secular science in the manner and to the extent indicated in the Manchester
trilogy; if the distinguished prelates who offer these terms are really
plenipotentiaries, then, so far as I may presume to speak on such a matter,
there will be no difficulty about concluding a perpetual treaty of peace,
and indeed of alliance, between the high contracting powers, whose history
has hitherto been little more than a record of continual warfare. But if
the great Chancellor's maxim, "Do ut des," is to form the basis of
negotiation, I am afraid that secular science will be ruined; for it seems
to me that theology, under the generous impulse of a sudden conversion, has
given all that she hath; and indeed, on one point, has surrendered more
than can reasonably be asked.
I suppose I must be prepared to face the reproach which attaches to those
who criticise a gift, if I venture to observe that I do not think that the
Bishop of Manchester need have been so much alarmed, as he evidently has
been, by the objections which have often been raised to prayer, on the
ground that a belief in the efficacy of prayer is inconsistent with a
belief in the constancy of the order of nature.
The Bishop appears to admit that there is an antagonism between the
"regular economy of nature" and the "regular economy of prayer" (p. 39),
and that "prayers for the interruption of God's natural order" are of
"doubtful validity" (p. 42). It appears to me that the Bishop's difficulty
simply adds another example to those which I have several times insisted
{304} upon in the pages of this Review and elsewhere, of the mischief which
has been done, and is being done, by a mistaken apprehension of the real
meaning of "natural order" and "law of nature."
May I, therefore, be permitted to repeat, once more, that the statements
denoted by these terms have no greater value or cogency than such as may
attach to generalisations from experience of the past, and to expectations
for the future based upon that experience? Nobody can presume to say what
the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it
extended over all past time and through all space) that events had happened
in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionally strong
expectation that events will go on so happening, and the demand for a
proportional strength of evidence in favour of any assertion that they had
happened otherwise.
It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which every one who is
capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out
of all _a priori_ objections either to ordinary "miracles" or to the
efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous
intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say _a priori_ that
any given so-called miraculous event is impossible; and no one is entitled
to say _a priori_ that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of
nature cannot possibly avail.
The supposition that there is any inconsistency between the acceptance of
the constancy of natural {305} order and a belief in the efficacy of
prayer, is the more unaccountable as it is obviously contradicted by
analogies furnished by everyday experience. The belief in the efficacy of
prayer depends upon the assumption that there is somebody, somewhere, who
is strong enough to deal with the earth and its contents as men deal with
the things and events which they are strong enough to modify or control;
and who is capable of being moved by appeals such as men make to one
another. This belief does not even involve theism; for our earth is an
insignificant particle of the solar system, while the solar system is
hardly worth speaking of in relation to the All; and, for anything that can
be proved to the contrary, there may be beings endowed with full powers
over our system, yet, practically, as insignificant as ourselves in
relation to the universe. If any one pleases, therefore, to give
unrestrained liberty to his fancy, he may plead analogy in favour of the
dream that there may be, somewhere, a finite being, or beings, who can play
with the solar system as a child plays with a toy; and that such being may
be willing to do anything which he is properly supplicated to do. For we
are not justified in saying that it is impossible for beings having the
nature of men, only vastly more powerful, to exist; and if they do exist,
they may act as and when we ask them to do so, just as our brother men act.
As a matter of fact, the great mass of the human race has believed, and
still believes, in such beings, under the various names of fairies, gnomes,
angels, and demons. Certainly I do {306} not lack faith in the constancy of
natural order. But I am not less convinced that if I were to ask the Bishop
of Manchester to do me a kindness which lay within his power, he would do
it. And I am unable to see that his action on my request involves any
violation of the order of nature. On the contrary, as I have not the honour
to know the Bishop personally, my action would be based upon my faith in
that "law of nature," or generalisation from experience, which tells me
that, as a rule, men who occupy the Bishop's position are kindly and
courteous. How is the case altered if my request is preferred to some
imaginary superior being, or to the Most High Being, who, by the
supposition, is able to arrest disease, or make the sun stand still in the
heavens, just as easily as I can stop my watch, or make it indicate any
hour that pleases me?
I repeat that it is not upon any _a priori_ considerations that objections,
either to the supposed efficacy of prayer in modifying the course of
events, or to the supposed occurrence of miracles, can be scientifically
based. The real objection, and, to my mind, the fatal objection, to both
these suppositions, is the inadequacy of the evidence to prove any given
case of such occurrences which has been adduced. It is a canon of common
sense, to say nothing of science, that the more improbable a supposed
occurrence, the more cogent ought to be the evidence in its favour. I have
looked somewhat carefully into the subject, and I am unable to find in the
records of any miraculous event evidence {307} which even approximates to
the fulfilment of this requirement.
