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British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV

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Title: British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, AMERICAN EDITION, VOL. LIV ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved.  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  Page 7:  Treves possibly should be Trèves
  Page 22: First Clause possibly should be First Cause
  Page 95:  tôi eterôi tanantia possibly should be tôi heterôi tanantia




      THE
      BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.
      JULY AND OCTOBER, 1871.
      VOL LIV.

      AMERICAN EDITION.

      NEW YORK:
      PUBLISHED BY THE LEONARD SCOTT PUBLISHING COMPANY.
      140 FULTON STREET, BETWEEN BROADWAY AND NASSAU STREET.

      1871.




      S. W. GREEN,
      PRINTER, STEREOTYPER, AND BINDER,
      16 and 18 Jacob St., N. Y.




THE

BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1871.




ART. I.--_The Roman Empire._

(1.) _Les Césars, par Franz de Champagny._ 3 vols. Paris: Bray.

(2.) _Les Antonines, par le Comte de Champagny._ 3 vols. Paris: Bray.


The history of the Roman Empire must ever have an interest peculiar to
itself. It stands alone. Nothing in the past has been, nothing in the
future can be, like it. It was the whole civilized world. It gathered
into itself the traditions of all that had ever been great and
illustrious in the human race, Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Hebrew,
Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan, as well as those of the multitudinous
western tribes--Italian, Gallic, Iberian or Teutonic, which had only
made themselves known as warriors. The civilization, the arts and
sciences, the laws and institutions, the poetry and philosophy, the
whole accumulated literary treasures of all past generations were
risked on a single venture. Rome had no rival on earth, and could have
no successor. She was the ark in which were preserved all the riches
of the past, all the hopes of the future. For many centuries the most
gifted races of men had been toiling and suffering, and there was no
reason to suppose that man was capable of doing more than had been
effected by their united efforts. If that was lost, all was lost. It
was no idle boast, then, when men said, 'When Rome shall fall, the
world will fall with her.' In those ages no man looked forward to
anything greater or better. The idea that 'progress' is the natural
law and condition of the world, is one quite characteristic of modern
times. The ancient notion was that its law was that of decay and
corruption. The utmost that anyone dared to hope was that things might
not change for the worse.

And so far as appears, their judgment was well founded. Man had done
all he could. The Roman Empire exhibited the highest state of society,
which, without some supernatural interference of a higher power in the
affairs of the world, he was able to develope. Viewed in this light,
as the last act of a vast drama which had been going on for ages, it
must ever be most worthy of study. And in truth there was in it very
much that was really great and noble. The impression left on the mind
by ordinary histories, which is little more than a vague idea of mad
and grotesque tyranny on the one side, and abject servitude on the
other, is very far from doing it justice. If, as we know, there has in
fact arisen out of its ashes a new world, on the whole vastly superior
to the old, this is because, by the mercy of his Creator, man has no
longer been left to find his way without light and guidance from on
high; because after having, in the old world, left man to work out to
the end all that he could do by himself, God Himself has been pleased,
in the new world, to stretch out His own right hand and His holy arm,
and to work in man and by him. Here, then, is the striking contrast
between ancient and modern history. The one shows man working without
God, the other God working by man; and man, alas! but too often,
crossing, interfering with, and maiming His work.

But this was not all; for although, while the Empire of Rome still
lasted, the kingdom of God was not as yet visibly set up among men,
yet, almost from its very foundation, the germs of that future kingdom
were working in it. It was under the reign of the first heathen
emperor that the Prince of Peace was born into the world. The grain of
mustard-seed was already sown, and through all the centuries occupied
by the heathen empire it was growing night and day, at first
unobserved by men, in later times forcing itself on their notice,
until it became a tree whose branches overshadowed the whole earth.

There are, then, two subjects which must attract attention in any
worthy description of the Roman Empire; first, the political, social,
moral, and religious condition of the heathen world, both in itself
and in comparison with that of Christian nations, and next the effect
produced on the heathen themselves by the gradual growth and
development of Christianity in the midst of them. The internal history
of Christianity, indeed, belongs in strictness to ecclesiastical
history, but no subject has a more direct claim upon the general
historian than that of its effects upon the political, moral, and
social standard, and upon the religious opinions of those who were not
Christians.

We know, however, no English book which throws light upon either of
these two subjects. Indeed, we doubt whether there is any which ever
attempted to do so. The greatest English writer who has described
those times, was made incapable of it by his hatred of Christianity,
and by his low standard of moral feeling. In our own times, no doubt,
we have had an interesting history of the 'Romans under the Empire'
from a writer whom it would be most unjust to compare to Gibbon; but
this has not been continued so far as the period when Christianity
would have forced itself on the writer's attention. And so far as
appears, his thoughts have not been sufficiently turned to the subject
to lead him to detect its influence, where it is quite as
unquestionable if not as prominent. The result is, that although Mr.
Merivale no doubt fully believes and admits the truth and importance
of Christianity, he has given us a history of the Romans under the
Empire, in which, except in one or two short recognitions of its
truth, there is nothing to remind the reader that the old world was
ignorant of the fact that God had been manifested in the flesh, while
all that is specially worth notice in the new world that has succeeded
it, is founded upon that fact.

Mr. Merivale, of course, would reply to this criticism that he
undertook to relate the history of the Romans as it had been recorded
by Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion, and others; and that if there was nothing
in Christianity which arrested their attention, and which they have
thought worthy of record, there could be nothing which came into his
subject. This, however, implies a total mistake as to the duty of an
historian. He has to tell us, of course, what really happened, and
nothing else. But it is certain that events, in their consequences of
the greatest importance, are often so much undervalued by those who
see them in progress, that they pass them over unmentioned, devoting
their attention to things which at the moment seem more important, but
which after-times see to have been of little interest. It is Arnold's
remark, that Phillip de Comines,[1] whose memoirs 'terminate about
twenty years before the Reformation, and six years after the first
voyage of Columbus,' writes without the least notion of the momentous
character of the times which he was describing. His 'memoirs are
striking, from their perfect unconsciousness. The knell of the middle
ages had already sounded, yet Comines had no other notions than such
as they had tended to foster; he describes their events, their
characters, their relations, as if they were to continue for
centuries.' And he justly blames Barante, because, while fully able to
analyze history philosophically, 'he has chosen, in his history of the
Dukes of Burgundy, to forfeit the benefits of his own wisdom, and has
described the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries no otherwise than
might have been done by their own simple chroniclers.' What else has
Merivale done in describing, for instance, the times of the Antonines
as they appeared to contemporary heathen writers, not as we know them
really to have been, who have the means of estimating the effects even
then produced upon heathen society by the influence of the Christians,
already so numerous in the midst of it, and of comparing them with
periods in the history of many Christian nations in many respects
similar.

