never rise again. His religion was no more than a funereal cult; a veil
thrown over it, no hope, no thought of reunion! The episode of Clotilde
was, in itself, one of those touches of nature which make the whole
world kin; the brief, bright, and long sad experience the solitary
had of his heart; the love, the loss, the unforgetting sorrow! But,
did it not prove, beyond the force of reclamation to disprove, that
Comte's system ends, at last, in what is commonly called materialism?
its faith (or negation of faith) being in effect this, that we look
for entire human dissolution coincident with bodily death. And the end
flows naturally from the beginning; all we think is phenomenal, all
we know is phenomenal, first and last. Our life is only a phenomenon;
and death, death joins us to the unreturning past. We are absorbed,
all that is good of us, into general and generic humanity; an Eidolon,
called the Great Being for our comfort; as if a name (what's in a
name?) could console us! The race we may have tried to serve is to be
our Euthanasia, our sepulchre, I had almost said our cenotaph!
Strange thought, not without a kind of serpent-fascination! Epidemic
in England now, gaining force from its unhallowed audacity! The
consistent pessimist, who rates men at the worst, thinks the worst in
himself, and does the worst by all others, and by himself, if he is
but fixed in this unbelief, need not fear what the world, man, or God
shall do unto him. It is the old whisper, "Ye shall be as gods!" 'Tis
superhuman to sit and watch the storm; to have our strong sensations,
illusions they are called in France; blood-poisons which circulate in
our life, working hot passion and mischief; sorrow to many a loving,
many a confiding heart; passion, mischief, sorrow, what matters it?
there comes an opiate by-and-by! The man of overwrought brain, used
up, worn-out feelings; the distempered dreamer; the reckless worker of
wrongs; the disappointed striver for an earthly crown, all shall have
their common slumber at last; unconscious, impervious, unbroken. I will
read you three stanzas from a longer piece written by one not unknown
always where that tree of knowledge grew:--
"Cessation is true rest,
And sleep for them opprest;
And not to be,--were blest.
Annihilation is
A better state than this;
Better than woe or bliss.
The name is dread;--the thing
Is death without its sting;
An overshadowing."
If such be the thought to them whose natural heritage stands strong,
fringed with luxurious hope to live beloved, to die regretted; what
will the "overshadowing" be when it passes, like a plague breath, over
the children of toil and anxiety, over them whose life is at best hard,
and their lot depressed and without "illusions"? Will they not want
their strong sensations? Will they respect any law, human or divine,
which stands between them and their enjoyments? Will they not crush
all who bar their pleasures, aye, choke them in their own blood? Why
not? The opiate comes to all at last. 'Tis an act of oblivion! The
overshadowing will cover all.
And this is the coming creed of the 19th century. To return to Comte,
about whom I might say much, but must not;--of course, he had no
foresight of anything worse than an immediate realization of his
crowning ideas--sociality, fraternity, Positivism. Europe split into
small states; women made incapable of property, but held objects
of religious worship; men worked on a communistic principle; an
oligarchy of rich; a spirituality of Positive believers, with a supreme
infallible pontiff at their head; Paris the seat of infallibility and
of order. Clotilde had shown Comte a principle antagonistic to, and
predominating over, all egoism; Altruism was to burn out of men all
selfish aims, nay, the ordinary feelings of a man! A rigorous rule of
life was to aid, and a religion without a God to enforce, this new
law. Two hours a day, divided into three private services, were to be
spent in the adoration of Humanity under the form of a living or dead
woman. The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything was to be
brought distinctly to mind; and the whole soul to be prostrated in her
honour. Comte, it has been said, gave woman everything except justice.