But, in the case of prayer, the Bishop points out a most just and necessary
distinction between its effect on the course of nature, outside ourselves,
and its effect within the region of the supplicator's mind.
It is a "law of nature," verifiable by everyday experience, that our
already formed convictions, our strong desires, our intent occupation with
particular ideas, modify our mental operations to a most marvellous extent,
and produce enduring changes in the direction and in the intensity of our
intellectual and moral activities. Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas
as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of
intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.
Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more
or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of
what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or
the man of science. One calls it faith, another calls it inspiration, a
third calls it insight; but the "intending of the mind," to borrow Newton's
well-known phrase, the concentration of all the rays of intellectual energy
on some one point, until it glows and colours the whole cast of thought
with its peculiar light, is common to all.
I take it that the Bishop of Manchester has psychological science with him
when he insists upon the subjective efficacy of prayer in faith, and on the
{308} seemingly miraculous effects which such "intending of the mind" upon
religious and moral ideals may have upon character and happiness.
Scientific faith, at present, takes it no further than the prayer which
Ajax offered; but that petition is continually granted.
Whatever points of detail may yet remain open for discussion, however, I
repeat the opinion I have already expressed, that the Manchester sermons
concede all that science has an indisputable right, or any pressing need,
to ask, and that not grudgingly but generously; and, if the three bishops
of 1887 carry the Church with them, I think they will have as good title to
the permanent gratitude of posterity as the famous seven who went to the
Tower in defence of the Church two hundred years ago.
Will their brethren follow their just and prudent guidance? I have no such
acquaintance with the currents of ecclesiastical opinion as would justify
me in even hazarding a guess on such a difficult topic. But some recent
omens are hardly favourable. There seems to be an impression abroad--I do
not desire to give any countenance to it--that I am fond of reading
sermons. From time to time, unknown correspondents--some apparently
animated by the charitable desire to promote my conversion, and others
unmistakably anxious to spur me to the expression of wrathful
antagonism--favour me with reports or copies of such productions.
I found one of the latter category among the accumulated arrears to which I
have already referred.
It is a full, and apparently accurate, report of a {309} discourse by a
person of no less ecclesiastical rank than the three authors of the sermons
I have hitherto been considering; but who he is, and where or when the
sermon was preached, are secrets which wild horses shall not tear from me,
lest I fall again under high censure for attacking a clergyman. Only if the
editor of this Review thinks it his duty to have independent evidence that
the sermon has a real existence, will I, in the strictest confidence,
communicate it to him.
The preacher, in this case, is of a very different mind from the three
bishops--and this mind is different in quality, different in spirit, and
different in contents. He discourses on the _a priori_ objections to
miracles, apparently without being aware, in spite of all the discussions
of the last seven or eight years, that he is doing battle with a shadow.
I trust I do not misrepresent the Bishop of Manchester in saying that the
essence of his remarkable discourse is the insistence upon the "supreme
importance of the purely spiritual in our faith," and of the relative, if
not absolute, insignificance of aught else. He obviously perceives the
bearing of his arguments against the alterability of the course of outward
nature by prayer, on the question of miracles in general; for he is careful
to say that "the possibility of miracles, of a rare and unusual
transcendence of the world order is not here in question" (p. 38). It may
be permitted me to suppose, however, that, if miracles were in question,
the speaker who warns us "that we must look for the heart of the absolute
{310} religion in that part of it which prescribes our moral and religious
relations" (p. 46) would not be disposed to advise those who had found the
heart of Christianity to take much thought about its miraculous integument.
My anonymous sermon will have nothing to do with such notions as these, and
its preacher is not too polite, to say nothing of charitable, towards those
who entertain them.
Scientific men, therefore, are perfectly right in asserting that
Christianity rests on miracles. If miracles never happened,
Christianity, in any sense which is not a mockery, which does not make
the term of none effect, has no reality. I dwell on this because there
is now an effort making to get up a non-miraculous, invertebrate
Christianity, which may escape the ban of science. And I would warn you
very distinctly against this new contrivance. Christianity is
essentially miraculous, and falls to the ground if miracles be
impossible.
Well, warning for warning. I venture to warn this preacher and those who,
with him, persist in identifying Christianity with the miraculous, that
such forms of Christianity are not only doomed to fall to the ground; but
that, within the last half century, they have been driving that way with
continually accelerated velocity.
The so-called religious world is given to a strange delusion. It fondly
imagines that it possesses the monopoly of serious and constant reflection
upon the terrible problems of existence; and that those who cannot accept
its shibboleths are either mere Gallios, caring for none of these things,
or libertines desiring to escape from the restraints of morality. It does
not {311} appear to have entered the imaginations of these people that,
outside their pale and firmly resolved never to enter it, there are
thousands of men, certainly not their inferiors in character, capacity, or
knowledge of the questions at issue, who estimate those purely spiritual
elements of the Christian faith of which the Bishop of Manchester speaks as
highly as the Bishop does; but who will have nothing to do with the
Christian Churches, because in their apprehension and for them, the
profession of belief in the miraculous, on the evidence offered, would be
simply immoral.