In contrast with the deficiencies of histories in our own language, we
would call special attention to the historical works of M. de
Champagny. We have been surprised to find how little they are known in
England, not merely by men of general culture and intelligence, but by
many whose studies have been especially directed to the history of the
Roman Empire. In France they are not only well known, but so highly
appreciated that they have won for their author a seat in the Academy,
the great object of literary ambition; and this, although the tone of
religious earnestness which runs through them, if it did not hinder,
assuredly in no degree tended to promote their popularity. At
different periods during the last forty years, M. de Champagny has
published four works on Roman history, the first two of which we have
placed at the head of this article. None of these works are called by
the author, or are exactly entitled to be called histories. They
contain, indeed, a narrative strictly confined to the facts recorded
by ancient authors, and full of life and interest; yet the narrative
is the least valuable part of the work. They are _études_, a term
which, for want of one more exactly expressing it, we may render
essays. This character pervades even the narrative: but less than half
the three volumes of 'the Cæsars' is narrative even in form. It
contains a 'picture of the Roman Empire,' giving innumerable details,
full of life and reality, of the provinces, the capital, the daily
life of the Romans, their worship, their family and social life, their
morals, their literary habits, their public amusements, and ending
with an account of the Neo-stoic philosophy which filled (so far as it
was filled at all) the place of a religion, as that word is understood
among ourselves. And throughout the whole, the comparison of the old
world and the new is kept in view. We know no work in the English
language, as we have already said, which supplies what we have here.
In 'the Antonines,' the proportion devoted to similar pictures,
especially to the estimate of the indirect influence of Christianity,
is equally large and equally important.

It would be impossible within the limits of an article, to give any
idea of the contents of essays in which our author presents, in the
lucid epigrammatic form peculiar to his country and language, the
results of a life of study and thought. What we specially desire is,
that our readers should consider for themselves whether it is not the
fact, that great as is the proportion of time and attention devoted to
the classics, in English education, the Roman Empire has been far too
much overlooked, especially in comparison with the Republic. For this
it is very easy to account. It is the natural result, not of any love
for a republic, but of that too exclusive love for the writers of the
Augustan age, which has long formed a characteristic feature in the
cultivated Englishman. The historians of the Empire, and even those
who, like Pliny, Seneca, &c., reflect its manners in contemporary
writings not professedly historical, but often of even more historical
value, are wanting in the especial charm which attracts a fastidious
scholar to the earlier history. And hence we greatly doubt whether
ninety out of one hundred boys educated at a classical school do not
practically think of Roman history, as if its interest ended with
Augustus. Before Gibbon turned attention to the 'Decline and Fall of
the Empire' this must have been still more the case. Account for this
as we may, we are sure that it is greatly to be regretted. For,
beautiful as is 'Livy's pictured page,' the state of society which it
presents--(that of a simple people, denizens of a single city,
retaining many of the virtues and faults of a rude age, esteeming
courage in the field as for all citizens the first and most necessary
of virtues, and valuing temperance, a life of labour, &c., chiefly, as
conducing to it)--has so little in common with our daily life and
habits, that the practical lessons impressed upon us are hardly more
than if we read as many pages of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' In
saying this, we by no means desire to discourage the study of writers
whom we heartily love and admire. It is a great thing to store the
mind (especially in the plastic season of youth) with images of
beauty; nor do we believe that the peculiar refinement of taste formed
by such an education is attainable by any other means. The first
decade of Livy, for instance, ranks high in that class of books, at
the top of which stand the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' Still, history
has an importance of its own, and it seems to us indisputable that the
strictly historical value of later Roman times is (at least in the
present age of the world) far greater than that of the golden age of
the Republic. Allowing for the immense difference between a heathen
and a Christian society, the world ruled by Marcus Aurelius is one in
which we can easily imagine ourselves to be living. We are sure that
no thoughtful man can read many pages of M. de Champagny's works
without finding his mind filled with thoughts and lessons which bear
immediately on the state of society in which our lot is cast. The
evils and corruptions which were undermining the Roman world were, in
many respects, those against which we are called to guard or contend.
Where there is a contrast, it is one which it is well for us to
observe; for it may easily be traced to the special blessings which
the indirect action of Christianity has conferred upon every class of
modern society, even upon those who have, more or less wilfully,
rejected it.

One fact which we think will strike every reader is that the state of
things under the Empire, as compared with that under the Republic, was
far better than ordinary histories would lead us to suppose. They
detail the mad and sanguinary tyranny of Caligula and Nero, but give
us little means of estimating the peace and prosperity which, for more
than two centuries after Augustus, prevailed, almost without
interruption, through the vast extent of his empire. Nothing could be
stronger than the practical appreciation of this by the generations
who lived under it. Pliny speaks of 'the immense majesty of the Roman
peace;' and these words 'Pax Romana' seem to have been almost as much
household words in his day as the phrase 'Our glorious constitution in
Church and State' in those of George III. To say that the heathen
world had never seen anything like it would greatly understate the
fact. There has been nothing like it since, any more than there had
been before. During several centuries, peace reigned almost
uninterrupted through the vast regions which extend from the Euphrates
to the Western shores of France and Portugal, from the slopes of the
Cheviots to the slopes of the Atlas. Passing over the very brief civil
contest which followed the death of Nero, the only exception was the
Jewish rebellion. The regions most favoured by nature of any that
earth holds--those which on every side surround the Mediterranean Sea,
Spain, the South of France, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt,
the Northern coasts of Africa--were full of rich and highly-civilized
cities, which, undisturbed by wars or rumours of wars, freely
exchanged the productions of their various climates and their
different industries. Many of them, among which we may name Athens,
Alexandria, and Carthage, were the chosen seats of learning and
philosophy. Men thought little of crossing the sea one way or the
other between Africa and Italy, France or Spain, as they might be
tempted by facilities for study or business, or even by curiosity.
When all formed part of one great empire, trade had no impediments
from laws of protection, or from the jealousy of rival nations or
governments.