There is a grave moral in this tale. Theology was extinguished; but the
desire to worship burned on--a fire unquenchable. Is that desire, or
is it not, a broad reality, an inalienable truth of our nature? Comte
accepted it for himself, and not for himself alone, but for our whole
human race. Along with it he accepted the only principle which could
bestow universal validity. Our moral intuitions were acknowledged safe
guides, and something more; the rulers of an intellectual world, the
revealers of truth higher than all beside. Often and often he asserted
the dominion of heart over mind. Probably, if Comte had lived longer he
would have acknowledged other revelations of our moral nature. Moral
causation, for example. That strange phrase of his--"a modifiable
fatality," self-contradiction in words, suicide in sense, what did it
portend? Was it the first sound of a marriage-bell, freedom and duty
once again united? A change of his system wonderful to contemplate, yet
not more wonderful than the state in which he left it.
One cannot help here asking how matters would have stood if Comte had
died without knowing his Clotilde. How incomplete according to his own
account his philosophy! how wanting in that which perfected the whole!
A notable fact this, throwing great light on the value of such-like
systematization which, after all, much resembles secretion from that
interesting viscus, the system-maker's own particular brain. And there
is another fact quite as notable. How curious that Comte should have
lived so long without discovering whatever truth his own heart and
a strong human affection disclosed to him! Hence we might illustrate
and confirm a previous remark, that any one not living a truly human
life--call him undeveloped, uneducated, dwarfed, or immature--is no
typical man; and if we believe ancient maxims, scarcely a learner in
philosophy, certainly not a judge of its highest and widest problems.
The most notable fact and greatest surprise of all is, that Comte's
prayer without petition, his passionate self-mesmerizing adoration,
his religion without a God, should have taken any hold on men. No
one can transfer to others his private sorrow or his private joy;
it is hard for a man to get his thought understood, harder still to
make common pasture of his heart. But Comte devised extraordinary
propagandist expedients; those who consider his developments mere
madness, should explain why sane people have accepted them. Comte
set no value on Protestantism in any shape. The religion of his own
country he carried back to mediæval forms, and then travestied it.
There were many festivals, a calendar of saints, nine sacraments, and
a horrible caricature of the Christian Trinity. This idea crowned his
sociology, which I need hardly say was communistic socialism, enfolding
(as socialism always must enfold) and scarcely veiling the most iron
of despotisms, both temporal and spiritual. His mind delighted in
contemplating a synthesis of the great Fetish, Earth, with the great
Being Humanity; which last somehow assumes on occasion a feminine
gender.
To Clotilde, symbolizing that supreme object, Clotilde, his noble and
tender patroness, he transferred Dante's homage of Beatrice; addresses
to the mother of our Lord; and stranger than all, the prayer of Thomas
à Kempis to Almighty God, "Amem te plusquam me, nec me nisi propter
te"--"May I love Thee more than self, nor self at all except for Thee."
Now consider: when Comte died, sixty-four years had not quite elapsed
since goddesses of Reason were worshipped in the cathedral and other
churches of Paris. Upon each high altar a fair woman, chosen for her
faultless beauty, sate enthroned, her feet resting upon the consecrated
slab. Gaily clothed in tunic and Greek mantle, she was so displayed
by a torch behind her throne, so elevated above her worshippers, as
to attract from Phrygian cap to Italic shoe their passionate gaze and
adoration. Low down beneath her footstool lay the broken symbols of
a faith then declared effete and passed away; just as half a century
afterwards Comte declared theology passed away. Music sounded, incense
smoked, Bishop Gobel, who assisted at a parody of sacred rites, wept
tears of shame, but in fear and trembling he assisted. The object of
this mad mockery of religion, this empire of heart over mind, this
woman-worship, was to proclaim afresh Fraternity, Progress, Sociality.
Sociality, for the supposed law of which final development Comte
worshipped humanity and Clotilde--but disowned immortality and God.
These two madnesses, how near akin, how far apart were they? The world
is not really made young by destroying old things; yet the path of 18th
century madness lay through fire and blood. Its deeds are sometimes
spoken of, even now, as great crimes; but no great crime is criminal
in the sight of men whose life is godless, dark, and unsubstantial.
