Which answer eventually the positive school will choose, and which answer men in general will accept, I make as I have said before, no attempt to answer. My only purpose to show is, that if man has any moral being at all, he has it in virtue of his immaterial will—a force, a something of which physical science can give no account whatever, and which it has no shadow of authority either for affirming or for denying; and further, that if we are not prevented by it from affirming his immaterial will, we are not prevented from affirming his immortality, and the existence of God likewise.

And now I come to that third point which I said I should deal with here, but which I have not yet touched upon. Every logical reasoner who admits the power of will must admit not only the possibility of miracles, but also the actual fact of their daily and hourly occurrence. Every exertion of the human will is a miracle in the strictest sense of the word; only it takes place privately, within the closed walls of the brain. The molecules of the brain are arranged and ordered by a supernatural agency. Their natural automatic movements are suspended, or directed and interfered with. It is true that in common usage the word miracle has a more restricted sense. It is applied generally not to the action of man's will, but of God's. But the sense in both cases is essentially the same. God's will is conceived of as disturbing the automatic movements of matter without the skull, in just the same way as man's will is conceived of as disturbing those of the brain within it. Nor, though the alleged manifestations of the former do more violence to the scientific imagination than do those of the latter, are they in the eye of reason one whit more impossible. The erection of a pyramid at the will of an Egyptian king would as much disturb the course of nature as the removal of a mountain by the faith of a Galilean fisherman; whilst the flooding of the Sahara at the will of a speculating company would interfere with the weather of Europe far more than the most believing of men ever thought that any answer to prayer would.

It will thus be seen that morality and religion are, so far as science goes, on one and the same footing—of one and the same substance, and that as assailed by science they either fall together or stand together. It will be seen too that the power of science against them resides not in itself, but in a certain intellectual fulcrum that we ourselves supply it with. That its methods can discover no trace of either of them, of itself proves nothing, unless we first lay down as a dogma that its methods of discovery are the only methods. If we are prepared to abide by this, there is little more to be said. The rest, it is becoming daily plainer, is a very simple process; and what we have to urge against religion will thenceforth amount to this. There is no supernatural, because everything is natural; there is no spirit, because everything is matter; or there is no air, because everything is earth; there is no fire, because everything is water; a rose has no smell because our eyes cannot detect any.

This, in its simplest form, is the so-called argument of modern materialism. Argument, however, it is quite plain it is not. It is a mere dogmatic statement, that can give no logical account of itself, and must trust, for its acceptance, to the world's vague sense of its fitness. The modern world, it is true, has mistaken it for an argument, and has been cowed by it accordingly; but the mistake is a simple one, and can be readily accounted for. The dogmatism of denial was formerly a sort of crude rebellion, inconsistent with itself, and vulnerable in a thousand places. Nature, as then known, was, to all who could weigh the wonder of it, a thing inexplicable without some supernatural agency. Indeed, marks of such an agency seemed to meet men everywhere. But now all this has changed. Step by step science has been unravelling the tangle, and has loosened with its human fingers the knots that once seemed deo digni vindice. It has enabled us to see in nature a complete machine, needing no aid from without. It has made a conception of things rational and coherent that was formerly absurd and arbitrary. Science has done all this; but this is all that it has done. The dogmatism of denial it has left as it found it, an unverified and unverifiable assertion. It has simply made this dogmatism consistent with itself. But in doing this, as men will soon come to see, it has done a great deal more than its chief masters bargained for. Nature, as explained by science, is nothing more than a vast automaton; and man with all his ways and works is simply a part of Nature, and can, by no device of thought, be detached from or set above it. He is as absolutely automatic as a tree is, or as a flower is; and is an incapable as a tree or flower of any spiritual responsibility or significance. Here we see the real limits of science. It will explain the facts of life to us, it is true, but it will not explain the value that hitherto we have attached to them. Is that solemn value a fact or fancy? As far as proof and reason go, we can answer either way. We have two simple and opposite statements set against each other, between which argument will give us no help in choosing, and between which the only arbiter is a judgment formed upon utterly alien grounds. As for proof, the nature of the case does not admit of it. The world of moral facts, if it existed a thousand times, could give no more proof of its existence than it does now. If on other grounds we believe that it does exist, then signs, if not proofs of it, at once surround us everywhere. But let the belief in its reality fail us, and instantly the whole cloud of witnesses vanishes. For science to demand a proof that shall convince it on its own premisses is to demand an impossibility, and to involve a contradiction in terms. Science is only possible on the assumption that nature is uniform. Morality is only possible on the assumption that this uniformity is interfered with by the will. The world of morals is as distinct from the world of science as a wine is from the cup that holds it; and to say that it does not exist because science can find no trace of it, is to say that a bird has not flown over a desert because it has left no footprints in the sand. And as with morals, so it is with religion. Science will allow us to deny or to affirm both. Reason will not allow us to deny or affirm only one.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] The argument has been used in this exact form by Professor Clifford.

[34] Dreams and Realities, by Leslie Stephen.

[35] The feebleness and vacillation of Dr. Tyndall's whole views of things, as soon as they bear on matters that are of any universal moment, is so typical of the entire positive thought of the day, that I may with advantage give one or two further illustrations of it. Although in one place he proclaims loudly that the emergence of consciousness from matter must ever remain a mystery, he yet shows indication of a hope that it may yet be solved. He quotes with approval, and with an implication that he himself leans to the view expressed in them, the following words of Ueberweg, whom he calls 'one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced.' 'What happens in the brain, says Ueberweg, 'would in my opinion not be possible if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration, did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a pair of mice, and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment. The quantity of these preserved by the first pair is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last would feel more fully than the first. The sensations and the feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale, it is true, and not concentrated, as in the brain.' 'We may not,' Dr. Tyndall adds, by way of a gloss to this, 'be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser. Hence Ueberweg's comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling pre-existing, but diluted, in the food.'

Let us now compare this with the following. 'It is no explanation,' says Dr. Tyndall, 'to say that objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should phenomena have two sides? There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window pane? If not, why should the molecular motions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion consciousness?'

Here we have two views, diametrically opposed to each other, the one suggested with approval, and the other implied as his own, by the same writer, and in the same short essay. The first view is that consciousness is the general property of all matter, just as motion is. The second view is that consciousness is not the general property of matter, but the inexplicable property of the brain only.

Here again we have a similar inconsistency. Upon one page Dr. Tyndall says that when we have 'exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty Mystery stills looms beyond us. We have made no step towards its solution. And thus it will ever loom.' And on the opposite page he says thus: 'If asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, the problem of the universe, I must shake my head in doubt.'

Further, I will remind the reader of Dr. Tyndall's arguments, on one occasion, against any outside builder or creator of the material universe. He argued that such did not exist, because his supposed action was not definitely presentable. 'I should enquire after its shape,' he says:—'Has it legs or arms? If not, I would wish it to be made clear to me how a thing without these appliances can act so perfectly the part of a builder? He challenged the theist (the theist addressed at the time was Dr. Martineau) to give him some account of his God's workings; and 'When he does this,' said Dr. Tyndall, 'I shall "demand of him an immediate exercise" of the power "of definite mental presentation."' If he fails here, Dr. Tyndall argues, his case is at once disproved; for nothing exists that is not thus presentable. Let us compare this with his dealing with the fact of consciousness. Consciousness, he admits, is not thus presentable; and yet consciousness, he admits, exists.