Neither must it be supposed that the peace which afforded these
advantages was purchased at the cost of subjection to a great military
tyranny. Nothing is more remarkable, yet nothing more certain, than
the fact that Rome, which made herself mistress of the world by
military force, ruled and maintained her dominion over the world she
had conquered, by the superiority of her purely civil administration.
Throughout these immense regions, the Roman military establishment
consisted, under Tiberius, of between 160,000 and 180,000 men under
arms; and even these were not kept in the great cities or the interior
of the provinces to preserve order. They were stationed on the
frontiers, to guard the unarmed population of those huge countries
from the predatory invasions of the surrounding barbarians. Four
legions kept watch on the Euphrates, three (or perhaps five) on the
Danube, eight on the Rhine, and three on the Northern border of the
British province. In the whole interior of Gaul, that is to say, in
the districts which are now France, Belgium, and Germany west of the
Rhine, there were (see 'Les Césars,' vol. ii. 304) only 1,200 men
under arms. The naval force, which maintained the peace of the
Mediterranean, checking the plague of piracy which had been so
prevalent in earlier times, as it has been almost to the present day,
consisted of three fleets, stationed at Ravenna, at Misenum, and at
Forum Julii (now Frejus); the three together consisted of 15,000 men.
There were also twenty-four vessels employed in the defence of the
Rhine, and as many on the Danube. Italy and Spain were without
soldiers, except about 9,000 pretorians in the immediate neighbourhood
of Rome. Asia Minor, abounding in wealth and population, with princely
cities enjoying the civilization of a thousand years and all the
treasures of art and industry in undisturbed repose, was administered
by unarmed governors. 'Beyond the Black Sea there were 3,000 men to
guard that inhospitable coast, and retain in obedience to Rome the
kings of the Bosphorus. The other kings were responsible to Rome for
the tranquillity of their kingdoms, and exercised the police over them
at their own cost, with the aid of such troops as Rome permitted them
to levy.'

Well may M. de Champagny exclaim--

      'These feeble material forces in an empire which was never
      without some war seem marvellous when we compare them with
      the burdensome armaments of modern powers, and the enormous
      sacrifices imposed upon them in time of profound peace,
      merely to maintain their position with regard to foreign
      countries, and assure the tranquillity of their
      States.'--('Les Césars,' vol. ii. 305.)

The contrast is, indeed, remarkable. A very large portion of the old
Roman Empire no longer forms part of the modern civilised world. The
remainder probably maintained, before the outbreak of the present war,
about 3,000,000 of men under arms, none of whom were employed (like
the armies of ancient Rome) in defending the frontier of a civilised
land against the incursions of warlike barbarous neighbours, but all
in jealously watching the power of neighbouring States and maintaining
a balance--how effectually the events of the last year have but too
plainly shown--or in holding down the struggles of revolutionary
parties at home.

To point the contrast, M. de Champagny shows that the army which
guarded each province of the Empire was composed of natives of the
country in which it was stationed. Roman citizens they no doubt were,
but citizens of provincial extraction, posted to defend in arms on
behalf of Rome the very land which their fathers, only a few
generations back, had defended against her. To this very day neither
France nor England has ventured to imitate this liberal policy.
Ireland is garrisoned by soldiers of English birth, and Breton
conscripts, in times of profound peace, were sent to fulfil their time
of service at Lyons and Paris.

It need hardly be said that the rule which was thus maintained, cannot
have been felt to be severe or oppressive by the subjugated people.
Our author traces the institutions by which the people in the
conquered provinces were gradually assimilated to the conquerors. We
have no space to follow him in detail. The principle was to leave each
nation in possession of its own laws and institutions, and to preserve
to the cities the right of self-government. The degrees of liberty
were different in different cases. In many cases the only restriction
was that they abandoned the right of making war and peace, engaging to
hold as their friends and enemies all whom Rome so held.

      'No doubt when Rome was a party this liberty shrank into
      small dimensions. The ancient institutions of the peoples
      were reduced to the dimensions of municipal charters, their
      magistrates became lieutenants of police, their areopagus
      an _hôtel de ville_. But still, conquered Athens retained
      its areopagus, the Greek cities had still their senates,
      their popular assemblies, Marseilles retained that
      constitution which had been so much admired by Cicero. Some
      cities, such as Marseilles, Nismes, and Sparta, were not
      merely free, but sovereign; others remained under their own
      laws. Leagues which really meant anything, powerful
      confederations, had been dissolved, but when Greece, in
      memory of its ancient amphictyonic councils, met at Elis or
      Olympia to hold dances in honour of her gods, when all the
      Ionian peoples gathered in the Temple of the Panionium for
      sacrifices and games, these innocent memorials of a common
      origin or of hereditary alliances mattered nothing to Rome.
      More than this, the towns of Caria, or the three and twenty
      cities of Lycia, assembled their deputies not only for
      feasts and games, but to deliberate upon their affairs,
      and, provided they did not discuss peace or war, these
      traces of political liberty gave no offence to the
      liberalism of Rome. Rome had a marvellous power of
      perceiving how much of independence would suffice to
      content nations without being dangerous; and I doubt
      whether any free and sovereign city of our modern Europe,
      Cracow for instance [a note added here gives the date of
      the first publication of the passage, 1842], is so
      completely mistress at home, as Rhodes and Cizicus were
      allowed to be under Augustus; whether there is any senate
      so much respected as the curia of Tarragona or the council
      of six hundred at Marseilles; or a burgomaster whose powers
      of police are so sovereign as those of the suffete at
      Carthage or the archion at Athens were allowed to be.'
      ('Les Césars,' vol. ii. 338.)