Horrors pass before them like unrealities. "The world," writes Mercier
on the trial of Louis XVI,--"The world is all an optical shadow." In
our 19th century life, 'tis a skilfully prepared overshadowing, beneath
which men beat their brows till their blood-shot eyes see red. "I see
red," exclaimed Eugene Sue's ruffian, "and then I strike with the
knife."[17]
Let me end by telling you a dream, which is not all a dream.
A company of _savans_ were seen in the visions of the night, busy
with a new scientific invention. Earth, they argued, earth has her
volcanoes, her burning exhalations; men have electric lights, fires,
gas lamps, furnaces. These make up the world's proper illumination.
The effect intended was, therefore, to darken the air we breathe, so
that no rays from the upper sky should pass through it. The inventors
hoped that a district, a country, nay, even a world, might thus be
overshadowed by a gloom impervious to moon and stars by night, to sun
by day; and the human eye see no changes, save those which the earth's
activity, or human power and skill, might produce. Terrestrial and
artificial alternations excepted, all was to be changeless as winter
midnight--deep impenetrable darkness! It was seen slowly, very slowly,
to descend. In thirty years the men of science hoped and purposed its
perfection.
Did those who had previously known the beautiful light of heaven, who
had bathed and basked in the life-giving sunbeam, feel happy, or even
calm, when they saw their children and children's children robbed of
celestial glory and gladness?
Yet there is one thing worse than a world without a sun--you know what
I mean--Humanity without a GOD.
POSTSCRIPT.
The Lecturer purposely abstained from reading Professor Huxley's acute
critique on Positivism until this Lecture had gone to press. He now
strongly recommends his auditors to read No. viii. of the Lay Sermons.
Should any reader find difficulties in pages 23-25 of the foregoing
Lecture, he will do well to peruse Littré's "Auguste Comte et la
Philosophie Positive," chapter iii., particularly pp. 42, 43.
SCIENCE AND REVELATION.
BY THE VERY REVEREND
R. PAYNE SMITH, D.D.,
DEAN OF CANTERBURY; LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, OXFORD.
SCIENCE AND REVELATION.
The duty which has been imposed upon me to-day by the Christian
Evidence Society is, I conceive, to state as clearly as I can, what
is our ground for believing that a revelation is not only possible,
but is a necessary part of the system of this world. As the programme
further joins science and revelation, I conceive that I am debarred
from any but a strictly scientific proof. We may reasonably infer the
probability of a revelation from God's necessary attribute of love. We
may ourselves feel morally sure that a creature, approaching so nearly
to the spiritual world, and capable of so much good as is man, would
not be left by his Maker in that miserable state of vice and misery in
which we find ourselves. There are many good and weighty reasons for
believing that God would give us a revelation, and that the Christian
religion is God's revelation--reasons drawn from the nature of God,
from the actual condition in which man is placed, and from the direct
teachings of Holy Scripture--all these, like a cord of many threads
that cannot easily be broken, serve to confirm the faith of the
believer, but I must forego their use. In confining myself to what I
conceive to be the strictly scientific basis of a revelation, I would,
nevertheless, beg you to remember that the evidences of Christianity
are cumulative. They cover a vast field, and it is in their united
force that their strength lies. The very vastness of the field often
invites attack. Some outlying work seems capable of overthrow. Some
discovery in the domains of history, of philology, or of physical
science, seems to provide new weapons for the assault. Possibly not
all the arguments used in defence of Christianity will endure the
test of close and accurate examination. Possibly, too, in our views
of the nature of Christianity, and in our exegesis of the Scriptures,
we have arrived only at partial truth, and do not distinguish with
sufficient accuracy between what is certainly revealed, and what is
nothing more that a possible explanation of the Divine word. There
are, moreover, I will candidly confess, difficulties in the way of