Instances might be multiplied of the same vacillation and confusion of thought—the same feminine inability to be constant to one train of reasoning. But those just given suffice. What weight can we attach to a man's philosophy, who after telling us that consciousness may possibly be an inherent property of matter, of which 'the receit of reason is a limbec only,' adds in the same breath almost, that matter generally is certainly not conscious, and that consciousness comes to the brain we know not whence nor wherefore? What shall we say of a man who in one sentence tells us that it is impossible that science can ever solve the riddle of things, and tells us in the next sentence that it is doubtful if this impossibility will be accomplished within the next fifty years?—who argues that God is a mystery, and therefore God is a fiction; who admits that consciousness is a fact, and yet proclaims that it is a mystery; and who says that the fact of matter producing consciousness being a mystery, proves the mystery of consciousness acting on matter to be a fact?

[36] It is true that one of the favourite teachings of the positive school is, that as to this question the proper attitude is that of Agnosticism; in other words, that a state of perpetual suspense on this subject is the only rational one. They are asked, have we a soul, a will, and consequently any moral responsibility? And the answer is that they must shake their heads in doubt. It is true they tell us that it is but as men of science that they shake their heads. But Dr. Tyndall tells us what this admission means. 'If the materialist is confounded,' he says, 'and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared with an answer? Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher—one and all.' In like manner, referring to the feeling which others have supposed to be a sense of God's presence and majesty: this, for the 'man of science,' he says is the sense of a 'power which gives fulness and force, to his existence, but which he can neither analyse nor comprehend.' Which means, that because a physical specialist cannot analyse this sense, it is therefore incapable of analysis. A bishop might with equal propriety use just the same language about a glass of port wine, and argue with, equal cogency that it was a primary and simple element. What is meant is, that the facts of the materialist are the only facts we can be certain of; and because these can give man no moral guidance, that therefore man can have no moral guidance at all.

Let us illustrate the case by some example that is mentally presentable. Some ruined girl, we will say, oppressed with a sense of degradation, comes to Dr. Tyndall and lays her case before him. 'I have heard you are a very wise man,' she says to him, 'and that you have proved that the priest is all wrong, who prepared me a year ago for my confirmation. Now tell me, I beseech you tell me, is mine really the desperate state I have been taught to think it is? May my body be likened to the temple of the Holy Ghost defiled? or do I owe it no more reverence than I owe the Alhambra Theatre? Am I guilty, and must I seek repentance? or am I not guilty, and may I go on just as I please?' 'My dear girl,' Dr. Tyndall replies to her, 'I must shake my head in doubt. Come, let its lower our heads, and acknowledge our ignorance as to whether you are a wretched girl or no. Materialism is confounded, and science rendered dumb by questions such as yours; they can, therefore, never be answered, and must always remain open. I may add, however, that if you ask me personally whether I consider you to be degraded, I lean to the affirmative. But I can give you no reason in support of this judgment, so you may attach to it what value you will.'

Such is the position of agnostics, when brought face to face with the world. They are undecided only about one question, and this is the one question which cannot be left undecided. Men cannot remain agnostics as to belief that their actions must depend upon, any more than a man who is compelled to go on walking can refrain from choosing one road or other when there are two open to him. Nor does it matter that our believing may in neither case amount to a complete certitude. It is sufficient that the balance of probability be on one side or the other. Two ounces will out-weigh one ounce, quite as surely as a ton will. But what our philosophers profess to teach us (in so far as they profess to be agnostics, and disclaim being dogmatists) is, that there is no balance either way. The message they shout to us is, that they have no message at all; and that because they are without one, the whole world is in the same condition.



CHAPTER X.

MORALITY AND NATURAL THEISM.

Credo quia impossibile est.

If we look calmly at the possible future of human thought, it will appear from what we have just seen, that physical science of itself can do little to control or cramp it; nor until man consents to resign his belief in virtue and his own dignity altogether, will it be able to repress religious faith, should other causes tend to produce a new outbreak of it. But the chief difficulties in the matter are still in store for us. Let us see never so clearly that science, if we are moral beings, can do nothing to weaken our belief in God and immortality, but still leaves us free, if we will, to believe in them, it seems getting clearer and yet more clear that these beliefs are inconsistent with themselves, and conflict with these very moral feelings, of which they are invoked as an explanation. Here it is true that reason does confront us, and what answer to make to it is a very serious question. This applies even to natural religion in its haziest and most compliant form; and as applied to any form of orthodoxy its force is doubled. What we have seen thus far is, that if there be a moral world at all, our knowledge of nature contains nothing inconsistent with theism. We have now to enquire how far theism is inconsistent with our conceptions of the moral world.

In treating these difficulties, we will for the present consider them as applying only to religion in general, not to any special form of it. The position of orthodoxy we will reserve for a separate treatment. For convenience' sake, however, I shall take as a symbol of all religion the vaguer and more general teachings of Christianity; but I shall be adducing them not as teachings revealed by heaven, but simply as developed by the religious consciousness of men.

To begin then with the great primary difficulties: these, though they take various forms, can all in the last resort be reduced to two—the existence of evil in the face of the power of God, and the freedom of man's will in the face of the will of God. And what I shall try to make plain with respect to these is this: not that they are not difficulties—not that they are not insoluble difficulties; but that they are not difficulties due to religion or theism, nor by abandoning theism can we in any way escape from them. They start into being not with the belief in God, and a future of rewards and punishments, but with the belief in the moral law and in virtue, and they are common to all systems in which the worth of virtue is recognised.

The vulgar view of the matter cannot be better stated than in the following account given by J.S. Mill of the anti-religious reasonings of his father. He looked upon religion, says his son, 'as the greatest enemy of morality; first, by setting up fictitious excellences—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of humankind, and causing them to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues; but above all by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom, indeed, it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts as eminently hateful. I have a hundred times heard him say that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind had gone on adding trait after trait, till they reached the most perfect expression of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. The ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a hell—who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them, should be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment.' James Mill, adds his son, knew quite well that Christians were not, in fact, as demoralised by this monstrous creed as, if they were logically consistent, they ought to be. 'The same slovenliness of thought (he said) and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevent them from perceiving the logical consequence of the theory.'

Now, in spite of its coarse and exaggerated acrimony, this passage doubtless expresses a great truth, which presently I shall go on to consider. But it contains also a very characteristic falsehood, of which we must first divest it. God is here represented as making a hell, with the express intention of forcibly putting men into it, and His main hatefulness consists in this capricious and wanton cruelty. Such a representation is, however, an essentially false one. It is not only not true to the true Christian teaching, but it is absolutely opposed to it. The God of Christianity does not make hell; still less does He deliberately put men into it. It is made by men themselves; the essence of its torment consists in the loss of God; and those that lose Him, lose Him by their own act, from having deliberately made themselves incapable of loving Him. God never wills the death of the sinner. It is to the sinner's own will that the sinner's death is due.

All this rhetoric, therefore, about God's malevolence and wickedness is entirely beside the point, nor does it even touch the difficulty that, in his heart, James Mill is aiming at. His main difficulty is nothing more than this: How can an infinite will that rules everywhere, find room for a finite will not in harmony with itself? Whilst the only farther perplexity that the passage indicates, is the existence of those evil conditions by which the finite will, already so weak and wavering, is yet farther hampered.

Now these difficulties are doubtless quite as great as James Mill thought they were; but we must observe this, that they are not of the same kind. They are merely intellectual difficulties. They are not moral difficulties at all. Mill truly says that they involve a contradiction in terms. But why? Not, as Mill says, because a wicked God is set up as the object of moral worship, but because, in spite of all the wickedness existing, the Author of all existences is affirmed not to be wicked.

Nor, again, is Mill right in saying that this contradiction is due to 'slovenliness of thought.' Theology accepts it with its eyes wide open, making no attempt to explain the inexplicable; and the human will it treats in the same way. It makes no offer to us to clear up everything, or to enable thought to put a girdle round the universe. On the contrary, it proclaims with emphasis that its first axioms are unthinkable; and its most renowned philosophic motto is, 'I believe because it is impossible.'