But while leaving the conquered cities in possession of their ancient
laws and government, Rome introduced in the midst of every province
Latin and Roman franchises, which were given sometimes to old,
sometimes to newly-founded cities. Each of these colonies afforded
many steps, by which the members of the conquered countries might
ascend, more or less completely, to the privileges of the Roman
citizen, and thus the ambition of becoming Romans quickly supplanted
the aspirations after political independence, which could hardly fail
to remain among a newly-conquered people. While enlarging upon this
remarkable characteristic of the Roman system of government over
conquered nations, M. de Champagny introduces a curious episode, into
which we may venture to follow him, and in which he contrasts the
French and English systems in the government of foreign dependencies.
He says:--

      'The Frenchman is a contrast to the Roman; his conquests
      are merely military, and are therefore transient in
      comparison with those of the Roman, which were always
      political. The Frenchman is a much better master, because
      more sociable, more humane, but he always wishes to show
      that he is master, officially, prominently, forcibly. There
      is wanting to him a sort of reserve, both towards others
      and himself. Instead of disguising his power he makes a
      point of letting it be seen, felt, touched, and thus he
      makes it annoying or compromises it. He never understands
      the importance of some things which appear very small, but
      which touch the heart of a foreigner; he laughs at him as
      he does at himself; he insists that people should be like
      him. He wishes to enforce on them his own laws, his
      manners, his language, nay, his vices. He wants them all to
      be adopted at once, not gradually, but by force, openly,
      without delay. All this of course as a benefit--but what
      insults people more than anything else, is a benefit
      imposed by force. He is unpopular without being the least
      conscious of it, having no suspicion that he has been
      tyrannical, and sincerely believes that he is securing the
      happiness of the people whom he is deeply irritating, till
      all of a sudden his power is overthrown by a storm which he
      never thought of expecting. It was thus that India slipped
      out of our hands in a few years. In a few months all
      Germany roused herself for the great contest of 1813. In a
      single day the bells of Palermo gave freedom to Sicily. No
      French conquest has ever been lasting.

      'On the other hand we are reminded by this Roman invasion
      and colonization, so active, so obstinate, so universal, of
      the incessant and indefatigable advance of English
      colonization.'

He attributes this to the manner in which the English have allowed
the conquered to retain their own institutions, customs, practices,
and religion, thus making the fact of conquest as little evident as
possible.

      'England, like Rome, does not pride itself on making its
      own language and its own laws universal. The _Prætor
      peregrinus_ at Rome judged all peoples according to their
      national laws. The Lord Chancellor in London judges the
      Canadian according to French law, the inhabitant of Jersey
      according to the customs of Normandy, of the Isle of France
      (Mauritius) according to the Code Napoleon, the Indian
      according to the law of Manou. The social system of England
      is no more forced on strangers than the social system of
      Rome; the Mussulman is not obliged to drink its ale, nor
      the Hindoo to attend its church. All it demands is the
      right of introducing itself, and introduce itself it does,
      whole and entire, without modifying or conforming itself,
      retaining its proud isolation and disdainful peculiarity.
      This is the course of nations endowed alike with the spirit
      of conquest and of conservatism. Rome and England have kept
      their conquests, because their conquest has always been
      intelligent and politic, because among them the statesman
      has always been master of the warrior, when it has not
      happened that the warrior himself was a statesman.' ('Les
      Césars,' vol. ii. 333.)

Our first impression in reading this passage was that the author had
done more than justice to the wisdom of the English people. On second
thoughts, however, we believe what he says to be substantially true.
There are obvious exceptions on both sides. For instance, nothing can
be more remarkable than the manner in which France has succeeded in
attaching to herself the German provinces, stolen by Louis XIV. less
than two centuries ago; while, on the other hand, England has held
Ireland at least since the accession of James I., partially since
Henry II., and has never managed for a single day to attach it to
herself. The last case is explained, because England, however it may
be accounted for, adopted in Ireland exactly the opposite course to
that described by M. de Champagny, and forced her own institutions
upon a people for whom they were quite unfit. Mr. Gladstone evidently
hopes that it is not too late to reconcile Ireland, by allowing it (as
the Romans certainly would have done) to be governed by Irish ideas.
The loss of the English colonies in America is another instance, for
which M. de Champagny, we think, imperfectly accounts. The other
instances he mentions seem in point. We do not believe that Frenchmen
would have allowed the people of India to retain their institutions,
manners, &c., as they have actually done under English government. As
for Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté, it is to be observed that
they were not held as dependencies, but were at once made an integral
part of France: and we believe that M. de Montalembert was right in
the opinion he expressed, that they had remained intensely
anti-French, until after the great Revolution, which for the first
time melted down the whole of France into one nationality. This may
easily be accounted for. Englishmen who think of that revolution are
apt to remember only the hideous crimes by which it was sullied. To
the French peasants, and perhaps more especially in the German
provinces, the revolution meant the abolition of the feudal system; a
system always oppressive to all classes, and most of all to those
lower classes on whom the whole weight of the enormous structure
rested and pressed.

But we must return to the Roman Empire. By the system we have
described it avoided what is ever the most grinding of tyrannies, the
domination of race over race. The conquered races, while retaining
their national institutions, very easily attained a place among the
Romans themselves, and before long, felt that the Empire and all it
contained was their own. Before the fall of the Republic, all Italians
either enjoyed the full privileges of Romans or knew that they could
very easily obtain them. Julius Cæsar had no sooner conquered Gaul
than he admitted some Gauls to the senate. This seems to have been
premature, and they are said to have been excluded from it by
Augustus. But the policy was steadily continued. Claudius, who was an
antiquarian, made a well-known speech on the occasion of admitting
more Gauls to the honour. Later we find men of almost every province
in the highest offices, and even attaining the imperial dignity.

The great proof of the wisdom of this system was in its working. The
civilized world was under the dominion of a single city; and yet there
was no example of any national revolt, except in the one instance of
Judæa; nay, conquered countries deprecated as the greatest of evils
separation from the Roman Empire. The 'groans of Britain' when the
Romans withdrew from her are well known. But the Gauls afforded a
still stronger example. They were among the most warlike and restless
of all ancient nations. Their very name had been the greatest terror
Rome ever knew. They were made subjects of Rome, after an heroic and
desperate resistance, in which a million of them perished, only fifty
years before the Christian era. How soon they were left without the
presence of any controlling Roman force we are not informed. Such,
unquestionably, must have been their ordinary position, to say the
least, long before the death of Nero, only one hundred and eighteen
years later (A.D. 68). In the civil commotions which followed, almost
the whole Roman force (itself, as we have already seen, composed of
natives, and employed not to enforce obedience, but to protect the
frontier against invasion) was withdrawn into Italy. A small number of
enterprising Gauls thought this a favourable opportunity for restoring
the national independence. What, however, is most remarkable is, that
it does not seem for one moment to have suggested itself, even to
them, to abolish the Roman or restore the ancient national
institutions. Their hope was to separate themselves from Italy, and
set up a Roman Empire, whose seat should be in Gaul. It seems to have
been owing to this circumstance, that the small remains of the
legionary soldiers still left in the country joined in the
movement--an event quite without example. For several months Gaul was
to all intents and purposes independent, yet its internal affairs and
government seem to have gone on without the least change. The
provincials, left wholly to themselves, convened at Treves a general
assembly of all the Gallic nations, and this assembly determined,
after full discussion, that Gaul should remain a province of the Roman
Empire.

