and of all worship; the source of all vices, and also of all virtues. What a man eats, that he is: without phosphorus in the brain, there is no thought; indeed, it is the phosphorus that, strictly speaking, thinks in us: and so on. Here, again, is the creed of materialism, stated from the scientific view-point, by Moleschott:-"Man is simply a natural phenomenon, an evanescent product and element of the circle of life......Each man is the sum of his parents and nurse, of place and time, of air and weather, of sound and light, of food and clothes. His will is the necessary result of these causes, bound to a natural law...... as the planet to its orbit, the plant to the soil. .....Thought is a movement of matter, a transposition of the substance of the brain. Apart from phosphorus, there is no thought; and consciousness is nothing but a property of matter. attention on one set of phenomena to the exclu- | (or self-ism) is the ultimate principle of all culture sion of all others. Whatever circumscribes a man's sphere of observation, will inevitably narrow and thwart his conceptions. A goldfish, that has spent its whole life in swimming slowly and solemnly round a glass-globe, must necessarily have a very contracted idea of the watery universe, and a very monotonous but very bigoted conception of an orthodox fish's chief end in life. And we can understand and sympathize with the feelings of a certain goldfish when its glass-globe was overturned, during a flood, by the stream which had entered the house, and when, notwithstanding its most solemn remonstrances concerning the folly and danger of leaving the old paths, it was remorselessly swept through the window and carried rapidly down the river towards the open sea. The theological tinge which the language has spontaneously assumed, would seem to suggest that the vice of narrowness is not confined to the sphere of secular thought. Another consideration suggested by the history of human thought, is the necessity of distinguishing between what is fact and what is inference, in every philosophical and scientific theory. There is, in every speculation having any claim to scientific attention, a certain proportion of facts which are undoubtedly true; and a superstructure of inference or conjecture, which may or may not be true. But in both cases we must distinguish the element of fact and the element of inference, since a very different degree of confidence is due to these respectively; while, from failing to make this distinction, people fall into the error of ascribing to inferences-which are often mere conjecture, and are at best no more than probablethe certainty which belongs to the facts alone. We shall select one or two examples, from the materialistic theories so prevalent in our own country, and still more so on the Continent. In Germany, the materialistic party is composed partly of metaphysicians and partly of scientific investigators. As a specimen of the first, take Feuerbach, who has transformed Hegel's deification of Universal Spirit into the deification of the Individual Spirit :-"Man (as such) is man (in the common sense of the term): man with man the unity of 'I' and 'Thou'-is God." Hence he has to maintain that Egoism ....When the body dies, man ceases to exist: the only immortality is, that when the body is disintegrated, its ammonia, carbonic acid, and lime serve to enrich the earth, and to nourish plants which feed other generations of men." This system has, unquestionably, an alarming appearance, for it cannot be denied that it rests on certain indubitable facts; but when we disentangle these from the inferences, we shall find that the facts in themselves are perfectly innocent, while the inferences are altogether unwarrantable, and therefore are also harmless. For instance, one of the most plausible arguments of the materialistic school, in support of the theory that organic and inorganic forces are on the same plane, or are so correlated that the one may be transformed into the other, is derived from the dogma of spontaneous generation, which was long regarded, not as a mere hypothesis, but as an ascertained and established fact, because people had failed to distinguish in this theory what was fact and what was inference. Thus, it was an observed fact that living organisms appeared in water exposed to the atmosphere, and it was assumed that those were transmuted inorganic matter. Again, in 1856, a German investigator, Krause, found that in certain diseases of the lower animals the blood was full of vegetable spores, and it was inferred that these were transformed blood corpuscles. Now, many men of But science, tacitly transferring the certainty of the facts to their inference from the facts, regarded spontaneous generation as indubitable. more careful investigations have shown that the inference is in no known case correct; and Professor Huxley, who is honest enough to confess he is wrong when it is proved to him, had recently to acknowledge he had been going a little too fast. And this confession must have cost him no small. effort; for so convinced was he at one time of the possibility of producing living protoplasm from dead matter, that he looked forward to the actual performance of the feat by chemistry with nearly as much confidence, and quite as little reason, as the old alchemist in the second part of Faust, who holds forth in the following boastful strain: "We chemists now indulge the expectation, By mixing, after careful computationSince all depends upon a right selectionSome hundred drugs, according to direction, And, boiling these into a fine quintessence, To properly compound the human essence; Subjecting this to more manipulations, To boilings, solvings, manifold