What shall it say, then, when assailed by the rational moralist? It will not deny its own condition, but it will show its opponent that his is really the same. It will show him that, let him give his morality what base he will, he cannot conceive of things without the same contradiction in terms. If good be a thing of any spiritual value—if it be, in other words, what every moral system supposes it to be—that good can co-exist with evil is just as unthinkable as that God can. The value of moral good is supposed to lie in this—that by it we are put en rapport with something that is better than ourselves—some 'stream of tendency,' let us say, 'that makes for righteousness,' But if this stream of tendency be not a personal God, what is it? Is it Nature? Nature, we have seen already, is open to just the same objections that God is. It is equally guilty of all the evil that is contained in it. Is it Truth, then—pure Truth for its own sake? Again, we have seen already that as little can it be that. Is it Human Nature as opposed to Nature?—Man as distinct from, and holier than, any individual men? Of all the substitutes for God this at first sight seems the most promising, or, at any rate, the most practical. But, apart from all the other objections to this, which we have already been considering in such detail, it will very soon be apparent that it involves the very same inconsistency, the same contradiction in terms. The fact of moral evil still confronts us, and the humanity to which we lift our hearts up is still taxable with that. But perhaps we separate the good in humanity from the evil, and only worship the former as struggling to get free from the latter. This, however, will be of little help to us. If what we call humanity is nothing but the good part of it, we can only vindicate its goodness at the expense of its strength. Evil is at least an equal match for it, and in most of the battles hitherto it is evil that has been victorious. But to conceive of good in this way is really to destroy our conception of it. Goodness is in itself an incomplete notion; it is but one facet of a figure which, approached from other sides, appears to us as eternity, as omnipresence, and, above all, as supreme strength; and to reduce goodness to nothing but the higher part of humanity—to make it a wavering fitful flame that continually sinks and flickers, that at its best can but blaze for a while, and at its brightest can throw no light beyond this paltry parish of a world—is to deprive it of its whole meaning and hold on us. Or again, even were this not so, and could we believe, and be strengthened by believing, that the good in humanity would one day gain the victory, and that some higher future, which even we might partake in by preparing, was in store for the human race, would our conception of the matter then be any more harmonious? As we surveyed our race as a whole, would its brighter future ever do away with its past? Would not the depth and the darkness of the shadow grow more portentous as the light grew brighter? And would not man's history strike more clearly on us as the ghastly embodiment of a vast injustice? But it may be said that the sorrows of the past will hereafter be dead and done with; that evil will literally be as though it had never been. Well, and so in a short time will the good likewise; and if we are ever to think lightly of the world's sinful and sorrowful past, we shall have to think equally lightly of its sinless and cheerful future.

Let us pass now to the secondary points. Opponents of theism, or of religion in general, are perpetually attacking it for its theories of a future life. Its eternal rewards and punishments are to them permanent stumbling-blocks. A future life of happiness they think an unmeaning promise; and a future life of misery they think an unworthy and brutal threat. And if reason and observation are to be our only guides, we cannot say that they do not argue with justice. If we believe in heaven, we believe in something that the imagination fails to grasp. If we believe in hell, we believe in something that our moral sense revolts at: for though hell may be nothing but the conscious loss of God, and though those that lose Him may have made their own hell for themselves, still their loss, if eternal, will be an eternal flaw and disease in the sum of things—the eternal self-assertion against omnipotence of some depraved and alien power.

From these difficulties it is impossible to escape. All we can do here, as in the former case, is to show that they are not peculiar to the special doctrines to which they are supposed generally to be due; but that they are equally inseparable from any of the proposed substitutes. We can only show that they are inevitable, not that they are not insoluble. If we condemn a belief in heaven because it is unthinkable, we must for the same reason, as we have seen already, condemn a Utopia on earth—the thing we are now told we should fix our hopes upon, instead of it. As to the second question—that of eternal punishment, we may certainly here get rid of one difficulty by adopting the doctrine of a final restitution. But, though one difficulty will be thus got rid of, another equally great will take its place. Our moral sense, it is true, will no more be shocked by the conception of an eternal discord in things, but we shall be confronted by a fatalism that will allow to us no moral being at all. If we shall all reach the same place in the end—if inevitably we shall all do so—it is quite plain that our freedom to choose in the matter is a freedom that is apparent only. Mr. Leslie Stephen, it seems, sees this clearly enough. Once give morality its spiritual and supernatural meaning, and there is, he holds, 'some underlying logical necessity which binds [a belief in hell] indissolubly with the primary articles of the faith.' Such a system of retribution, he adds, is 'created spontaneously' by the 'conscience. Heaven and hell are corollaries that rise and fall together.... Whatever the meaning of [Greek: aionios], the fearful emotion which is symbolised, is eternal or independent of time, by the same right as the ecstatic emotion.' He sees this clearly enough; but the strange thing is that he does not see the converse. He sees that the Christian conception of morality necessitates the affirmation of hell. He does not see that the denial of hell is the denial of Christian morality, and that in calling the former a dream, as he does, he does not call the latter a dream likewise.

We can close our eyes to none of these perplexities. The only way to resist their power is not to ignore them, but to realise to the full their magnitude, and to see how, if we let them take away from us anything, they will in another moment take everything; to see that we must either set our foot upon their necks, or that they will set their feet on ours; to see that we can look them down, but that we can never look them through; to see that we can make them impotent if we will, but that if they are not impotent they will be omnipotent.

But the strongest example of this is yet to come: and this is not any special belief either as to religion or morals, but a belief underlying both of these, and without which neither of them were possible. It is a belief which from one point of view we have already touched upon—the belief in the freedom of the will. But we have as yet only considered it in relation to physical science. What we have now to do is to consider it in relation to itself.

What, then, let us ask, is the nature of the belief? To a certain extent the answer is very easy. When we speak and think of free-will ordinarily, we know quite well what we mean by it; and we one and all of us mean exactly the same thing. It is true that when professors speak upon this question, they make countless efforts to distinguish between the meaning which they attach to the belief, and the meaning which the world attaches to it. And it is possible that in their studies or their lecture-rooms they may contrive for the time being to distort or to confuse for themselves the common view of the matter. But let the professor once forget his theories, and be forced to buffet against his life's importunate and stern realities: let him quarrel with his housekeeper because she has mislaid his spectacles, or his night-cap, or, preoccupied with her bible, has not mixed his gruel properly; and his conception of free-will will revert in an instant to the universal type, and the good woman will discern only too plainly that her master's convictions as to it are precisely the same things as her own. Everywhere, indeed, in all the life that surrounds us—in the social and moral judgments on which the fabric of society has reared itself, in the personal judgments on which so much depends in friendship and antipathies—everywhere, in conduct, in emotion, in art, in language, and in law, we see man's common belief in will written, broad, and plain, and clear. There is, perhaps, no belief to which, for practical purposes, he attaches so important and so plain a meaning.