And this was the voluntary resolution of a nation celebrated all over
the world for its warlike courage, and which had been conquered by
Rome less than one hundred and twenty years before. It seems
impossible that anything could more clearly have demonstrated that the
Empire of Rome over the conquered provinces was maintained, not by
force, but by the free will of the provincials.

M. de Champagny gives it as his deliberate opinion that the Roman
Empire, during the first two centuries, is to be regarded as 'a
federation of free nations under an absolute monarch.' He has a most
interesting chapter ('Antonines,' book iv. ch. 11) on the liberties of
the Roman Empire, in which he especially compares them with those of
the nations of modern Europe. It was published under the reign of
Louis Philippe, and is doubly interesting to English readers, both for
the contrast which it establishes between the Roman Empire and the
most free Continental States; and also because it throws much
undesigned light upon the immense difference between the meaning
attached to the word liberty in France and in England. He deliberately
declares, and, we think, proves, that a subject had much greater
personal freedom under the Antonines than under any of the most free
Continental kingdoms. Of political liberty, he says the moderns have
much more--the free press, the right of voting, the tribune (_i.e._,
the power of addressing a public legislative assembly), charters,
constitutions, _habeas corpus_.

      'And yet I venture to doubt whether Europe in the
      nineteenth century, at the present moment, is much more
      free than the ancient world, even under the Roman Empire
      (of course I do not include the slaves).... We, the proud
      citizens of a Parliamentary monarchy, who have made
      revolutions when we were called _subjects_--subjects
      nevertheless we were and still are, every day of our lives.
      We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or to
      dine more than twenty together; or to have in our
      portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or to lend a
      book to a friend; or to put a patch of mortar on our own
      house, if it stands in a street; or to kill a partridge, or
      to plant a tree near a roadside; or to dig coal out of our
      own land; or to teach three or four children to read; or to
      gather our neighbours for prayer; or to have an oratory in
      our house (what is it that constitutes an oratory?); or to
      bleed a sick man; or to sell him a medicine; or (in some
      countries) to be married; or to do any one of a thousand
      other things, which it would fill volumes to enumerate;
      without permission from the Government, which permission,
      we are carefully told, is always, and in its very nature,
      subject to be recalled. In three cases out of four, indeed,
      the Government does not either authorise or forbid; it
      tolerates. We live by toleration. We are born, we have a
      home, a family, we bring up our children, we have a God, we
      have a religion, all by the indulgent and merciful, but
      always revocable, toleration of the ruling power. Of all
      things that man does there is only one over which the
      Government has no authority. We are allowed to die without
      its permission. Still, we do need it in order to allow us
      to be buried. At certain moments we have sovereign power
      over great and public matters, but in small matters of
      private life we are subjects, nay, inferior to subjects.
      Unluckily, these small matters make up our life, and these
      private matters are just the things important in
      life.'--('Antonines,' vol. ii. 182.)

This passage brings out in strong light the substantial difference
between our own system and that of the Continental nations. In France,
notwithstanding the passionate demand for liberty which has been
uttered from time to time, we sincerely believe there neither now is
nor ever has been any party which has ever desired what we mean by
liberty, or even understood what it is; and hence, numerous as have
been its revolutions, there is one point on which every government in
France, at least since the days of Richelieu, has been of one mind.
No one of them has respected what we mean by 'personal liberty.' No
one has seriously thought of leaving men to do what they like, as long
as they do not interfere with the liberty and rights of their
neighbour. In this there has been no substantial difference between
the _ancien régime_, the republic, the first empire, the monarchy of
the restoration, the monarchy of July, the second republic, the second
empire, the government of defence. We see no reason to hope that the
system to be authorised by the Assembly just elected will, in this
respect, differ from any of its predecessors. But this is not a thing
peculiar to France. We doubt whether it is not carried even farther in
Germany. We believe the Continental State which, in this respect, is
most like England, to be Switzerland. If Englishmen are wise they will
be on the watch to prevent the gradual introduction of this
Continental system. It is evil, not merely because it needlessly
limits and interferes with the liberty which is the choicest of the
natural gifts of God to man, but because by accustoming men to walk in
leading strings it gradually makes them incapable of walking without
them. A Prussian in England last winter expressed strong misgivings
whether it would be right to skate, because the Government had not yet
authorised it. We have known a Roman gentleman of our own day complain
of the Pope's Government, because he had never been taught to swim.
These things, ludicrous as they are, are symptoms of a very serious
evil, they show that men have been treated like children until their
minds have become childish. Mr. Göschen, some years back, said that he
saw great danger of the same system gradually creeping in among
ourselves. It was likely to come, he said, not because the Government
is anxious to interfere, but because there is a continual tendency on
the part of the people to call for its interference. We shall do well
to sacrifice something of uniformity and energy in many departments,
if they can only be obtained by the sacrifice of liberty. The very
fact that political power has lately been extended so much more widely
among us increases instead of diminishing the danger. Classes long
shut out from political power naturally feel much more eager for
equality than for liberty. In France it is this passion for equality
that makes personal liberty almost hopeless. Under the Roman Empire
equality was never dreamed of. The cities of the same province might
be divided into half a dozen classes, each of which had different
degrees of self-government. But there was none in which a man could so
little do what he liked as in modern Paris. M. de Champagny accounts
for this:--