So far as my experience goes, men of science are neither better nor worse
than the rest of the world. Occupation with the endlessly great parts of
the universe does not necessarily involve greatness of character, nor does
microscopic study of the infinitely little always produce humility. We have
our full share of original sin; need, greed, and vainglory beset us as they
do other mortals; and our progress is, for the most part, like that of a
tacking ship, the resultant of opposite divergencies from the straight
path. But, for all that, there is one moral benefit which the pursuit of
science unquestionably bestows. It keeps the estimate of the value of
evidence up to the proper mark; and we are constantly receiving lessons,
and sometimes very sharp ones, on the nature of proof. Men of science will
always act up to their standard of veracity, when mankind in general leave
off sinning; but that standard appears to me to be higher among them than
in any other class of the community. {312}
I do not know any body of scientific men who could be got to listen without
the strongest expressions of disgusted repudiation to the exposition of a
pretended scientific discovery, which had no better evidence to show for
itself than the story of the devils entering a herd of swine, or of the
fig-tree that was blasted for bearing no figs when "it was not the season
of figs." Whether such events are possible or impossible, no man can say;
but scientific ethics can and does declare that the profession of belief in
them, on the evidence of documents of unknown date and of unknown
authorship, is immoral. Theological apologists who insist that morality
will vanish if their dogmas are exploded, would do well to consider the
fact that, in the matter of intellectual veracity, science is already a
long way ahead of the Churches; and that, in this particular, it is
exerting an educational influence on mankind of which the Churches have
shown themselves utterly incapable.
Undoubtedly that varying compound of some of the best and some of the worst
elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate
character of certain people of the Western world, which, since the second
century, has assumed to itself the title of orthodox Christianity, "rests
on miracles" and falls to the ground, not "if miracles be impossible," but
if those to whom it is committed prove themselves unable to fulfil the
conditions of honest belief. That this Christianity is doomed to fall is,
to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will be neither sudden nor speedy.
The Church, with all the aid {313} lent it by the secular arm, took many
centuries to extirpate the open practice of pagan idolatry within its own
fold; and those who have travelled in southern Europe will be aware that it
has not extirpated the essence of such idolatry even yet. _Mutato nomine_,
it is probable that there is as much sheer fetichism among the Roman
populace now as there was eighteen hundred years ago; and if Marcus
Antoninus could descend from his horse and ascend the steps of the Ara
Coeli church about Twelfth Day, the only thing that need strike him would
be the extremely contemptible character of the modern idols as works of
art.
Science will certainly neither ask for, nor receive, the aid of the secular
arm. It will trust to the much better and more powerful help of that
education in scientific truth and in the morals of assent, which is
rendered as indispensable, as it is inevitable, by the permeation of
practical life with the products and ideas of science. But no one who
considers the present state of even the most developed countries can doubt
that the scientific light that has come into the world will, for a long
time, have to shine in the midst of darkness. The urban populations, driven
into contact with science by trade and manufacture, will more and more
receive it, while the _pagani_ will lag behind. Let us hope that no Julian
may arise among them to head a forlorn hope against the inevitable.
Whatever happens, science may bide her time in patience and in confidence.
But to return to my "Anonymous." I am afraid {314} that if he represents
any great party in the Church, the spirit of justice and reasonableness
which animates the three bishops has as slender a chance of being imitated,
on a large scale, as their common sense and their courtesy. For, not
contented with misrepresenting science on its speculative side, "Anonymous"
attacks its morality.
For two whole years, investigations and conclusions which would upset
the theories of Darwin on the formation of coral islands were actually
suppressed, and that by the advice even of those who accepted them,
_for fear of upsetting the faith and disturbing the judgment formed by
the multitude on the scientific character--the infallibility--of the
great master!_
So far as I know anything about the matters which are here referred to, the
part of this passage which I have italicised is absolutely untrue. I
believe that I am intimately acquainted with all Mr. Darwin's immediate
scientific friends; and I say that no one of them, nor any other man of
science known to me, ever could, or would, have given such advice to any
one--if for no other reason than that, with the example of the most candid
and patient listener to objections that ever lived fresh in their memories,
they could not so grossly have at once violated their highest duty and
dishonoured their friend.
