingdom much more complex, heightens the wonder. But then
comes the further change, the pouring out of animal life upon the
globe. Was this too an inevitable consequence of physical forces? All
the animal creation teems with marks of purpose. Consider only some of
the contrivances by which the fowls of the air are fitted for their
peculiar life. Describing a night of extreme coldness, the poet says:
"The owl, for all her feathers, is a-cold."
That warm covering of the bird must be portable as well as warm; it
weighs about an ounce and a half. But the covering of birds would be
useless to them if the showers to which they must be exposed were
absorbed by the plumage, so that it became a heavy clinging mass. An
oily secretion makes it waterproof; we have all seen the duck free
itself by one shake from every trace of its recent bath. The heavy
skeleton that befits pedestrian creatures, would disable the bird from
flight; so it is provided with tubes of thin bone, surrounding a cavity
filled with air. Its pinions must be light as well as strong; observe
how the light barbs of the feather have roughened edges so that they
form one strong continuous surface, almost impervious to the air which
they strike. The air in the bones of birds and in other cavities of
the body, heated too by an inner warmth much greater than that of man,
contributes something to their buoyancy. Their speed and endurance are
enormous. It is said that the swallow's flight is ninety miles an hour.
One long stretch across the North Sea brings the sea-fowl from Norway
to Flamborough Head; they rest for a short time after this flight, and
pass inland, not the worse for their exploit. You may infer from the
beak of a bird its habits and its food. The bill of a woodpecker is a
pointed tool, tipped with hardest horn, to break open the bark of the
tree for insects. The flat bill of the duck has plates of horn at the
side; an excellent instrument for straining off the water and retaining
the food. The bill of the snipe is long, and narrow, and sensitive, to
pierce the marshy ground, and feel after its food. We might go on for
hours multiplying such instances, and from every part of the field of
creation.
Now, any mind in its natural state knows that in human works such
adaptations could only proceed from contrivance, and is willing to
regard these in the same way as proofs of design in creation. The
physicist has to tutor himself to a different view. All these things
are evolutions, under pressure of circumstances, of the original forces
of creation. For example, out of certain birds tenanting marshy
places, one has a somewhat larger beak, and this gives him an advantage
in piercing the ground for food; and so his share of food is larger,
and his strength and courage greater, and he has a freer choice of a
mate; and so the long beak grows longer in the next generation, and
the grandson's beak is longer than the son's, from the same causes;
and thus the law works, until in course of time there stands confessed
a new species--a perfect snipe. Is the scientific theory better in
this case than the popular? It is not. It does not account for the
facts so well. But is not our belief that God made the fowl of the
air with fitting instruments for a peculiar life because He saw that
it was good, and wished all portions of His varied earth to be the
scene of the joy and energy of appropriate tenants, a mere hypothesis?
The worship of God is universal, and exists without any explicit
opinion that He is the Creator, the first Cause. Because you are able
to conceive of Him, and are willing to accept Him as the Ruler of
your will and conscience, He must exist. Does this seem too rapid an
assumption? Consider the alternative. If He exists not, the sound of
worship has gone up from all lands in vain, and in vain have all good
men consecrated their lives to an obedience to the law of duty. Were
such deceit felt to be possible, a darkness that might be felt would
settle upon our spirits, and the hands would indeed hang down, and the
feeble knees be paralyzed, and a strict silence on all moral subjects
become us best. But we must see with such eyes as God has given us; and
scepticism about faith and conscience is perhaps as unprofitable as
scepticism about touch and sight. God exists then, it is assured to us
by the common faith of mankind, by the highest law within ourselves.
And as He exists, to Him, and to no other, must we assign the place
of Creator. There cannot be two Gods. I cannot give my conscience to
one as its guide, and adore another for the wisdom of the universe.
God exists then, and His existence is not merely assumed in order to
account for marks of design in nature. And we maintain that the easier
supposition is also the truer. These marks of purpose are what they
appear to be, tokens of the wisdom of God. "Thou hast made heaven, the
heaven of heavens with all their host, the earth and all things that
are therein, the sea and all that is therein, and thou preservest them
all."[7]
If I were to venture to express in a few sentences the belief of a man
of ordinary education upon this subject I should say that God alone is
and can be the first cause of this universe, the mover of its motion,
the giver of its life. The wise purposes which shine forth for us
in nature, were in the mind of God from the first act of creation.