Such is free-will when looked at from a distance. But let us look at it more closely, and see what happens then. The result is strange. Like a path seen at dusk across a moorland, plain and visible from a distance, but fading gradually from us the more near we draw to it, so does the belief in free-will fade before the near inspection of reason. It at first grows hazy; at last it becomes indistinguishable. At first we begin to be uncertain of what we mean by it; at last we find ourselves certain that so far as we trust to reason, we cannot possibly have any meaning at all. Examined in this way, every act of our lives—all our choices and refusals, seem nothing but the necessary outcome of things that have gone before. It is true that between some actions the choice hangs at times so evenly, that our will may seem the one thing that at last turns the balance. But let us analyse the matter a little more carefully, and we shall see that there are a thousand microscopic motives, too small for us to be entirely conscious of, which, according to how they settle on us, will really decide the question. Nor shall we see only that this is so. Let us go a little further, and reason will tell us that it must be so. Were this not the case, there would have been an escape left for us. Though admitting that what controlled our actions could be nothing but the strongest motive, it might yet be contended that the will could intensify any motive it chose, and that thus motives really were only tools in its hands. But this does but postpone the difficulty, not solve it. What is this free-will when it comes to use its tools? It is a something, we shall find, that our minds cannot give harbour to. It is a thing contrary to every analogy of nature. It is a thing which is forever causing, but which is in itself uncaused.

To escape from this difficulty is altogether hopeless. Age after age has tried to do so, but tried in vain. There have been always metaphysical experts ready to engage to make free-will a something intellectually conceivable. But they all either leave the question where they found it, or else they only seem to explain it, by denying covertly the fact that really wants explaining.

Such is free-will when examined by the natural reason—a thing that melts away inevitably first to haze, and then to utter nothingness. And for a time we feel convinced that it really is nothing. Let us, however, again retire from it to the common distance, and the phantom we thought exorcised is again back in an instant. There is the sphinx once more, distinct and clear as ever, holding in its hand the scales of good and evil, and demanding a curse or a blessing for every human action. We are once more certain—more certain of this than anything—that we are, as we always thought we were, free agents, free to choose, and free to refuse; and that in virtue of this freedom, and in virtue of this alone, we are responsible for what we do and are.

Let us consider this point well. Let us consider first how free-will is a moral necessity; next how it is an intellectual impossibility; and lastly how, though it be impossible, we yet, in defiance of intellect, continue, as moral beings, to believe in it. Let us but once realise that we do this, that all mankind universally do this and have done—and the difficulties offered us by theism will no longer stagger us. We shall be prepared for them, prepared not to drive them away, but to endure their presence. If in spite of my reason I can believe that my will is free, in spite of my reason I can believe that God is good. The latter belief is not nearly so hard as the former. The greatest stumbling-block in the moral world lies in the threshold by which to enter it.

Such then are the moral difficulties, properly so called, that beset theism; but there are certain others of a vaguer nature, that we must glance at likewise. It is somewhat hard to know how to classify these; but it will be correct enough to say that whereas those we have just dealt with appeal to the moral intellect, the ones we are to deal with now appeal to the moral imagination. The facts that these depend on, and which are practically new discoveries for the modern world, are the insignificance of the earth, when compared with the universe, of which it is visibly and demonstrably an integral but insignificant fragment; the enormous period of his existence for which man has had no religious history, and has been, so far as we can tell, not a religious being at all; and the vast majority of the race that are still stagnant and semi-barbarous. Is it possible, we ask, that a God, with so many stars to attend to, should busy himself with this paltry earth, and make it the scene of events more stupendous than the courses of countless systems? Is it possible that of the swarms, vicious and aimless, that breed upon it, each individual—Bushman, Chinaman, or Negro—is a precious immortal being, with a birthright in infinity and eternity? The effect of these considerations is sometimes overwhelming. Astronomy oppresses us with the gulfs of space; geology with the gulfs of time; history and travel with a babel of vain existence. And here as in the former case, our perplexities cannot be explained away. We can only meet them by seeing that if they have any power at all, they are all-powerful, and that they will not destroy religion only, but the entire moral conception of man also. Religious belief, and moral belief likewise, involve both of them some vast mystery; and reason can do nothing but focalise, not solve it.

All, then, that I am trying to make evident is this—and this must be sufficient for us—not that theism, with its attendant doctrines, presents us with no difficulties, necessitates no baffling contradictions in terms, and confronts us with no terrible and piteous spectacles, but that all this is not peculiar to theism. It is not the price we pay for rising from morality to religion. It is the price we pay for rising from the natural to the supernatural. Once double the sum of things by adding this second world to it, and it swells to such a size that our reason can no longer encircle it. We are torn this way and that by convictions, each of which is equally necessary, but each of which excludes the others. When we try to grasp them all at once, our mind is like a man tied to wild horses; or like Phaeton in the Sun's chariot, bewildered and powerless over the intractable and the terrible team. We can only recover our strength by a full confession of our weakness. We can only lay hold on the beliefs that we see to be needful, by asking faith to join hands with reason. If we refuse to do this, there is but one alternative. Without faith we can perhaps explain things if we will; but we must first make them not worth explaining. We can only think them out entirely by regarding them as something not worth thinking out at all.



CHAPTER XI.

THE HUMAN RACE AND REVELATION.

'The scandal of the pious Christian, and the fallacious triumph of the infidel, should cease as soon as they recollect not only by whom, but likewise to whom, the Divine Revelation was given.'—Gibbon.[37]

And now let us suppose ourselves convinced, at least for the sake of argument, that man will always believe in himself as a moral being, and that he will, under no compulsion, let this belief go. Granting this, from what we have just seen, thus much will be plain to us, that theism, should it ever tend to reassert itself, can have no check to fear at the hands of positive thought. Let us, therefore, suppose further, that such a revival of faith is imminent, and that the enlightened world, with its eyes wide open, is about to turn once again to religious desires and aims. This brings us face to face with the second question, that we have not as yet touched upon: will the religion thus turned to be a natural religion only, or is it possible that some exclusive dogmatism may be recognised as a supernatural re-statement of it?

Before going further with this question it will be well to say a few words as to the exact position it occupies. This, with regard to the needs of man, is somewhat different to the position of natural theism. That a natural theism is essential to man's moral being is a proposition that can be more or less rigidly demonstrated; but that a revelation is essential as a supplement to natural theism can be impressed upon us only in a much looser way. Indeed, many men who believe most firmly that without religion human life will be dead, rest their hopes for the future not on the revival and triumph of any one alleged revelation, but on the gradual evanescence of the special claims of all. Nor can we find any sharp and defined line of argument to convince them that they are wrong. The objections, however, to which this position is open are, I think, none the less cogent because they are somewhat general; and to all practical men, conversant with life and history, it must be plain that the necessity of doing God's will being granted, it is a most anxious and earnest question whether that will has not been in some special and articulate way revealed to us.

Take the mass of religious humanity, and giving it a natural creed, it will be found that instinctively and inevitably it asks for more. Such a creed by itself has excited more longings than it has satisfied, and raised more perplexities than it has set at rest. It is true that it has supplied men with a sufficient analysis of the worth they attach to life, and of the momentous issues attendant on the way in which they live it. But when they come practically to choose their way, they find that such religion is of little help to them. It never puts out a hand to lift or lead them. It is an alluring voice, heard far off through a fog, and calling to them, 'Follow me!' but it leaves them in the fog to pick their own way out towards it, over rocks and streams and pitfalls, which they can but half distinguish, and amongst which they may be either killed or crippled, and are almost certain to grow bewildered. And even should there be a small minority, who feel that this is not true of themselves, they can hardly help feeling that it is true of the world in general. A purely natural theism, with no organs of human speech, and with no machinery for making its spirit articulate, never has ruled men, and, so far as we can see, never possibly can rule them. The choices which our life consists of are definite things. The rule which is to guide our choices must be something definite also. And here it is that natural theism fails. It may supply us with the major premiss, but it is vague and uncertain about the minor. It can tell us with sufficient emphasis that all vice is to be avoided; it is continually at a loss to tell us whether this thing or whether that thing is vicious. Indeed, this practical insufficiency of natural theism is borne witness to by the very existence of all alleged revelations. For, if none of these be really the special word of God, a belief in them is all the more a sign of a general need in man. If none of them represent the actual attainment of help, they all of them embody the passionate and persistent cry for it.