filtrations, And cautiously avoiding error and disorder, We thus shall fashion men quite easily to order." Here is another doctrine of materialism, stated confidently enough, by Karl Vogt, the celebrated German naturalist:-"Physiology declares itself definitely and categorically against individual immortality, and generally against all representations that rest on the assumption of the special existence of a soul; it recognises in the spiritual activities functions of the brain as the material substratum." When we examine the proof of this assertion, regarded as certain by many men of science at home and abroad, we find that it consists of a few undeniable facts and a quantity of most astounding inference. Thus it is a fact that thought is invariably accompanied by certain vibrations in the matter of the nerves and brain. This is fact. But when physiologists proceed to assert that these movements of the brain-matter are themselves the conscious thoughts and emotions and volitions, this, it will be observed, is mere inference. And further, it is as gratuitous an inference as it would be to assume that the picture on the retina of the eye is sight, or the vibrations of the tympanum hearing. On this principle of reasoning, we should have to hold that shame is nothing more than the determination of blood to the face in blushing; and that sorrow is nothing more than a flow of water from the eyes in the shape of tears, and a spasmodic escape of air from the chest in the form of sobs: in which case, Spenser's description in the "Faerie Queen" of the grief of a hypocritical woman would acquire a universal applicability: "Yet were her words but wind, and all her tears but water." A necessary corollary of this physical conception of mental activity is, that there is no such thing as free agency. This, again, is mere assertion, and yet it is amazing what confidence sensible men have in its correctness. Thus, Huxley says: "The physiology of the future will gradually extend the realm of matter and law, until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with action." This is a prediction which has frequently been made—for instance, by Epicurus, hy Hartley, by Condillac, and by many othersbut it still occupies a place in the category of unfulfilled prophecy; and, in addition to this, it has so little ground to stand on, that I can only account for Huxley's making it by supposing that he has mixed up fact and inference, and, above all, that he has been carried away by professional prejudice. It is related that a scientific gardener, whose great hobby was mathematical symmetry, punished one of his boys for misconduct by inserting him in one of two large ornamental flowerpots which stood in front of the entrance to the garden, and happened to be empty. Perceiving that this had a one-sided effect, he fetched another and innocent child, and, forgetting the claims of justice in his regard for harmony, inserted him in the opposite pot. Now, as this gardener, from a too exclusive devotion to symmetry, had come to forget the great law of moral justice, and to view his offspring as on a level with ornamental shrubs; so Professor Huxley, from an excessive regard for uniformity and universal generalization, would seem to have lost sight of the grand fact of free agency, and to consider human beings on a level with stocks and stones, and other senseless things. These few simple instances sufficiently show the necessity, in measuring the pretensions of any theory, philosophical, scientific, or, I may add, theological, to distinguish between what is fact and what is inference, and to attach to each its respective importance. Were this more carefully attended to, we should witness less arrogance and bad logic in the statement of scientific and philosophical theories, and less unreasonable outcry and alarm on the part of orthodox but timid spectators. Hitherto we have confined our attention to theories where the inferences were manifestly unwarranted, but there are cases where the inferential element is at least logical, and must therefore be regarded as more or less probable. Does history throw any light on the value of such theories? We think it does, and that its verdict is adverse just in proportion to the amount of inference in them. Thus in every department of science it is amazing what vast numbers of theories have seen the light, flourished for a short time, and then passed into oblivion. It would be well if we could have an exact calculation of the rate of mortality among scientific hypotheses; for by applying it to the numerous existing generation we should doubtless have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that nearly all of them are doomed to perish and decay, and leave nothing valuable behind them save the skeleton of facts on which they were framed. Turning to the history of philosophy, we find that here the carnage is still greater, and the remains of imperishable fact of necessity scantier. It is remarkable how rapidly one system rises and displaces its predecessor. Take Germany during the first half of the present century, and you have Kant succeeded by Fichte, Fichte by Schelling, Schelling by Hegel; and since then we have a perfect swarm of philosophies in Schleiermacher, Herbart, Schopenhauer, Beneke, &c. ;-in fact, "their name is legion." The same process has gone on uninterruptedly since first men were driven to seek to solve the mysteries of existence. And there is something very pathetic in the history, when you remember how each system was wrought out by a strong and earnest soul, and with what high hopes it was launched by the founder and his disciples, who confidently thought that it was destined to bear all mankind