In saying that He has wrought by laws, we do not detract from His
power; we seem rather to enhance it to our minds in attributing to Him
constancy as well as wisdom. A law is not a restraint; it is a fixed
manner of working. To say of a painter that he never produces any but
fine works, does not affirm that he is less free than an inferior
artist; just because producing bad work is no power or privilege but a
defect. And so, when we admit that God works by law, and expect to find
the same spectrum from the sun's rays, which we have once made with
our own prism, at every time and in every place where the sun's light
shines, and so on, we do not narrow the power of the Great Artificer,
unless it can be shown that caprice is a privilege and a good. The
subject of miracles is not here to be discussed; I will only observe
that they are presented to us as parts of a great purpose for the
good of man; and that our Lord refused, when He was tempted, to work
wonders out of wilfulness, or only to astonish. The extreme jealousy
of scientific men of admitting any allusion to theology, in connection
with the course of nature, proceeds from erroneous conceptions of God.
Mr. Wallace, whom I have already quoted with respect, is ready to
admit that the Creator works in the beginning as the founder of the
laws on which the world is to proceed; but he is afraid of admitting
that there has been continual interference and re-arrangement of
details.[8] But this eminent naturalist attributes to us a conception
of the Most High which we do not hold, nay, which we energetically
reject. If the laws were wise and good, whence would come the need
of interference or re-arrangement? Who are we that we should bid God
speak once, and forbid Him twice to speak? The laws of nature are God's
laws, and God's laws are His utterance of Himself through the speech
of nature. God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and so His
laws remain the same. They are, if I may say so without irreverence,
the veil and vesture over the form of God, too bright in itself for
us to look on; they take their outline from Him who is beneath them.
You may continue your researches in full confidence that the laws
will stand sure, not because you have the slightest guarantee as a
man of science that these laws will never be interfered with; such a
guarantee you have on your own principles no right to ask. You are to
observe that the facts are so; that they shall eternally be so is not
for you, for that is all beyond experience. But the wisdom that made
the laws needs not to revise its work, and erase and insert and amend
its code. In the days of creation God saw that it was good; the eye
that so approved it changes not. Until the purpose that runs through
the ages is completed the laws will stand sure. But each new kingdom
of nature has introduced a change amounting to a revolution, which
neither the theologian nor the naturalist regards as an interference or
a caprice. When the principle of plant-life was introduced, the mineral
world became the material on which the plant-life worked; it gathered
into itself the lower elements, carbon, silica, nitrogen, and used
them as means of its own organic life. The plant partook of the nature
of the class below it, whilst it dominated and used that class. This
same took place when animal life was introduced. The beautiful plants
become the material whereon the animal life worked, the food whereby it
sustained itself. It was the same when man was added, in whom instinct
is replaced by reason, and ethical action supervenes over action by
impulse and appetite. Each of these kingdoms has much in common with
that which is below it. The animal is in many respects a plant; for the
diatomaceous creatures one knows hardly in which kingdom to find their
place. The man is an animal in much, and perhaps his animal instincts
play a larger part in the world's history and in his own development
than we are wont to allow. But each higher step brings in something
wholly new. "An animal," says Hegel, "is a miracle for the vegetable
world." Each step is a revolution in one point of view; but then the
lower state prepared itself for the higher, prophesied, so to speak,
of its coming, and the higher seated itself so easily on the throne
prepared for it, that we do not wonder to find it there. You call it
evolution; we call it a creative act. We think that God exists, and if
He acts anywhere it must be in this, the universe of things. Ἐξ ἑνὸς τὰ
πάντα γίγνεσθαι [Greek: Ex henos ta panta gignesthai] is an old saying
long before Christianity. But you and we may work by the same calculus
and rules of observation. The facts are the same, the interpretation of
what is behind them is different. Nor need we deny that the principle
of which Mr. Wallace spoke as "supreme in the world," has its truth and
its use in explaining the facts of creation. It never raised an inert
mineral mass into a vegetable organism; it never raised a plant into
an animal. It never raised an ape into a man. No facts have yet been
produced that go to prove any such leaps, and if our logic is to be
improved in anything by the light of experience, it is in this, that
facts should be recorded and generalised, but not assumed. But that
climatic conditions, and the struggles for life, have modified species,
and worked out new varieties, or new species, we may fearlessly admit;
it is one more proof, perhaps, that the world is a meet school and
training ground for the creatures placed in it for discipline. But a
law is not a god; it never ruled supreme; never was other than one
precept out of many in the Divine code of the world.