The charge thus brought by "Anonymous" affects the honour and the probity
of men of science; if it is true, we have forfeited all claim to the
confidence of the general public. In my belief it is utterly false, and its
real effect will be to discredit those who are responsible for it. As is
the way with slanders, it {315} has grown by repetition. "Anonymous" is
responsible for the peculiarly offensive form which it has taken in his
hands; but he is not responsible for originating it. He has evidently been
inspired by an article entitled "A Great Lesson," published in the
September number of this Review. Truly it is "a great lesson," but not
quite in the sense intended by the giver thereof.
In the course of his doubtless well-meant admonitions, the Duke of Argyll
commits himself to a greater number of statements which are demonstrably
incorrect, and which any one who ventured to write upon the subject ought
to have known to be incorrect, than I have ever seen gathered together in
so small a space.
I submit a gathering from the rich store for the appreciation of the
public.
First:--
Mr. Murray's new explanation of the structure of coral-reefs and
islands was communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1880, and
supported with such a weight of facts and such a close texture of
reasoning, that no serious reply has ever been attempted (p. 305).
"No serious reply has ever been attempted"! I suppose that the Duke of
Argyll may have heard of Professor Dana, whose years of labour devoted to
corals and coral-reefs when he was naturalist of the American expedition
under Commodore Wilkes, more than forty years ago, have ever since caused
him to be recognised as an authority of the first rank on such subjects.
Now does his Grace know, or does he not {316} know, that, in the year 1885,
Professor Dana published an elaborate paper "On the Origin of Coral-Reefs
and Islands," in which, after referring to a presidential address by the
Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland delivered in
1883, in which special attention is directed to Mr. Murray's views,
Professor Dana says:--
The existing state of doubt on the question has led the writer to
reconsider the earlier and later facts, and in the following pages he
gives his results.
Professor Dana then devotes many pages of his very "serious reply" to a
most admirable and weighty criticism of the objections which have at
various times been raised to Mr. Darwin's doctrine, by Professor Semper, by
Dr. Rein, and finally by Mr. Murray, and he states his final judgment as
follows:--
With the theory of abrasion and solution incompetent, all the
hypotheses of objectors to Darwin's theory are alike weak; for all have
made these processes their chief reliance, whether appealing to a
calcareous, or a volcanic, or a mountain-peak basement for the
structure. The subsidence which the Darwinian theory requires has not
been opposed by the mention of any fact at variance with it, nor by
setting aside Darwin's arguments in its favour; and it has found new
support in the facts from the _Challenger's_ soundings off Tahiti, that
had been put in array against it, and strong corroboration in the facts
from the West Indies.
Darwin's theory, therefore, remains as the theory that accounts for the
origin of reefs and islands.[77]
Be it understood that I express no opinion on the controverted points. I
doubt if there are ten living men who, having a practical knowledge of what
a {317} coral-reef is, have endeavoured to master the very difficult
biological and geological problems involved in their study. I happen to
have spent the best part of three years among coral-reefs and to have made
that attempt; and, when Mr. Murray's work appeared, I said to myself that
until I had two or three months to give to the renewed study of the subject
in all its bearings, I must be content to remain in a condition of
suspended judgment. In the meanwhile, the man who would be voted by common
acclamation as the most competent person now living to act as umpire, has
delivered the verdict I have quoted; and, to go no further, has fully
justified the hesitation I and others may have felt about expressing an
opinion. Under these circumstances, it seems to me to require a good deal
of courage to say "no serious reply has ever been attempted"; and to chide
the men of science, in lofty tones, for their "reluctance to admit an
error" which is not admitted; and for their "slow and sulky acquiescence"
in a conclusion which they have the gravest warranty for suspecting!
Second:--
Darwin himself had lived to hear of the new solution, and, with that
splendid candour which was eminent in him, his mind, though now grown
old in his own early convictions, was at least ready to entertain it,
and to confess that serious doubts had been awakened as to the truth of
his famous theory (p. 305).
I wish that Darwin's splendid candour could be conveyed by some description
of spiritual "microbe" to those who write about him. I am not aware that
Mr. Darwin ever entertained "serious doubts as to {318} the truth of his
famous theory"; and there is tolerably good evidence to the contrary. The
second edition of his work, published in 1876, proves that he entertained
no such doubts then; a letter to Professor Semper, whose objections, in
some respects, forestalled those of Mr. Murray, dated October 2, 1879,
expresses his continued adherence to the opinion "that the atolls and
barrier reefs in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans indicate
subsidence"; and the letter of my friend Professor Judd, printed at the end
of this article (which I had perhaps better say Professor Judd had not
seen) will prove that this opinion remained unaltered to the end of his
life.
Third:--
... Darwin's theory is a dream. It is not only unsound, but it is in
many respects the reverse of truth. With all his conscientiousness,
with all his caution, with all his powers of observation, Darwin in
this matter fell into errors as profound as the abysses of the Pacific
(p. 301).