faith. However new may be the form of the attack, and however modern
the materials which it uses, yet the strength of the attack lies in
real difficulties, which are no new matter, but have ever lain deep in
the minds of thoughtful men. I do not believe that belief is a thing
easy of attainment, any more than virtue is. I believe that both are
victories, gained by a struggle--gained over opposing forces.[173] But
as certain as I am that this present state of things was intended to
train man to virtue, though I cannot answer all the objections brought
against the system of the world being exactly what it is, nor solve all
the doubts and difficulties, moral and metaphysical, which surround
us: so I am convinced, in spite of similar difficulties in the way of
religion, that belief, and not unbelief, is the end at which man ought
to aim. I believe that man was intended to attain to a higher and more
perfect state than that in which he now finds himself, and that he can
only attain to it by virtue and faith; but as the very value of these
lies apparently in their being won by an effort, long and earnestly
maintained, I am not surprised at the existence of difficulties, least
of all of such difficulties as arise from our ignorance. Still belief
would be unnecessarily[18] difficult,[174] and we may even say, morally
impossible, if the sum of the arguments in defence of a revelation did
not largely exceed the sum of the arguments against one. With these
arguments I have to-day nothing to do. The evidences of Christianity,
external and internal, will be treated of by others. My business is to
show that a revelation was to be expected; that it was probable, or at
all events possible, and, therefore, that the evidences of Christianity
have a claim upon the consideration of every right thinking man. In
showing that a revelation was to be expected, I shall at the same
time show what is the exact position which it holds, and in what way
revealed knowledge differs from all other knowledge, scientific and
unscientific.
Now the argument which I shall use as my proof of the possibility of a
revelation is simply this, that in the present system of things we find
no being endowed with any faculties without there being also provided
a proper field for their exercise, and a necessity imposed upon that
being of using those faculties. In this statement I assume nothing.
I do not assume that there is a God who made these beings. I do not
assume that they were made or created; still less do I assume that
they were intended to use their faculties. I put aside all theories of
design and causation, not because I do not believe that they possess
force, but because the actual facts which I see around me, or which I
am taught by scientific men, are enough for my proof. The only thing
which I assume is, that the laws of nature are universal; and I assume
this simply because it will be readily granted me. The universality of
nature's laws compels us to admit that a law which holds good in all
known cases, will necessarily hold good in all cases whatsoever.
Our whole language is so essentially based upon religious ideas that it
would be very difficult for me to use only neutral words. But in using
religious words, I wish them to be understood in a neutral sense. If
I speak of creatures, I mean only beings, things which exist now, or
have existed. If I speak of them as endowed with faculties, I merely
mean that they possess them. By nature, I mean simply the present
state of things, whether designed by an intelligent mind, or a mere
come-by-chance. I look simply around me at what is--or at all events
appears to be--and I find myself in a world in which there is a very
exact correspondence between the endowments and faculties of every
existent being, and the state of things in which it happens to be.
So exact is this correspondence, that if you give Professor Owen a
bone, he will tell you to what order of animals its owner belonged,
what were its habits, the nature of its food, of its habitat, and mode
of life. Nature works out this correspondence even to the most minute
detail. By looking at the bone of a quadruped we can tell, not merely
great things about it, but such trifles as which leg it used first
in getting up from the ground. For nature is so undeviating that the
outward habits, even in things of no apparent moment, correspond to
the internal conformation.
