U. Upon that showing it would be safer that no race and no man recognized either the supernatural or the natural selection. W. Or else that those who feel the first most strongly should confess that their selection is for the sake of the whole race, and of all persons-that the selector is one who desires all the families of the earth to be blessed. U. By recurring to the language of the Jewish Scriptures, you intimate that theirs is the only selection which you count valid. W. On the contrary, as I endeavoured to explain when I began this conversation, the principle on which I have written my book is this: that the conquest over any brutality, the formation of any wholesome manners, the establishment of any political life, among Hindoos, Chinese, Persians, Greeks, bore witness to the same selector who called the Jews to be a family and a nation; who gave them laws; who inspired their prophets. Believing that the Jew was taught from the first that his calling was for mankind—believing that his downfall was the consequence of his denying that vocation-I can interpret the triumphs and the overthrows of other races by the principle which is elucidated in his. The truth which they did not believe has proved itself; they have existed for other ages and countries, and not for themselves; their decay-I dare not say their extinction has been for the good of the universe, and therefore for their own. U. The enthusiasts for Hellenic culture in our day speak very scornfully of that Semitic calling which you seem to connect with it. W. Of course; if they condescended to notice me they would pronounce me a Philistine or a barbarian. I do not complain of their enthusiasm; the more they have of that PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. xxxi the better: the scorn which accompanies it, I think, weakens as well as narrows it. My own conviction is, that while they reject what they call the Semitic culture, they can do no justice to the Hellenic; that this in their hands will be made into a restraint upon modern growth, not as it has been, and ought to be, a great instrument in promoting and directing it. U. How can we do more justice to the Greeks by accepting the monotheistic denunciations of all which gave worth to their arts, their letters, even to their philosophy? W. I think I can do more justice to every Greek fable than those who denounce the Hebrews can. U. What! To the gods and goddesses? W. To one who accepts the teaching of the old Hebrew, -"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In Him was life, and His life was the light of men"-every conception that men have formed of a Divine Wisdom who was illuminating them, whatever shape it may have taken, with whatever local or material accidents it may have been clothed, must be profoundly interesting, not for its falsehoods, but for its truth. The study of the divided forms under which the light has broken in upon the human heart and intellect-of the efforts of the senses to draw it down into themselves-of the corruptions which have darkened it-will be pursued by one who takes this clue with him, reverently, in sympathy and in fear. The fear will deepen the sympathy; for he will find his own experiences and temptations anticipated on a great scale, even as he will find the later experiences of the world shadowed forth in different partial societies and personal biographies. And the reverence will grow with the fear and the sympathy; for he will be compelled at every moment to say-"Surely God was in this place, and in this time, and I knew it not." U. The confession of a God of Light or wisdom-even of Muses that inspire song-may receive this interpretation. But the stories of relations among the gods, or of gods with men, you would be bound-starting from the Jewish creed-indignantly to reject. W. Saul the Pharisee, wrapped in his proud contemptuous monotheism, would of course have treated every Greek whom he met at Tarsus as a blind idolater for feeling that there could be-that there must be-relations between men and their divine Rulers, and that those relations must have their ground in some still deeper relation. Paul, the Hebrew Apostle to the Gentiles, wishing to churches composed of both races blessing from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, will have revolted much more than in his earlier days from all that was foul and corrupt in the stories of the kinsmanship of celestials among themselves or with mortals, but will have seen in them the witness of the truth which was dearest to him, which most expounded the meaning of his own oracles, which was most needful to bind all the generations of man in one. The belief in a Father of spirits; in a Son in whom men were formed to be a kind; in a Spirit by whom they are brought to know their fellowship with each other;-here was that perfect unity, that burning charity, in the fire of which the hard dogma of a notplural deity was consumed away. U. And this theology, you think, has survived all the shocks of philosophy, and has lasted even to our days. W. The shocks of philosophy have, it seems to me, been its strength. The real wounds which have tested its vitality have been those which it has received from its professors and champions. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. xxxiii U. That may be so. But you set before us a number of contradictory opinions about morals-about the mind of man-about the logic which is to guide us in our study of evidence about the ends and conditions of political society. Must it not be a shock to us to feel that these opinions in general ignore your Christian theology, if they do not directly contradict it; and that whenever little bits of compliment to it are thrown in, they have manifestly nothing to do with the substance of the discourse: are only intended for our edification, or to satisfy the public sense of propriety? W. I regret the bits of compliment; I cannot regret the variety of opinions to which you refer. I cannot regret that those who put them forward have had no bias in favour of Christian theology-have often had a strong bias against it. The university, I hold, has acted wisely, and has shown its faith in the principles upon which it is founded-in encouraging you to study manfully the inquiries of men in all directions, starting from all points. If you do study them manfully—if you do connect them with your own thoughts, your own acts, your own selves, I have no fear that you will be led to ask for some other guide than you can find in them, or in any books, or in us who comment upon them. And when you ask for such a guide, you will know that you have one. - U. I have always been afraid to fancy that I had some spiritual direction which could set me above my teachers, or save me from the ordinary trouble of reading or thinking. W. Hold fast that fear. But if you are ever at a loss to discover the sense of your visible teachers,-if you catch yourself despairing of the effort to read and think, or turning that effort to little profit-your sensible and excellent resolution may suggest the very craving which I deem so desirable. U. And with that aid you suppose we may come to some clear determination as to which of the opposing schools that you tempt us to compare we should embrace, which we should eschew? W. With such aid I venture to think that you will be made aware how much you can gain from each of the schools; what lessons each is appointed to give you in the hard work of fighting and living. U. You would have us become eclectics? W. No, my friend; anything but that. Picking and choosing an opinion here, there, and everywhere, is not for the man who is learning to fight and live: it is for those who are compounding a grand system. U. Then I am at a loss to know how you would have me proceed. Butler tells me I have a conscience; Paley tells me practically that I have none. Descartes sends me away from my senses to look for myself. Locke tells me I can know nothing except through my senses. Adam Smith builds the universe upon sympathy. Bentham laughs sympathy to scorn, and glorifies utility as the only standard. These are but specimens of the perplexities among which you throw us. And Logic, which is to deliver us out of them, what a tangled web that weaves for us! Are we to follow Mr. Mill or Sir William Hamilton? What is that strange vision of a higher Logic -a Logic of Logic, which our Hegelian friends sometimes conjure up before us? W. Well! I would not willingly have been spared one of these conflicts, for they have forced me to observe what conflicts there are in myself. Butler and Paley did not invent the questions about a conscience; they do not exist in a volume of sermons at the Rolls or of lectures on moral philosophy. If thou hast not a conscience, Butler will not give it thee. If thou hast one, Paley cannot take it |