We shall understand this more clearly if we consider one of the first characteristics that a revelation necessarily claims, and the results that are at this moment, in a certain prominent case, attending on a denial of it. The characteristic I speak of is an absolute infallibility. Any supernatural religion that renounces its claim to this, it is clear can profess to be a semi-revelation only. It is a hybrid thing, partly natural and partly supernatural, and it thus practically has all the qualities of a religion that is wholly natural. In so far as it professes to be revealed, it of course professes to be infallible; but if the revealed part be in the first place hard to distinguish, and in the second place hard to understand—if it may mean many things, and many of those things contradictory—it might just as well have been never made at all. To make it in any sense an infallible revelation, or in other words a revelation at all, to us, we need a power to interpret the testament that shall have equal authority with that testament itself.

Simple as this truth seems, mankind have been a long time in learning it. Indeed, it is only in the present day that its practical meaning has come generally to be recognised. But now at this moment upon all sides of us, history is teaching it to us by an example, so clearly that we can no longer mistake it.

That example is Protestant Christianity, and the condition to which, after three centuries, it is now visibly bringing itself. It is at last beginning to exhibit to us the true result of the denial of infallibility to a religion that professes to be supernatural. We are at last beginning to see in it neither the purifier of a corrupted revelation, nor the corrupter of a pure revelation, but the practical denier of all revelation whatsoever. It is fast evaporating into a mere natural theism, and is thus showing us what, as a governing power, natural theism is. Let us look at England, Europe, and America, and consider the condition of the entire Protestant world. Religion, it is true, we shall still find in it; but it is religion from which not only the supernatural element is disappearing, but in which the natural element is fast becoming nebulous. It is indeed growing, as Mr. Leslie Stephen says it is, into a religion of dreams. All its doctrines are growing vague as dreams, and like dreams their outlines are for ever changing. Mr. Stephen has pitched on a very happy illustration of this. A distinguished clergyman of the English Church, he reminds us, has preached and published a set of sermons,[38] in which he denies emphatically any belief in eternal punishment, although admitting at the same time that the opinion of the Christian world is against him. These sermons gave rise to a discussion in one of the leading monthly reviews, to which Protestant divines of all shades of opinion contributed their various arguments. 'It is barely possible,' says Mr. Stephen, 'with the best intentions, to take such a discussion seriously. Boswell tells us how a lady interrogated Dr. Johnson as to the nature of the spiritual body. She seemed desirous, he adds, of "knowing more; but he left the subject in obscurity." We smile at Boswell's evident impression that Johnson could, if he had chosen, have dispelled the darkness. When we find a number of educated gentlemen seriously enquiring as to the conditions of existence in the next world, we feel that they are sharing Boswell's naivete without his excuse. What can any human being outside a pulpit say upon such a subject which does not amount to a confession of his own ignorance, coupled, it may be, with more or less suggestion of shadowy hopes and fears? Have the secrets of the prison-house really been revealed to Canon Farrar or Mr. Beresford Hope?... When men search into the unknowable, they naturally arrive at very different results.' And Mr. Stephen argues with perfect justice that if we are to judge Christianity from such discussions as these, its doctrines of a future life are all visibly receding into a vague 'dreamland;' and we shall be quite ready to admit, as he says, in words I have already quoted, 'that the impertinent young curate who tells [him he] will be burnt everlastingly for not sharing such superstitions, is just as ignorant as [Mr. Stephen himself], and that [Mr. Stephen] knows as much as [his] dog.'

The critic, in the foregoing passages, draws his conclusion from the condition of but one Protestant doctrine. But he might draw the same conclusion from all; for the condition of all of them is the same. The divinity of Christ, the nature of his atonement, the constitution of the Trinity, the efficacy of the sacraments, the inspiration of the Bible—there is not one of these points on which the doctrines, once so fiercely fought for, are not now, among the Protestants, getting as vague and varying, as weak and as compliant to the caprice of each individual thinker, as the doctrine of eternal punishment. And Mr. Stephen and his school exaggerate nothing in the way in which they represent the spectacle. Protestantism, in fact, is at last becoming explicitly what it always was implicitly, not a supernatural religion which fulfils the natural, but a natural religion which denies the supernatural.

And what, as a natural religion, is its working power in the world? Much of its earlier influence doubtless still survives; but that is a survival only of what is passing, and we must not judge it by that. We must judge it by what it is growing into, not by what it is growing out of. And judged in this way, its practical power—its moral, its teaching, its guiding power—is fast growing as weak and as uncertain as its theology. As long as its traditional moral system is in accordance with what men, on other grounds, approve of, it may serve to express the general tendency impressively, and to invest it with the sanction of many reverend associations. But let the general tendency once begin to conflict with it, and its inherent weakness in an instant becomes apparent. We may see this by considering the moral character of Christ, and the sort of weight that is claimed for His example. This example, so the Christian world teaches, is faultless and infallible; and as long as we believe this, the example has supreme authority. But apply to this the true Protestant method, and the authority soon shows signs of wavering. Let us once deny that Christ was more than a faultless man, and we lose by that denial our authority for asserting that he was as much as a faultless man. Even should it so happen that we do approve entirely of his conduct, it is we who are approving of him, not he who is approving of us. The old position is reversed: we become the patrons of our most worthy Judge eternal; and the moral infallibility is transferred from him to ourselves. In other words, the practical Protestant formula can be nothing more than this. The Protestant teacher says to us, 'Such a way of life is the best, take my word for it: and if you want an example, go to that excellent Son of David, who, take my word for it, was the very best of men.' But even in this case the question arises, how shall the Protestants interpret the character that they praise? And to this they can never give any satisfactory answer. What really happens with them is inevitable and obvious. The character is simply for them a symbol of what each happens to think most admirable; and the identity in all cases of its historical details does not produce an identity as of a single portrait, but an identity as of one frame applied to many. Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, sees in Jesus one sort of man, Father Newman another, Charles Kingsley another, and M. Renan another; and the Imitatio Christi, as understood by these, will be found in each case to mean a very different thing. The difference between these men, however, will seem almost unanimity, if we compare them with others who, so far as logic and authority go, have just as good a claim on our attention. There is hardly any conceivable aberration of moral licence that has not, in some quarter or other, embodied itself into a rule of life, and claimed to be the proper outcome of Protestant Christianity. Nor is this true only of the wilder and more eccentric sects. It is true of graver and more weighty thinkers also; so much so, that a theological school in Germany has maintained boldly 'that fornication is blameless, and that it is not interdicted by the precepts of the Gospel.'[39]

The matter, however, does not end thus. The men I have just mentioned agree, all of them, that Christ's moral example was perfect; and their only disagreement has been as to what that example was. But the Protestant logic will by no means leave us here. That alleged perfection, if we ourselves are to be the judges of it, is sure, by-and-by, to exhibit to us traces of imperfection. And this is exactly the thing that has already begun to happen. A generation ago one of the highest-minded and most logical of our English Protestants, Professor Francis Newman, declared that in Christ's character there were certain moral deficiencies;[40] and the last blow to the moral authority of Protestantism was struck by one of its own household. It is true that Professor Newman's censures were small and were not irreverent. But if these could come from a man of his intense piety, what will and what do come from other quarters may be readily conjectured. Indeed, the fact is daily growing more and more evident, that for the world that still calls itself Protestant, the autocracy of Christ's moral example is gone; and its nominal retention of power only makes its real loss of it the more visible. It merely reflects and focalises the uncertainty that men are again feeling—the uncertainty and the sad bewilderment. The words and the countenance, once so sure and steadfast, now change, as we look at, and listen to them, into new accents and aspects; and the more earnestly we gaze and listen, the less can we distinguish clearly what we hear or see. 'What shall we do to be saved?' men are again crying. And the lips that were once oracular now merely seem to murmur back confusedly, 'Alas! what shall you do?'