      'The liberties of the Roman Empire consisted not in its
      laws, but in something greater or less than laws--in facts,
      and these facts may be summed up in one. The art of
      government was not then brought to perfection as it is now.
      There was more freedom because there was less civilization.
      Not to say that Cæsar had neither telegraphs nor railroads,
      he had not even any system of administration. This was his
      first want. He had no hierarchy of functionaries, depending
      upon each other, each subject to be promoted or dismissed
      by some other, or by the common master.... Then (a second
      want), he neither had nor could have a police; all he had
      was a set of volunteer spies, called _delators_,
      inconvenient and even dangerous instruments. The heart of
      Tiberius would have bounded at the very idea of a great
      system of administrative _délation_ and _espionage_ [thank
      God English writers are compelled to use Latin or French
      words to express a thought so foreign to our manners]
      organised from above, and extending its branches everywhere
      below, such as that for which I believe we are indebted to
      M. de Sartines.[2] His heart would have bounded, but his
      purse would have failed, for (his third want) Cæsar had no
      budget. The art of finance was in its infancy. Those vast
      regions, on an average as rich as they are now, and which
      now pay to their actual sovereigns, without much complaint,
      at least two hundred millions sterling, did not produce to
      Cæsar sixteen millions sterling, and inasmuch as the
      contributions which produced these sixteen millions had to
      pass through the hands of some fifty thousand publicans and
      agents of finance, the contributors, who paid perhaps twice
      as much as the Emperor received, cried out fearfully.
      Lastly, if Cæsar, wishing to compel his people, had brought
      on any serious rising, he would have had no means of
      putting it down, for (a fourth want) Cæsar, having no
      budget, had no army. Those countries, which now furnish not
      less than three millions of soldiers, in those days,
      without being much less populous than they are now, did not
      furnish more than 300,000 men, and these 300,000 were
      absorbed by the guard on the frontiers. There were whole
      provinces without a single soldier. This Empire, without
      administration, without police, without budget, without
      army, would make the lowest clerk in the prefecture of
      police, the prefecture of the Seine, the offices of the
      Minister of War, or the Minister of Finance, shrug his
      shoulders at its poverty--military, fiscal, and
      administrative--I know that. But what would have been
      thought of our monarchies, so well constituted, so
      vigilant, so rich, so powerfully armed, I do not say by the
      clerks, but by the subjects of the Roman
      Empire?'--('Anton.,' vol. ii. p. 185.)

We heartily wish we had space to give the whole of the chapter from
which we have made these extracts. The author proves in detail that
under the Empire there was liberty of property, municipal liberty,
liberty of association, liberty of worship (except for the
Christians), liberty of education, liberty of speech. This last, M. de
Champagny most truly says, was far more general at Rome under Trajan
than under Louis Philippe at Paris. 'That liberty of the tongue was
the liberty of every man: what is our liberty of the press than the
liberty of two hundred journalists?' It was this that made Tacitus
exclaim, 'Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quæ velis, et quæ
sentias licet dicere.' The effect of this was that

      'A modern European, as soon as he goes out of his own door
      and begins to act, to think, to live, among his fellows,
      must take for granted that everything is forbidden except
      what is expressly authorized. Under the Roman Empire,
      everything not expressly forbidden was understood to be
      authorized. Above all, intellectual liberty was complete.
      Every one talked, listened, gave and received information
      publicly as he pleased. Doctrines spread. Schools of
      thought raised themselves without interference of authority
      until it felt itself in danger, not from the general
      independence of thought (that misgiving had not yet come
      into anyone's mind), but from the special character of some
      teaching which arrested its attention. Even when the
      Imperial Government made up its mind to be severe, its
      rigour might often be averted, sometimes even paralyzed, by
      the municipal authority, which alone was on the spot and in
      activity in the interior of each great city. It was thus
      that the Christian teachers and apologists presented
      themselves as "philosophers," for, as a general rule,
      philosophers were at liberty to teach what they thought
      fit.'

No wonder that centuries of peace, free government of each city and
nation under its own immemorial laws and customs, and taxation little
more than nominal, led to the mighty public works, the very ruins of
which are still the wonders of the world--the roads, 'massy causeways,
whose foundations were beneath the surface, their surface many feet
above it'--the system of navigable rivers and canals which made
communication through the whole world (as it then was) easier and
swifter than it ever was in England before the time of the generation
not yet passed away. M. de Champagny quotes the words of Tertullian:--

      'The world itself is opened up, and becomes from day to day
      more civilized, and increases the sum of human enjoyment.
      Every place is reached, has been made known, is full of
      business. Solitudes, famous of old, have changed their
      aspects under the richest cultivation. The plough has
      levelled forests, and the beasts that prey on man have
      given place to those that serve him. Corn waves on the
      sea-shores; rocks are opened out into roads, marshes are
      drained, cities are more numerous now than villages in
      former times. The island has lost its savageness, and the
      cliff its desolation. Houses spring up everywhere, and men
      to dwell in them. On all sides are government and life.
      What better proof can we have of the multiplication of our
      race than that man has become a drug, while the very
      elements scarcely meet our needs; our wants outrun the
      supplies; and the complaint is general that we have
      exhausted Nature herself.'[3]

Again, he quotes Pliny:--

      'Rome has united the scattered empires. She has given
      softness to manners; she has made the industry of all
      peoples, the productiveness of all climates, a common
      possession. She has given a common language to nations
      separated by the discordance and the rudeness of their
      dialects. She has civilized the most savage and most
      distant tribes. She has taught man humanity.'

      'War,' says another writer, 'is now nothing more than a
      tale of ancient days, which our age refuses to believe; or,
      if it does chance that we learn that some Moorish or
      Getulean clan has presumed to provoke the arms of Rome, we
      seem to dream, as we hear of these distant combats. The
      world seems to keep perpetual holiday. It has laid aside
      the sword, and thinks only of rejoicings and feasts. There
      is no rivalry between cities except in magnificence and
      luxury; they are made up of porticoes, aqueducts, temples,
      and colleges. Not cities only, but the earth itself puts on
      gay attire and cultivation, like that of a sumptuous
      garden. Rome, in one word, has given to the world something
      like a new life.'

M. de Champagny thinks that our present civilization would 'seem mean
and poor to one of the contemporaries of Cicero, or even to one of the
subjects of Nero.' ('Les Césars,' vol. ii. 397.) He shows how this
would be felt, both as to public and private life, and especially
refers to Pompeii. In proof of his assertion we must refer our readers
to a passage, much too long to quote, as to the daily life of Rome
itself. He follows a Roman, 'not opulent, but merely well off' through
his day:--

      The sun has no sooner risen than his house is thronged by
      clients (_manè salutantes_). This is a hasty _levée_. Then
      the patron, surrounded by his followers, goes down to the
      forum; if he likes, he is carried in a litter by his
      slaves. There the serious business of the day is
      conducted--causes, money payments, and arrangements; "all
      is activity, chatter, noise." But, at noon, all ceases; the
      audience breaks up, the shops are deserted, the streets are
      soon silent, and during the artificial night of the
      _siesta_ no one is to be seen but stragglers returning to
      their houses, or lovers, who come, as if it were really
      night, to sigh beneath the balcony of their ladies.
      Business to-morrow. For the rest of the day Rome was free;
      Rome was asleep. The poor man lay down to sleep in the
      portico; the rich on the ground-floor of his house, in the
      silence and darkness of a room without windows, and to the
      sound of the fountains in the _cavædium_, slept, mused, or
      dreamed. Later than four o'clock, no business might be
      proposed in the Senate, and there were Romans who after
      that hour would not open a letter.

