gamut-scale of such an Oratorio as Handel's Messiah or Haydn's Creation, or the symphonies of Beethoven, but surely the consideration of time for composition would have no importance in reference to a claim that it had been altogether accidentally done. Such complicated coincidence of accidents, made in any time, is the point of incredulity. Numberless millions of living organisms built up from the dust are now alive, each itself a complicated system put together with intelligible physiological law and order, and all arranged systematically in their respective kingdoms within multiplied graded categories, and in spite of all rivalry and conflict they exist side by side, and in the face of all the threatening forces of nature they propagate their kind, and perpetuate their species in consistent and coherent expression for an intelligent experience in consciousness; and now what help can it be, in support of a theory that all this has been an accidental flow from a thoughtless Absolute Force, without plan or purpose, to say that there has been an infinite time for this complicated system of the universe so to happen? Incalculable myriads of fortunate accidents, in the heavens above and the earth and waters beneath, are to-day standing out in order and beauty and glorious harmony! give to the theory all the time it asks, and how is this to help our belief in it?

We thus find the great defect of this theory of Natural Development to be its exclusion of thought and plan from the absolute force, and the greater error is its assumption that such an absolute can give thought and plan to its relative forces. Out of such an idealess abyss as this absolute force is, order and system can never come, nor can life or mind have their origin in it. The main argument for proving life and mind to be force is the assumed application of the laws of force to them, but this is done through a logical sophism. Because correlation and equivalence of forces obtain among the phenomena of life and mind, it is therefore concluded that they reach to and determine life and mind themselves. But while the matter used by life and mind is force, they themselves are other and more than force. The billiard-ball loses the force it gives to its fellow and must be stricken anew for any new impulse, but this moving impulse originates in the player, and because the determinations of correlation and equivalence obtain among the bil

liard-balls, it does not logically follow that the player is concluded by them.

So of any material instrumentality made and used the harpstrings must be stricken anew for every new note, and the telegraph wire must be retouched by the electro-magnet for every letter, but these cases prove nothing for the application of the laws of force to the maker or to the user of the instruments; and so the life-instinct uses force, and in using it up must supply itself anew, and the laws of force will apply to the forces used up and those supplied, but not logically so to the life instinct using them. The life is more than force and both prompts and guides the action of forces, but while the forces have the laws of correlation and equivalence, the life instinct will work spontaneously. Brute-instinct builds sentient organisms and wakes to conscious activity, and uses up force in muscular contraction and nerve irritation; and especially humaninstinct constructs human organisms, and its voluntary agencies use up forces which must be replaced; but neither the animal sentient-life nor the human rational life can so be found to be under the control of material laws. Reason well knows the signs of force in inorganic phenomena, and those of life in organic phenomena, and reads their distinct meanings, and cannot be satisfied with any sense-confounding of force with life and mind. It well knows that living spontaneity, and sentient activity, and moral free agency, can never come from undesigning absolute force.

We have excluded Chance and disproved the theory of Natural Development, and thus come to the only remaining theory of Supernatural Origination, which must alone stand in its validity, and will need only short consideration of what it is and how much it comprehends.

We now know that material forces cannot give phenomena to experience intelligibly, except as they are ordered connectedly and systematically, and thus thought and plan must precede and guide the action of force. There is, however, a profound philosophy resting in Thought alone, and making thinking itself to be creative. All that is needed for knowing the universe is the development of an absolute logical process by an inherent logical law. But when to the Hegelian Logic we grant all that it assumes, and admit it to be comprehensive of all truth which

logical thinking can attain, and that pure thought applies alike to both the ideal and the real, and interprets the latter by the former, still must we be left unsatisfied without some essential discrimination between the logical product and the real world determinative of all sense-experience.

The real has an intrinsic essence other and more than the purely logical, and while this essence of the real must be recognized and expounded by a more complete philosophy, the essence itself must come from a higher agency than any philosophical thinking. The Creator himself may and must have first his ideal, but with nothing further there will yet be no created reality.

Pure mathematics will be alike applicable to an ideal sphere and to a material globe, and the geometry applied will determine truth the same and as much for one as the other, but the material sphere has an intrinsic essential force which the ideal has not, and which no pure mathematics can help us to recognize. And so pure logical thinking may have the universal sphere of thought intrinsically in the spaceless point of the thinking Ego, the extrinsic of which must be the negative of this in infinite spacial outness, the one known as the subjective, the other as the objective sphere; still the real world will have its essential force, which thinking alone can never give to either of these spheres. And this is the point for present discrimination-the knowledge of matter and life determinative of experience, and the logical corception constituting the ideal-and which discrimination the recognition of this inner essence can alone secure.