Such and so helpless, even now, is natural theism showing itself; and in the dim and momentous changes that are coming over things, in the vast flux of opinion that is preparing, in the earthquake that is rocking the moral ground under us, overturning and engulfing the former landmarks, and re-opening the graves of the buried lusts of paganism, it will show itself very soon more helpless still. Its feet are on the earth, only. The earth trembles, and it trembles: it is in the same case as we are. It stretches in vain its imploring hands to heaven. But the heaven takes no heed of it. No divine hand reaches down to it to uphold and guide it.

This must be the feeling, I believe, of most honest and practical men, with regard to natural religion, and its necessary practical inefficiency. Nor will the want it necessarily leaves of a moral rule be the only consideration that will force this conviction on them. The heart, as the phrase goes, will corroborate the evidence of the head. It will be felt, even more forcibly than it can be reasoned, that if there be indeed a God who loves and cares for men, he must surely, or almost surely, have spoken in some audible and certain way to them. At any rate I shall not be without many who agree with me, when I say that for the would-be religious world it is an anxious and earnest question whether any special and explicit revelation from God exist for us; and this being the case, it will be not lost time if we try to deal fairly and dispassionately with the question.

Before going further, however, let us call to mind two things. Let us remember first, that if we expect to find a revelation at all, it is morally certain that it must be a revelation already in existence. It is hardly possible, if we consider that all the supernatural claims that have been made hitherto are false, to expect that a new manifestation, altogether different in kind, is in store for the world in the future. Secondly, our enquiries being thus confined to religions that are already in existence, what we are practically concerned with is the truth of Christianity only. It is true that we have heard, on all sides, of the superiority of other religions to the Christian. But the men who hold such language, though they may affect to think that such religions are superior in certain moral points, yet never dream of claiming for them the miraculous and supernatural authority that they deny to Christianity. No man denies that Christ was born of a virgin, in order to make the same claim for Buddha: or denies the Christian Trinity in order to affirm the Brahminic. There is but one alleged revelation that, as a revelation, the progressive nations of the world are concerned with, or whose supernatural claims are still worthy of being examined by us: and that religion is the Christian. These claims, it is true, are being fast discredited; but still, as yet they have not been silenced wholly; and what I propose to ask now is, what chance is there of their power again reviving.

Now considering the way in which I have just spoken of Protestantism, it may seem to many that I have dismissed this question already. With the 'enlightened' English thinker such certainly will be the first impression. But there is one point that such thinkers all forget: Protestant Christianity is not the only form of it. They have still the form to deal with which is the oldest, the most legitimate, and the most coherent—the Church of Rome. They surely cannot forget the existence of this Church or her magnitude. To suppose this would be to attribute to them too insular, or rather too provincial, an ignorance. The cause, however, certainly is ignorance, and an ignorance which, though less surprising, is far deeper. In this country the popular conception of Rome has been so distorted by our familiarity with Protestantism, that the true conception of her is something quite strange to us. Our divines have exhibited her to us as though she were a lapsed Protestant sect, and they have attacked her for being false to doctrines that were never really hers. They have failed to see that the first and essential difference which separates her from them lies, primarily not in any special dogma, but in the authority on which all her dogmas rest. Protestants, basing their religion on the Bible solely, have conceived that Catholics of course profess to do so likewise; and have covered them with invective for being traitors to their supposed profession. But the Church's primary doctrine is her own perpetual infallibility. She is inspired, she declares, by the same Spirit that inspired the Bible; and her voice is, equally with the Bible, the voice of God. This theory, however, upon which really her whole fabric rests, popular Protestantism either ignores altogether, or treats it as if it were a modern superstition, which, so far from being essential to the Church's system, is, on the contrary, inconsistent with it. Looked at in this way, Rome to the Protestant's mind has seemed naturally to be a mass of superstitions and dishonesties; and it is this view of her that, strangely enough, our modern advanced thinkers have accepted without question. Though they have trusted the Protestants in nothing else, they have trusted them here. They have taken the Protestants' word for it, that Protestantism is more reasonable than Romanism; and they think, therefore, that if they have destroyed the former, a fortiori have they destroyed the latter.[41]

No conception of the matter, however, could be more false than this. To whatever criticism the Catholic position may be open, it is certainly not thus included in Protestantism, nor is it reached through it. Let us try and consider the matter a little more truly. Let us grant all that hostile criticism can say against Protestantism as a supernatural religion: in other words, let us set it aside altogether. Let us suppose nothing, to start with, in the world but a natural moral sense, and a simple natural theism; and let us then see the relation of the Church of Rome to that. Approached in this way, the religious world will appear to us as a body of natural theists, all agreeing that they must do God's will, but differing widely amongst themselves as to what His will and His nature are. Their moral and religious views will be equally vague and dreamlike—more dreamlike even than those of the Protestant world at present. Their theories as to the future will be but 'shadowy hopes and fears.' Their practice, in the present, will vary from asceticism to the widest license. And yet, in spite of all this confusion and difference, there will be amongst them a vague tendency to unanimity. Each man will be dreaming his own spiritual dream, and the dreams of all will be different. All their dreams, it will be plain, cannot represent reality; and yet the belief will be common to all that some common reality is represented by them. Men, therefore, will begin to compare their dreams together, and try to draw out of them the common element, so that the dream may come slowly to be the same for all; that, if it grows, it may grow by some recognizable laws; that it may, in other words, lose its character of a dream, and assume that of a reality. We suppose, therefore, that our natural theists form themselves into a kind of parliament, in which they may compare, adjust, and give shape to the ideas that were before so wavering, and which shall contain some machinery for formulating such agreements as may be come to. The common religious sense of the world is thus organized, and its conclusions registered. We have no longer the wavering dreams of men; we have instead of them the constant vision of man.

Now in such a universal parliament we see what the Church of Rome essentially is, viewed from her natural side. She is ideally, if not actually, the parliament of the believing world. Her doctrines, as she one by one unfolds them, emerge upon us like petals from a half-closed bud. They are not added arbitrarily from without; they are developed from within. They are the flowers contained from the first in the bud of our moral consciousness. When she formulates in these days something that has not been formulated before, she is no more enunciating a new truth than was Newton when he enunciated the theory of gravitation. Whatever truths, hitherto hidden, she may in the course of time grow conscious of, she holds that these were always implied in her teaching, though before she did not know it; just as gravitation was implied in many ascertained facts that men knew well enough long before they knew that it was implied in them. Thus far, then, the Church of Rome essentially is the spiritual sense of humanity, speaking to men through its proper and only possible organ. Its intricate machinery, such as its systems of representation, its methods of voting, the appointment of its speaker, and the legal formalities required in the recording of its decrees, are things accidental only; or if they are necessary, they are necessary only in a secondary way.

But the picture of the Church thus far is only half drawn. She is all this, but she is something more than this. She is not only the parliament of spiritual man, but she is such a parliament guided by the Spirit of God. The work of that Spirit may be secret, and to the natural eyes untraceable, as the work of the human will is in the human brain. But none the less it is there.

Totam infusa per artus Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

The analogy of the human brain is here of great help to us. The human brain is an arrangement of material particles which can become connected with consciousness only in virtue of such a special arrangement. The Church is theoretically an arrangement of individuals which can become connected with the Spirit of God only in virtue of an arrangement equally special.