It has become the fashion with some naturalists to speak of God as "the
Unknowable." Mr. Martineau has finely observed, somewhere, that this
name is self-contradictory; for we affirm by the use of it that we
know so much, that He cannot be known. I go much further. It assumes
the existence of God, and in the same breath separates us from Him
for ever. Theologians have ever been ready to confess that God cannot
be known in His own essence to creatures such as we. "Lo! these are
parts of His ways: but how little a portion is known of Him? but the
thunder of His power who can understand?"[9] An uninspired writer
speaks the same language as the inspired. "For us that are men to talk
about divine things is as when the unmusical discourse of music or
civilians of strategy."[10] But shall we then sit down in despair, and
no more look up to God? We shall be untrue to our own best instincts;
we shall not have used all our means of enlightenment. I grant that
the mere contemplation of God in nature is not enough. Like the pillar
of cloud of old, it is at once light and darkness; a light to us in
contemplating the book of nature, a darkness to our hearts, shut in
with their own sins and sorrows. Naturalists have never done justice,
as it seems to me, to the most important facts of man's nature. Not
only can he study nature, but he can act in it and upon it. And this
power of action assures him of his freedom. Possessed of this gift,
that places him a little lower than the angels, he knows that he can
use it either way. He may follow his own foolish vanity, his own evil
wishes, and set up for his own law, and be his own God; or he may
return to Him, whence he came out, and offer to God the homage of his
own will, of his love, and his obedience. To one who has performed this
great act God is no more "the Unknowable." In the mutual commerce of
two wills, two spirits, the finite and the infinite, the finite rises
more and more, and sees more and more of Him who has manifested Himself
to us in His creation of the world out of free love, in His creation of
a free being to rule in the same world, crowned with glory and honor,
in His giving that free being a law of duty wherewith to rule himself,
in His having planted in him hopes and longings that will be satisfied
only in eternity.
Yes; man is humble and low. By every organ, and by every fibre he is
mated with some analogous creature in the brute world. He surpasses
them in the variety of his ailments, and the profundity of his pains.
He is part of a system, which naturalists tell us is hastening towards
night and death;[11] the motion of the power of nature tending plainly
towards universal rest. But
"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great,"
he has that in him which unites him to another sphere. To be able
to conceive of God at all; to have within him a will and a power of
worship, these make him one with God, and assure him against death and
darkness. To deny oneself this privilege of viewing the earth in its
relation to God, to shut out God artificially from that sphere where
the natural understanding has always found Him without assistance, is
a pedantry for which we shall surely suffer. God will find us out.
There is often a certain irritation in those who would exclude Him
from their sphere of view. They lose their philosophic calmness when
they speak of religious things. These are the tokens of past conflicts
and past quarrels, of a soul that might know more of God if it had not
refused. God is reflected in the world, in the man's intelligence, in
his conscience, in his will. "Whither shall I go from His presence?"
we seem to be saying. It is better to be able to say, "Whom have I in
heaven and earth but Thee?"
PANTHEISM.
BY THE
REV. J. H. RIGG, D.D.,
PRINCIPAL OF WESTMINSTER TRAINING COLLEGE.
PANTHEISM.
A hundred years ago the controversy of Christianity in England was
with Deism, and in France with Atheism; while at that time the
transcendental infidelity of Germany was as yet undeveloped, and the
name of Spinoza was nowhere held in honour. Now, however, deistic
infidelity appears to be obsolete, and it is universally felt by those
who have entered truly into the thought and controversies of the age,
that the question for the present is between Christian Theism and that
style of philosophy which recognises an impersonal divinity in all
things.