      'About two the streets began to fill again. The crowd
      flowed towards the Campus Martius. There was a vast meadow,
      where the young men practised athletics, ran, and threw the
      javelin. The elders sat, talked, and looked on. Sometimes
      they had exercises of their own; often they walked in the
      sun. The exposure of the naked body to its life-giving
      action served them instead of the gymnasium. The women had
      their walks under the porticoes. This, too, was an hour of
      activity, but of merry, gay, satisfied activity.

      'At three a bell sounded, and the baths were opened. The
      bath combined business, medical treatment, and pleasure.
      The poor enjoyed them in the public baths, the voluptuous
      rich, in their palaces.... The bath was a place of
      assembly, with a degree of boyish freedom. There was
      laughing, talk, gaming, even dancing.... There, too, the
      great affair of the day was arranged--the supper--almost
      the only social meal of a Roman. As evening came on, the
      party stretched themselves, leaning on their elbows, round
      the hospitable table, and had before them for the meal and
      for society all the hours till night. It commonly consisted
      of six or seven (never more than the Muses, said the
      proverb, or less than the Graces), stretched on couches of
      purple and gold, round a table of precious wood. A large
      band of servants was employed in the service of the feast;
      the _maître d'hôtel_ provided it, the _structor_ placed the
      dishes in symmetrical order, the _scissor_ carved. Young
      slaves, in short tunics, placed on the table the huge
      silver salver, changed for each course, upon which the
      dishes were tastefully arranged. Children kept, what
      Indians in our day call punkahs, in motion over the heads
      of the company, to drive away the flies, and to cool them.
      Young and beautiful cup-bearers, with long robes and
      flowing hair, filled the cups with wine, others sprinkled
      on the floor an infusion of vervain and Venus-hair, which
      was supposed to promote cheerfulness. Round the table are
      songs, dances, and symphonies, tricks of buffoons, or
      discussions of philosophers. In the midst of all this
      merry-making the king of the feast gives the toasts, counts
      the cups, and crowns the guests with short-lived flowers.
      "Let us lose no time to live," he said, "for death is
      drawing near; let us crown our heads before we go down to
      Pluto." In fact, the dominant thought of ancient society
      was to live, to enjoy, to shut out from life as much as
      possible everything of suffering, care, toil, and
      duty.'--('Les Césars,' vol. ii. p. 388.)[4]

One essential feature of the Roman world, as compared with ours,
judging alike by the remains which still exist, and by the hints of
ancient authors, was the far greater extent and magnificence of the
public buildings of all kinds, and the comparatively confined size of
ordinary private houses. This our author especially points out at
Pompeii, a country town of the third or fourth class, the public
buildings of which, as far as they have hitherto been uncovered,
astonish modern visitors by their extent and magnificence. Such was
the natural tendency of a society in which men spent little time in
their own houses, and mixed much with their fellows. Many a Roman in
easy circumstances seems to have used his house chiefly for sleeping
and meals. It mattered little, with such habits, how contracted might
be the other parts, if the public banqueting room was spacious and
highly ornamented; and such was the character of the houses at
Pompeii. The extreme magnificence of the baths, porticoes, theatres,
&c., at Rome, all the world knows. Our author enlarges on this part of
the subject. But we will quote a few words upon it from a living
English writer:--

      'What was the life that Rome bestowed upon her inhabitants?
      Judge of it by the gift of an emperor to his people; of
      such gifts there were many in Rome. A vast square, of more
      than a thousand feet, comprehended within its various
      courts three great divisions. One contained libraries,
      picture and sculpture galleries, music halls, and every
      need for the cultivation of the mind. A second, courts for
      gymnastics, riding, wrestling, and every bodily exercise. A
      third, the baths; but how little the word, associated with
      modern poverty conveys a notion of the thing! There were
      tepid, vapour, and swimming baths, accompanied with
      perfumes and frictions, giving to the body an elastic
      suppleness. [We believe the author has omitted the chief
      thing conveyed to a Roman by the term, viz., what we now
      call the Turkish bath, dry heat, producing perspiration.]
      Then, as to their material: alabaster vied with marble;
      mosaic pavements, with ceilings painted in fresco; walls
      were encrusted with ivory, and a softened daylight
      reflected from mirrors; while on all sides a host of
      servants were engaged in the various offices of the bath.
      The afternoon _siesta_ is over; a bell sounds, the _thermæ_
      open. There all Rome assembles, to chat, to criticise, to
      declaim. There is the coffee-house, theatre, exchange,
      palace, school, museum, parliament, and drawing-room, in
      one. There is food for the mind, exercise and refreshment
      for the body. There, if anywhere, the eye can be satisfied
      with seeing, and the ear with hearing; and every sense and
      every taste find but a too ready gratification. This feast
      of intellect, this palace of ancient power and art is open
      daily, without cost, or for the smallest sum, to every
      Roman citizen. Private wealth in modern times bestows a few
      of these gifts on a select number; but poor as well as rich
      could revel in them, without fear of exhaustion, in this
      treasure-house of material civilization.'

We have enlarged on the material blessings enjoyed under the Roman
Empire, because, as we began by saying, we are convinced that the
mass, even of those who have received a classical education, have
never sufficiently estimated them. But it is curious, on the other
hand, to observe how much the judgment even of the most learned and
thoughtful men, whose standard of excellence was merely earthly, has
been dazzled when they have allowed themselves seriously to consider
them. Gibbon goes so far as to say, 'If a man were called upon to fix
the period in the history of the world during which the condition of
the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without
hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the
accession of Commodus.'

The great poet of the last generation mourns over the fall of Rome--

      'Alas! the golden city, and alas!
      The trebly kindred triumphs.'