An ideal sphere as given in pure thought cannot be aggressive upon sense-organs nor resistive to them, and thus in all cases the pure thought is unable to come through sense into the consciousness and so become intelligible experience. An efficiency must be given it to affect sense, and in just this is the distinction between the real and ideal. The latter is actual as product of the thought-process, the former is tactual as having in it an imparted energy above thinking, even an essential force as product of fixed will and purpose, and so standing fast in its own place and excluding all other forces therefrom. Both the ideal and the real have the intensity of thought; over and above this the real has the exertion of will putting force into it and making a palpable, impenetrable thing of it. It is thus no longer the

secret thought but the overtly expressed thing, put out for any sense to take, and so a communication from the thinker to the sense-observer, and has its common appearance in common place and common period for all sense-observers. So the thing may be, but so the pure thought cannot be, and as thus fixed in re for the sense, it becomes distinctively and essentially a reality.

The intellectual idea and the energetic will which is to put force therein and give fixed expression to the ideal, are both originally in the supernatural, and so creation from nothing is not to be contemplated as origination from a void, but as put forth from the supernatural into the void, and this fixing the idea steadfast in place by giving force to it from the energetic will of the supernatural is the creation of matter, and is modified according to the substances designed. What was above nature now constitutes nature, and as fixed or changing gives occasion for determining place in space or period in time, in common for all experience. The original pure idea and its space and time were in the supernatural and only for the supernatural, but in the creative expression they become open and common to all who perceive through sense-organs.

The distinguishable forces are essentially the inorganic world; the infusion of the instinctive life-want into force, thus creating life, gives essentially the organic world; and this life raised to sensation, and from thence by superinducing reason raised to human free-agency, is the elevation of organic being from plant to animal and from thence to responsible humanity.

We have now, the mystery removed from both matter and life in their essential constitutions and their reciprocal interworkings; and then again from all question of their origin; and while all nature is thus opened to a comprehensive universal philosophy, the supernatural source of both nature and humanity is alone left in obscurity. We seek not here to remove the mystery further back, and to subject the supernatural to philosophical knowledge. It is enough for our present design, that nature and humanity stand here before us with no conflict in the necessary connections of the former with the social communions of the latter, and that the freedom of man is consistent with the claims of immutable morality in reason and the authority of theology in any way of revelation. Wherever "by the things that are made are clearly seen the eternal power and

God head" of the Maker, Natural Religion will press its obligations; and wherever the inspired word makes known the divine will, Revealed Religion will enjoin its duties and offer its consolations.

ART. IV.-FAITH AS AN AMBIGUOUS MIDDLE TERM.

BY PROF. WILLIS J. BEECHER, Auburn Theological Seminary.

The term faith and its cognates, like most other terms, are currently used in various significations. Their use in three specific senses, each of which includes certain variations of its own, will be considered in this paper.

First, By faith we frequently mean probable knowledge, as differing from certain knowledge. One says, "I am not sure how it is, but I believe that it is so and so." "The affair seems to me doubtful, but I have faith that it will turn out well." This meaning is certainly sanctioned by good usage, and cannot, therefore, be reasonably excluded. Faith in this sense, is one with opinion.

Secondly, Faith is used to describe that knowledge, whether certain or probable, which we receive on personal testimony, as differing from that which we obtain from other sources. In this sense the act of religious faith is the cognizing of truth on God's testimony, or more specifically, on God's testimony as given in the Bible, in distinction from all other knowing whatever. It is in this sense, though not in this sense only, that a body of religious opinions is called a faith, and an official promulgation of such a body of opinion, a confession of faith. In this sense, within certain limits, the knowledge of faith is widely different from scientific knowledge. Matters of faith we know by one kind of evidence, and matters of science by another kind. But the difference does not at all affect the certainty of the knowledge. That which we know by God's testimony, we know certainly or as a mere probability, according as the testimony is to us more or less clear, and according as we are more or less perfectly assured that the testimony is really that of God. That which we know by other proof, we likewise know with certainty