over the stormy waves of mystery and fear and doubt, safe to the firm land of knowledge and peace and certainty. And now it lies on the shore of that great sea, a battered and abandoned wreck, and men struggle as painfully and helplessly as ever to surmount the billows of uncertainty that rise and threaten to engulf them. Therefore it is that we say the teaching of history leads us to be very wary of putting much reliance on inferential attempts to explain or interpret facts. The verdict of history is, that when the products of every age have been sifted, the result is a very small portion of grain and a very enormous heap of chaff. Surely, then, the proper frame of mind for us is, to remember that much which we regard as probable-nay, as certain may be wrong, and is at best incomplete. Yet men are very slow to learn this lesson, and still they continue to publish their theories with an unfaltering confidence, which is at once comical and touching, and is doubtless to be ascribed to the blindness of parental affection, which can see no fault in its offspring. Hence, although every great field of inquiry is white with the skeletons of previous attempts to solve the mystery, inventors still start off their own attempt without the slightest doubt that it is destined to succeed where all its predecessors have failed. For instance, so many theories have at various times appeared proclaiming that they had exposed and finally refuted Christianity, that most men of sense have come to receive the announcement as coolly as people do those bills which advertise the appearance of second-rate actors, "positively for the last time." Indeed, so suspicious has the cry of "Christianity exposed" become, that one would think a respectable man of science would be reluctant to employ it even if he had certainly accomplished the feat. Yet there must be a mysterious fascination about such statements; for I find that prudent man, Professor Huxley, proclaiming that when he read Darwin's Origin of Species, he was convinced "that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands." Now, without insinuating that the wish was father to the thought, I do not wonder at Professor Huxley's thinking that Mr. Darwin had finally annihilated the argument for God's existence from the evidence of design in nature, but I do wonder at his telling it, since it is a wise rule never prematurely to indulge in public rejoicings over the news of an enemy's death, especially in the case of a foe that has been already frequently declared defunct, but that has a singular faculty of always turning up again none the worse of its reported decease. Without giving more examples of the advisability of distinguishing fact and inference, and of speaking with due caution, in the departments of science and philosophy, I proceed to observe that history teaches the same lessons to theologians. They, too, must carefully distinguish between the statements of revelation, which are certain, and their own interpretations and inferences, which are by no means equally reliable, and ought always to be maintained with becoming modesty. The history of theology presents a sad array of abandoned and dilapidated theories, consisting of ungrounded inferences and false interpretations; and even sober and well-balanced orthodoxy has not unfrequently had to recede from positions which it once defended as absolutely certain and essential to the truth of Christianity. I shall only mention, as examples, the allegorical school of interpretation, the strictly historical character of the Book of Job, the immobility of the Earth, the creation of the world out of nothing in six days of twenty-four hours--and so on. These lessons should teach us, while defending our view with all our might, not to claim the attribute of certainty for our interpretation, which it has no right to; and, above all, never to stake the credit of Christianity on the truth of our theories. Yet I suspect a conviction of infallibility is as strong among us as it was in our clerical forefathers, when Cromwell, trying in vain to convince them of their folly in supporting Charles, besought them, "by the bowels of their common Christianity, to believe that it was just within the bounds of possibility that they might be mistaken." To show, however, that presumptuous dogmatism is not confined to the orthodox, take the following quotation from Ewald, whose Commentary on the Old Testament Prophets (whom he regards as having been little, if at all, more inspired than himself) closes with these words: "The ignoring and stiffnecked denying that this book of mine contains a perfectly secure foundation for the right interpretation of the Prophets, appears to me to border very closely on the sin against the Holy Ghost." Such being his estimate of his own utterances, it will not surprise the reader to find him denouncing an adverse reviewer in the following terms: "Most assuredly, had Olshausen lived in the time of the apostles, he would have been one of the most cold-blooded and dangerous of their persecutors and crucifiers." Contrast such presumptuous arrogance with the following sentences from the Preface to Rothe's "Theologische Ethik: "-"I have no desire to maintain against others that my view is correct, and theirs not ;......nay, I know that I am incorrect, for even at the best it is but a drop that I have drawn out of the ocean. If therefore any reader-judging from the confidence with which inventors of philosophical systems are wont to regard their work-should ask me if I find full satisfaction for my mind in my principles, I can only smile. Woe is me, if God and the universe did not remain overwhelmingly greater than my conception of them!" Need