Deism grants too much to the Christian. If a man really believes in a
living and personal God, a Divine Maker and Ruler of the universe, with
a moral character and will, he finds it hard to deny the possibility
and probability of a revelation, and impossible to maintain the
impossibility of miracles. Having been obliged to yield thus far to
the Christian argument, the deist is unable thereafter to withstand
the positive evidence in favour of Christianity. Moreover Deism is
beset by the same difficulties in effect which surround the Christian
revelation, without its lights, its consolations, its blessings. The
man, therefore, who rejects Christianity seldom finds his resting-place
in Deism. He becomes a pantheist or an atheist.
Naked atheism, however, is a repulsive creed. It is a heart-withering
negation. It touches no sympathy; it stimulates no play of intellect;
under the deadly chill of its unlighted vacancy, imagination cannot
breathe. There is nothing about it refined, or subtle, or profound. It
is the barest and hardest form of infidelity, and has been professed
by the coarsest minds. It demands no effort to comprehend its one
universal negation and it taxes no skill to expound it. It is an arid
and barren, a cold and dreary, hypothesis, which no genius, not even
that of Lucretius, could make attractive. The old illustration is
conclusive as to its absurdity. It would be immensely less monstrous
to maintain that the Iliad, in its full perfection, might have been
the product of the "fortuitous concourse" of the letters of the Greek
alphabet, than that this infinitely wonderful and glorious universe
is the result of the "fortuitous concourse of atoms." Stark atheism,
therefore, however it may have flourished in the heartless and
hopeless France of a hundred years ago, was never likely to take root
in the soil of European scepticism as the alternative of Christianity.
In England it has had very few votaries. Nor has atheism, as such,
ever found favour in the land of Luther and Melancthon, the favourite
soil of mysticism and pietism. English deism and Scottish scepticism
did, indeed, produce potent effects in Germany a hundred years ago;
but the result was neither deism, nor such scepticism as that of Hume,
nor atheism, but a dreamy idealistic pantheism. And now Germany,
with a disastrous fidelity, by an infusion into our literature of
its pantheistic unbelief, has repaid to Britain the debt which it
contracted by its importation of English deism and Scottish scepticism.
At the present moment a pantheistic philosophy is the philosophy in
which unbelief for the most part invests itself in England.
Hence the task which falls to me to-day cannot but be felt by myself
to be one of very grave importance. I could unfeignedly have wished
that it had fallen into other and more competent hands. Perhaps,
however, I may venture to claim two qualifications which may, in some
measure, help to fit me for dealing with the subject on which I have
to speak. One is, that the subject of Pantheism is one which has much
and frequently exercised my thoughts for many years past, ever since I
learnt from the writings of Coleridge, Hare, and others the meaning
of what Hare spoke of as the "fascination of Pantheism;" ever since I
was led to the study of philosophy and its development, and especially
of the thoughts of the early Greek wrestlers with the mysteries of
being, of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists, and of the modern thinkers
of Germany, who have filled with transcendental exhalations of verbal
dialectics the vacuum in speculation which had been created by the
destructive logic of Kant. The other qualification which I venture
to claim for my task to-day is that I have some knowledge of the
difficulties of thought and belief which may lead honest men to become
pantheists; that I understand the manner of thought of one who has
become entangled in the mazy coil of pantheistic reasonings; at all
events, that I know that honest searchers after truth may reluctantly
become intellectually pantheists, while yet their heart longs to
retain faith and worship towards a personal God. If, therefore, one
necessary condition of true success in argument is an intellectual
and, as far as possible, a moral sympathy with one's opponents, that
condition, I believe, is fulfilled in my case. And I cannot but think
that all Christian controversialists ought to feel a tender sympathy
towards honest thinkers who are involved in the bewildering confusions
of a philosophy which they do not love, even although they may, after
many a struggle and in sadness of heart, have succumbed at length to
Pantheism as the only conclusion of controversy in which they are able
to abide.
My subject to-day is not the history of Pantheism, but its principles.
The history could not be dealt with in one lecture; the principles, I
hope, may. And whatever may be the intellectual genesis, the descent
and derivation, or the special character, of any particular form of
Pantheism, all its forms will be found to coincide in certain respects.
The semi-Hegelian of Oxford, and the pantheist who falls back on the
lines of Mr. Herbert Spencer's speculations as his place of defence,
may both be regarded as standing on common ground for the purpose of my
present argument.