If this be a true picture of the Catholic Church, and the place which the only revelation we are concerned with ideally holds in the world, there can be no a priori difficulty in the passage from a natural religion to such a supernatural one. The difficulties begin when we compare the ideal picture with the actual facts; and it is true, when we do this, that they at once confront us with a strength that seems altogether disheartening. These difficulties are of two distinct kinds; some, as in the case of natural theism, are moral; others are historical. We will deal with the former first, beginning with that which is at once the profoundest and the most obvious.

The Church, as has been said already, is ideally the parliament of the whole believing world; but we find, as a matter of fact, that she is the parliament of a small part only. Now what shall we say to this? If God would have all men do His will, why should He place the knowledge of it within reach of such a small minority of them? And to this question we can give no answer. It is a mystery, and we must acknowledge frankly that it is one. But there is this to say yet—that it is not a new mystery. We already suppose ourselves to have accepted it in a simpler form: in the form of the presence of evil, and the partial prevalence of good. By acknowledging the claim of the special revelation in question, we are not adding to the complexity of that old world-problem. I am aware, however, that many think just the reverse of this. I will therefore dwell upon the subject for a few moments longer. To many who can accept the difficulty of the partial presence of good, the difficulty seems wantonly aggravated by the claims of a special revelation. These claims seem to them to do two things. In the first place, they are thought to make the presence of good even more partial than it otherwise would be; and secondly—which is a still greater stumbling-block—to oblige us to condemn as evil much that would else seem good of the purest kind. There are many men, as we must all know, without the Church, who are doing their best to fight their way to God; and orthodoxy is supposed to pass a cruel condemnation on these, because they have not assented to some obscure theory, their rejection or ignorance of which has plainly stained neither their lives nor hearts. And of orthodoxy under certain forms this is no doubt true; but it is not true of the orthodoxy of Catholicism. There is no point, probably, connected with this question, about which the general world is so misinformed and ignorant, as the sober but boundless charity of what it calls the anathematising Church. So little indeed is this charity understood generally, that to assert it seems a startling paradox. Most paradoxes are doubtless in reality the lies they at first sight seem to be; but not so this one. It is the simple statement of a fact. Never was there a religious body, except the Roman, that laid the intense stress she does on all her dogmatic teachings, and had yet the justice that comes of sympathy for those that cannot receive them. She condemns no goodness, she condemns even no earnest worship, though it be outside her pale. On the contrary, she declares explicitly that a knowledge of 'the one true God, our Creator and Lord,' may be attained to by the 'natural light of human reason,' meaning by 'reason' faith unenlightened by revelation; and she declares those to be anathema who deny this. The holy and humble men of heart who do not know her, or who in good faith reject her, she commits with confidence to God's uncovenanted mercies; and these she knows are infinite; but, except as revealed to her, she can of necessity say nothing distinct about them. It is admitted by the world at large, that of her supposed bigotry she has no bitterer or more extreme exponents than the Jesuits; and this is what a Jesuit theologian says upon this matter: 'A heretic, so long as he believes his sect to be more or equally deserving of belief, has no obligation to believe the Church ... [and] when men who have been brought up in heresy, are persuaded from boyhood that we impugn and attack the word of God, that we are idolaters, pestilent deceivers, and are therefore to be shunned as pestilence, they cannot, while this persuasion lasts, with a safe conscience hear us.'[42] Thus for those without her the Church has one condemnation only. Her anathemas are on none but those who reject her with their eyes open, by tampering with a conviction that she really is the truth. These are condemned, not for not seeing that the teacher is true, but because having really seen this, they continue to close their eyes to it. They will not obey when they know they ought to obey. And thus the moral offence of a Catholic in denying some recondite doctrine, does not lie merely, and need not lie at all, in the immediate bad effects that such a denial would necessitate; but in the disobedience, the self-will, and the rebellion that must in such a case be both a cause and a result of it.

In the light of these considerations, though the old perplexity of evil will still confront us, it will be seen that the claims of Catholic orthodoxy do nothing at all to add to it. If orthodoxy, however, admit so much good without itself, we may perhaps be inclined to ask what special good it claims within itself, and what possible motives can exist for either understanding or teaching it. But we might ask with exactly equal force, what is the good of true physical science, and why should we try to impress on the world its teachings? Such a question, we can at once see, is absurd. Because a large number of men know nothing of physical science, and are apparently not the worse for their ignorance, we do not for that reason think physical science worthless. We believe, on the whole, that a knowledge of the laws of matter, including those of our organisms and their environments, will steadily tend to better our lives, in so far as they are material. It will tend, for instance, to a better preservation of our health. But we do not for this reason deny that many individuals may preserve their health who are but very partially acquainted with the laws of it. Nor do we deny the value of a thorough study of astronomy and meteorology because a certain practical knowledge of the weather and of navigation may be attained without it. On the contrary, we hold that the fullest knowledge we can acquire on such matters it is our duty to acquire, and not acquire only, but as far as possible promulgate. It is true that the mass of men may never master such knowledge thoroughly; but what they do master of it we feel convinced should be the truth, and even what they do not, will, we feel convinced, be some indirect profit to them. And the case of spiritual science is entirely analogous to the case of natural science. A man to whom the truth is open is not excused from finding it because he knows it is not so open to all. A heretic who denies the dogmas of the Church has his counterpart in the quack who denies the verified conclusions of science. The moral condemnation that is given to the one is illustrated by the intellectual condemnation that is given to the other.

If we will think this over carefully, we shall get a clearer view of the moral value claimed for itself by orthodoxy. Some of its doctrines, the great and picturable parts of them, that appeal to all, and that in some degree can be taken in by all, it declares doubtless to be saving, in their own nature. But for the mass of men the case is quite different with the facts underlying these. That we eat Christ's body in the Eucharist is a belief that, in a practical way, can be understood perfectly by anyone; but the philosophy that is involved in this belief would be to most men the merest gibberish. Yet it is no more unimportant that those who do understand this philosophy, should do so truly and transmit it faithfully, than it is unimportant that a physician should understand the action of alcohol, because anyone independent of such knowledge can tell that so many glasses of wine will have such and such an effect on him. Theology is to the spiritual body what anatomy and medicine are to the natural body. The parts they each play in our lives are analogous, and in their respective worlds their raison d'etre is the same. What then can be shallower than the rhetoric of such thinkers as Mr. Carlyle, in which natural religion and orthodoxy are held up to us as contrasts and as opposites, the former being praised as simple and going straight to the heart, and the latter described and declaimed against as the very reverse of this? 'On the one hand,' it is said, 'see the soul going straight to its God, feeling His love, and content that others should feel it. On the other hand, see this pure and free communion, distracted and interrupted by a thousand tortuous reasonings as to the exact nature of it. What can obscure intellectual propositions,' it is asked, 'have to do with a religion of the heart? And do not they check the latter by being thus bound up with it?' But what really can be more misleading than this? Natural religion is doubtless simpler in one sense than revealed religion; but it is only simple because it has no authoritative science of itself. It is simple for the same reason that a boy's account of having given himself a headache is simpler than a physician's would be. The boy says merely, 'I ate ten tarts, and drank three bottles of ginger-beer.' The physician, were he to explain the catastrophe, would describe a number of far more complex processes. The boy's account would be of course the simplest, and would certainly go more home to the general heart of boyhood; but it would not for that reason be the correctest or the most important. And just like this will be the case of the divine communion, which the simple saint may feel, and the subtle theologian analyse.