Now, possibly, it will readily be granted that such is the present
state of things. Whatever may have been the stages through which we
have, or have not, passed, we now find ourselves in a world of apparent
cause and effect--full of infinitely varied forms of life, but of
which none are purposeless. I cannot upon this point bring forward a
better witness than Professor Huxley, who, in his most interesting
essay on Geological Contemporaneity (Lay Sermons, p. 236) speaks
as follows:--"All who are competent to express an opinion upon the
subject are, at present, agreed that the manifold varieties of animal
and vegetable form have not either come into existence by chance,
nor result from _capricious exertions of creative power_; but that
they have taken place in a definite order, the statement of which
order is what men of science term a natural law." The whole chain of
animal and vegetable life seems to this great authority so perfect
and complete, that even the variations which have taken place in it,
have been governed, he considers, by a law, that is, a regular and
orderly succession. These variations have been the result, apparently,
of certain changes in the external state of things, to which the
external conformation of the animal has somehow or other been made
to correspond. But as Professor Huxley points out, these variations
have been confined to very narrow limits. When people speak of the
enormous changes which have taken place in the living population of
the globe during geological eras, they refer, he says, to the presence
in the later rocks of fossil remains of a vast number of animals not
discoverable in the earlier rocks; but the fossils which you do find in
the early rocks differ but little from existing species. (See p. 238.)
He thus negatives on sure grounds the idea that a state of things ever
existed on this globe essentially unlike what exists now.
What then exists now? I answer, first of all a vast chain of vegetable
life, fitted in every portion of it to find its own subsistence, and
to propagate its species. Its main function is to "manufacture out
of mineral substances that protoplasm, upon which, in the long run,
all animal life depends." (Lay Sermons, p. 138.) I need not detain
you by enumerating the many various contrivances by which plants are
enabled to manufacture food for us out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen--substances upon which, in their original state, animals
cannot feed--nor the still more curious and elaborate processes by
which their fecundation, and the propagation of each species is
provided for--processes which seem often to require the intervention of
animal life. I need not detain you upon this point: you will readily
grant that this correspondence does exist. If a plant is not suited to
its habitat, and cannot use its natural powers, nature imposes upon it
the severe penalties--first, of degradation, and then of death.
Upon the animal world she imposes just the same penalties. There is
neither excess nor defect in her operations.[19] Whatever she gives
must be used, but animals, being governed in the main by instincts,
have no choice. They necessarily employ all their living powers,
and apparently have no powers beyond those indispensable for their
existence. This point, however, I will not press, though it seems to
follow from the fact asserted by Professor Huxley, that no important
difference can be observed between the fossil remains found in the
earliest strata, and animals of the same species and order existent
now. (See pp. 241, 242, and for vegetables, p. 240.) For, as he tells
you, facts establish a scientific law--law in the mouths of scientific
men, meaning an established order of facts. Well then! I will put this
fact of absence of progress aside, and with it the corollary of the
absence of latent powers.[20] But of actual powers it is evident that
animals do use them all, and have to use them all. So close, too, is
the agreement between the powers and the external position of every
animal, that a change in its external relations will modify its powers
to a certain extent. But only to a certain extent; there are fixed
limits to the adaptability of those living powers. If the changes are
such as to occasion a more active exercise of its living powers, the
animal increases in strength, size, and beauty; if unfavourable, but
still permitting some use of its powers, it dwindles and decays. But
pass the appointed bounds and the animal dies. Nature is exacting the
penalty of the non-use of what it has given. Nature exacts a severe
penalty for the mis-use, and the last and final penalty for the
violation of her laws. I do not know that an ascidian jelly-bag has any
other faculties than those of sucking in water, and of sticking to a
stone.[21] But this I know, that if it does not use all the powers it
possesses and suck in its water, and stick to its stone, no process of
natural selection will ever develop it into a monkey: it will go to the
limbo of nonentity.[22] But what an alarming thought, that at a period
separated from us by such vast geologic ages, that, according to the
nebular hypothesis, held by so many of our leading astronomers as a
probable theory, this whole universe was a mass of heated vapour; what
an alarming thought that the very existence of man should have depended
upon a jelly bag sticking to a stone and sucking up water! Alas! there
was then no water, no stones, no jelly bags, and therefore there are
now no men! Man escapes, poor thing, from his humble parentage: he
need not feel his ears to find the proof there of his monkeyhood:[23]
but his escape costs him dear. What with astronomy and biology, men of
science between them have cleared us out of existence. Scientifically,
man is no more.