I say that the reverent humility with which Rothe introduces to his readers the greatest modern system of ethics, is the same spirit which breathed in the greatest of the apostles when he said-" Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known"? Once more I remark, that these features of the history of human thought ought to affect our attitude to the antichristian speculations of the age. If, instead of indulging in vague denunciations, which only serve to reveal their ignorance and anxiety, Christian men would learn the lesson of the past, we should have less of that spirit of ill-concealed terror and misgiving in the unlearned Christian world; and we should witness in the learned defenders of our faith more of what Sir Walter Scott describes as "The stern joy which warriors feel But it may be asked, What of Professor Huxley's boast, that "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules " ? It is a very strong statement of a very commonplace fact; and the fate of the few extinguished theologians should serve as a warning to weakminded brethren not to stray out of their proper pastures. But how has it fared with men of science and philosophy who have attempted to solve those mysteries that are impenetrable to man's unaided reason? I take up a History of Philosophy and Science, and as I survey the long than the vision of green trees and cooling streams that floats in the mirage before the eyes of the traveller dying of thirst in the desert? "There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor cry line of skeletons of defunct theories, I feel the prospect to be very like that presented to the eyes of the prophet who was set down in the midst of the valley which was full of dry bones : and, behold, there were very many in the opening, neither shall there be any more pain "-what valley; and, lo, they were very dry." I turn to the History of Christianity, and looking back to the first centuries, I behold the religion of Christ born into a world possessed by the giant forms of Platonism, Stoicism, Epicurism, and Paganism; and I watch the tiny stream grow stronger and overwhelm these obstacles to its progress; and gradually it expands into a river broad and deep, whose banks are strewn with the wrecks of countless barriers that were raised to stem its tide: and I know that this river will flow on triumphantly, till it swells into a mighty ocean that will "fill all the earth, as the waters cover the sea." : Finally it is instructive to note that history shows the connection between the thought and life of an age to be the same as that between an epidemic and the general health of a community. The epidemic is not the cause, but the result of a low sanitary condition; yet when once established, it increases the previous depreciation. So the philosophy of an age is not the cause, but the result of the general tone of feeling; but once evolved, it feeds the tendency that fostered it. In our age, philosophy and science have assumed a materialistic and utilitarian aspect; and, as we should expect from the teaching of history, we see that the general tone of thought and feeling is of a worldly, material, matter-of-fact character. The age has been one of unexampled commercial enterprise and prosperity, and thus attention has been fixed on outward and temporal good, until this has attained an exaggerated value, and the subjective, the ideal and the spiritual, have fallen into the background. There is a strong tendency to ignore the future life, and concentrate every effort to secure well-being in this life. The motto of secularism-"To live and die for this world" -is more or less present in many hearts. If there be a future life, say they, we know nothing of it. This life we have; let us make the best of it: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." What is hell but the dream of disordered minds and may not heaven be nothing more is that but the last variation of the refrain we are always singing and hoping, "Hard times come again no more"? And what of that strange story of One who came to save the lost? What say we of Christ? And the sad answer comes, that he is the creation of broken hearts that had lost their earthly friends or been deceived, and who therefore dreamed of One who feels for them in heaven, and who is ever faithful and true. This feeling is beautifully expressed in the sad words of Matthew Arnold, when, after describing how Christ lived in the warm faith of the early believers, he adds : "Now He is dead: far hence he lies, And on his grave, with shining eyes, "From David's lips this word did roll- 'No man can save his brother's soul, On the other hand, worldly prosperity is regarded as the summum bonum; success is worshipped; and the one unpardonable sin is to fail to secure as large a share as possible of life's prizes and men's applause. With such a spirit largely pervading certain classes of society, can we wonder to find, both in thought and in life, a strong antagonism to Christianity; a system whose great principle is, "Seek first the kingdom of heaven," and whose Founder gained no earthly crown except a crown of thorns? We must, therefore, set ourselves to solve the problem how best this sickness of the age may be met and healed. The answer seems to me to be something like this: If you would do good service in opposing this spirit of worldliness that has got possession of our age, it is not necessary that you should, like the first preachers of Christ, turn wholly away from the pursuits and honours of secular life. Nor must you imitate the hermits of the Middle Ages, who sought to save themselves from the hardness and corruption of the world by flight. But there is open to you a way more |