But it will be well to observe, further, that the simplicity of a religion can of itself be no test of the probable truth of it. And in the case of natural religion, what is called simplicity is in general nothing more than vagueness. If simplicity used in this way be a term of praise, we might praise a landscape as simple because it was half-drowned in mist. As a matter of fact, however, the religion of the Catholic Church, putting out of the question its theology, is a thing far simpler than the outside world supposes; nor is there a doctrine in it without a direct moral meaning for us, and not tending to have a direct effect on the character.

But the outside world misjudges of all this for various reasons. In the first place, it can reach it as a rule through explanations only; and the explanation or the account of anything is always far more intricate than the apprehension of the thing itself. Take, for instance, the practice of the invocation of saints. This seems to many to complicate the whole relation of the soul to God, to be introducing a number of new and unnecessary go-betweens, and to make us, as it were, communicate with God through a dragoman. But the case really is very different. Of course it may be contended that intercessory prayer, or that prayer of any kind, is an absurdity; but for those who do not think this, there can be nothing to object to in the invocation of saints. It is admitted by such men that we are not wrong in asking the living to pray for us. Surely, therefore, it is not wrong to make a like request of the dead. In the same way, to those who believe in purgatory, to pray for the dead is as natural and as rational as to pray for the living. Next, as to this doctrine of purgatory itself—which has so long been a stumbling-block to the whole Protestant world—time goes on, and the view men take of it is changing. It is becoming fast recognized on all sides that it is the only doctrine that can bring a belief in future rewards and punishments into anything like accordance with our notions of what is just or reasonable. So far from its being a superfluous superstition, it is seen to be just what is demanded at once by reason and morality; and a belief in it to be not an intellectual assent only, but a partial harmonising of the whole moral ideal. And the whole Catholic religion, if we only distinguish and apprehend it rightly, will present itself to us in the same light.

But there are other reasons besides those just described, by which outsiders are hindered from arriving at such a right view of the matter. Not only does the intricacy of Catholicism described, blind them to the simplicity of Catholicism experienced, but they confuse with the points of faith, not only the scientific accounts the theologians give of them, but mere rules of discipline, and pious opinions also. It is supposed popularly, for instance, to be of Catholic faith that celibacy is essential to the priesthood. This as a fact, however, is no more a part of the Catholic faith than the celibacy of a college fellow is a part of the Thirty-nine Articles, or than the skill of an English naval officer depends on his not having his wife with him on shipboard. Nor again, to take another popular instance, is the headship of the Catholic Church connected essentially with Rome, any more than the English Parliament is essentially connected with Westminster.

The difficulty of distinguishing things that are of faith, from mere pious opinions, is a more subtle one. From the confusion caused by it, the Church seems pledged to all sorts of grotesque stories of saints, and accounts of the place and aspect of heaven, of hell and purgatory, and to be logically bound to stand and fall by these. Thus Sir James Stephen happened once in the course of his reading to light on an opinion of Bellarmine's, and certain arguments by which he supported it, as to the place of purgatory. It is quite true that to us Bellarmine's opinion seems sufficiently ludicrous; and Sir James Stephen argued that the Roman Church is ludicrous in just the same degree. But if he had studied the matter a little deeper, he would soon have dropped his argument. He would have seen that he was attacking, not the doctrine of the Church, but simply an opinion, not indeed condemned by her, but held avowedly without her sanction. Had he studied Bellarmine to a little more purpose, he would have seen that that writer expressly states it to be 'a question where purgatory is, but that the Church has defined nothing on this point.' He would also have learned from the same source that it is no article of Catholic faith, though it was of Bellarmine's opinion, that there is in purgatory any material fire; and that, 'as to the intensity of the pains of purgatory, though all admit that they are greater than anything that we suffer in this life, still it is doubtful how this is to be explained and understood.' He would have learned too that, according to Bonaventura, 'the sufferings of purgatory are only severer than those of this life, inasmuch as the greatest suffering in purgatory is more severe than the greatest suffering endured in this life; though there may be a degree of punishment in purgatory less intense than what may sometimes be undergone in this world.' And finally he would have learned—what in this connection would have been well worth his attention—that the duration of pains in purgatory is according to Bellarmine, 'so completely uncertain, that it is rash to pretend to determine anything about it.'

Here is one instance, that will be as good as many, of the way in which the private opinions of individual Catholics, or the transitory opinions of particular epochs, are taken for the unalterable teachings of the Catholic Church herself; and it is no more logical to condemn the latter as false because the former are, than it would be to say that all modern geography is false because geographers may still entertain false opinions about regions as to which they do not profess certainty. Mediaeval doctors thought that purgatory might be the middle of the earth. Modern geographers have thought that there might be an open sea at the North Pole. But that wrong conjectures have been hazarded in both cases, can prove in neither that there have been no true discoveries. The Church, it is undeniable, has for a long time lived and moved amongst countless false opinions; and to the external eye they have naturally seemed a part of her. But science moves on, and it is shown that she can cast them off. She has cast off some already; soon doubtless she will cast off others; not in any petulant anger, but with a composed determined gentleness, as some new light gravely dawns upon her.

Granting all this, however, there remains a yet subtler characteristic of the Church, which goes to make her a rock of offence to many; and that is, the temper and the intellectual tone which she seems to develop in her members. But here, again, we must call to our aid considerations similar to those we have just been dwelling on. We must remember that the particular tone and temper that offends us is not necessarily Catholicism. The temper of the Catholic world may change, and, as a matter of fact, does change. It is not the same, indeed, in any two countries, or in any two eras. And it may have a new and unsuspected future in store for it. It may absorb ideas that we should consider broader, bolder, and more rational than any it seems to possess at present. But if ever it does so, the Church, in the opinion of Catholics, will not be growing false to herself; she will only, in due time, be unfolding her own spirit more fully. Thus some people associate Catholic conceptions of extreme sanctity with a neglect of personal cleanliness; and imagine that a clean Catholic can, according to his own creed, never come very near perfection. But the Church has never given this view her sanction; she has never made it of faith that dirt is sacred; she has added no ninth beatitude in favour of an unchanged shirt. Many of the greatest saints were doubtless dirty; but they were dirty not because of the Church they belonged to, but because of the age they lived in. Such an expression of sanctity for themselves, it is probable, will be loathed by the saints of the future; yet they may none the less reverence, for all that, the saints who so expressed it in the past. This is but a single instance; but it may serve as a type of the wide circle of changes that the Church as a living organism, still full of vigour and power of self-adaptation, will be able to develop, as the world develops round her, and yet lose nothing of her supernatural sameness.

To sum up, then; if we would obtain a true view of the general character of Catholicism, we must begin by making a clean sweep of all the views that, as outsiders, we have been taught to entertain about her. We must, in the first place, learn to conceive of her as a living, spiritual body, as infallible and as authoritative now as she ever was, with her eyes undimmed and her strength not abated, continuing to grow still as she has continued to grow hitherto: and the growth of the new dogmas that she may from time to time enunciate, we must learn to see are, from her own stand-point, signs of life and not signs of corruption. And further, when we come to look into her more closely, we must separate carefully the diverse elements we find in her—her discipline, her pious opinions, her theology, and her religion.

Let honest enquirers do this to the best of their power, and their views will undergo an unlooked-for change. Other difficulties of a more circumstantial kind, it is true, still remain for them; and of these I shall speak presently. But putting these for the moment aside, and regarding the question under its widest aspects only—regarding it only in connection with the larger generalisations of science, and the primary postulates of man's spiritual existence—the theist will find in Catholicism no new difficulties. He will find in it the logical development of our natural moral sense, developed, indeed, and still developing, under a special and supernatural care—but essentially the same thing; with the same negations, the same assertions, the same positive truths, and the same impenetrable mysteries; and with nothing new added to them, but help, and certainty, and guidance.