He laments over fallen earthly greatness:

                           'Dost thou flow,
      Old Tiber, through a marble wilderness?
      Rise with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress.'

So laments the world over fallen worldly greatness and glory. Our own
estimate of the matter is the very opposite. We know, indeed, that the
time was coming, and coming apace, in which not only the great city
and its empire, but all the greatness and glory of the old heathen
world was to be so utterly swept away, that for weeks together the
very spot where Rome had once stood remained untrodden by any human
foot, and abandoned to the birds of the air and the beasts of the
field. But in all this we see nothing over which any man need lament,
unless, indeed, he esteems mere material prosperity above all that is
truly noble and exalted in man. Rather are we disposed to cry out with
exultation--

      'Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is become the
      habitation of devils, and hold of every foul spirit, and a
      cage of every unclean and hateful bird.--The kings of the
      earth shall bewail over her, and lament for her, when they
      shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for
      the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas! that great
      city Babylon, that mighty city,... which was clothed in
      fine linen and purple and scarlet, and decked with gold
      and precious stones and pearls.--Rejoice over her, thou
      heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath
      avenged you on her!'

For, in truth, all this splendour and luxury was not merely
associated, but inseparably one with a moral system, by far the most
execrable, the most indescribable, the most inconceivable, under which
God's earth ever groaned. The morals of the accursed race were far too
foul to be described here. They became the wonder and loathing, the
byword of contempt even of the heathen barbarians by whom they were
surrounded.[5] Lust, not merely unbridled, but wearing out and jading
itself to invent new ways of pollution; and cruelty, shedding man's
blood like water--these were the very foundations of the gorgeous
fabric. Any cure for these evils, except in the total sweeping away of
the whole order of society, was, as we shall soon see, utterly
hopeless.

First of all, the prosperity which we have described was only the
privilege of a favoured class. The mass of the population derived from
it no benefit. The whole social system was founded on slavery. The
whole domestic service, nay, the manufacturing, and what is to modern
ideas far more marvellous, even the intellectual labour, was performed
by slaves. It is calculated that in Rome itself the slave population
was twice or three times as numerous as the free. These slaves were
drawn from races fully equal to their masters in natural gifts, they
were often their equals even in culture; and every one of these slaves
was by Roman law not a person, but a thing. The male slave was not a
man, the female slave not a woman. 'The slave is without rights,
without a family, without a God.'[6] The hideous moral pollution which
this state of law not merely rendered possible, but consecrated, is
defended from exposure in the language of a Christian country by its
unutterable, inconceivable foulness; and of the moral system of
heathen Rome, as a whole, the same must be said. It is like the beast
of the American prairies, which no hunter dare touch because it emits
a stench which none can endure. We are well aware that this of
necessity prevents our exhibiting this side of the question with
anything like justice. Let us thank God that, far as our age has
fallen beneath the standard of Christianity, it is still so much
pervaded by Christian instincts that no writer, not even the most
utterly abandoned in his personal character, would dare to publish to
the world what was practised without shame or concealment by men who
were esteemed free from reproach and models of virtue. 'It is a shame
even to speak of the things that are done of them in secret.' Thus
much, however, we may say, that the men whom the heathen Romans
honoured, not merely for greatness, but especially for virtue, lived
without shame in all the horrors described by St. Paul in that
terrible first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; and poets, as
deeply pervaded as man ever was with a sense of the beautiful, nay,
who undertook to be the moral reformers of their age, introduced into
the midst of their most delicious strains not mention merely, but
praises of things which the moral standard of our age forbids us to
mention--even for execration; for these are they of whom the Apostles
testifies that 'they not only do such things, but have pleasure in
them that do them.'

Neither must we look upon slavery, and the indescribable system of
pollution which it sprang from, as an evil accidentally attached to
heathen society. It was intimately and essentially mixed with its very
life. It is important to observe that, so far as we know, there has
never existed upon earth any purely heathen civilized society of which
slavery has not been the basis. There is no reason to suppose that if
the Roman Empire had continued in all its greatness to the present
day, and had continued heathen, slavery would at this hour have been a
less essential part of its social and moral system than it was in the
days of Nero. Before it could have been abandoned, the whole habits of
life of all the free population of the Empire, and especially of Rome,
must have been fundamentally changed; and the change must have been
such that we can hardly imagine any nation to have been reconciled to
it except by some superhuman power; for it would have implied the
sacrifice of all the habits of self-indulgence and luxury upon which
Roman society was built. It is impossible to suppose that such a
change could have been effected, especially because, as far as
experience teaches, there never has been any instance of a heathen
nation which has begun to fall into decay and has been raised in any
degree to a new life. Such a national resurrection is one of the
miracles which nothing except Christianity has ever worked.

As to the barbarity of which the slave at Rome was the victim, we
might speak with less reserve if our space allowed. But we can devote
only a few words to a subject which would fill volumes. We will, then,
confine ourselves to suggesting two subjects for the consideration of
our readers,--first, the wholesale slaughter, merely for amusement,
which was one of the most cherished and universally diffused
institutions of Roman society, and was the delight of women as well as
men; next the state of the law with regard to slaves, and the manner
in which it was administered. The life of a Roman was of course always
held subject to the despair of his slaves, and hence it was the law,
that if a master was killed by his slave, under whatever
circumstances, or for whatever cause, every one of his slaves, male
and female, old and young, however manifestly innocent of all
complicity in the murder, however without power to have prevented it,
was to die upon the cross.[7] Tacitus tells how, in the reign of Nero,
even the populace of Rome was horrified at the execution of this law
in the case of the 'family,' as it was called, of a man of consular
dignity murdered by one of his slaves, it was reported, in consequence
of rivalry in a matter of infamous passion, or because the master had
received the price of his slave's freedom and then refused to fulfil
his engagement by giving him his liberty. His slaves were four hundred
in number; among them were not only men and women, but little
children, and the matter was brought before the Senate by some who
wished to temper in this instance the severity of the law. But the
proposal was indignantly rejected by Cassius, a Roman of noble family,
and whom the philosophic historian Tacitus expressly praises for his
knowledge of the laws of Rome. He argued that although in this case
the innocent would perish with the guilty, this must happen even when
a legion was punished by decimation, and that if some injustice was
committed, it would be outweighed by the public benefit. But his chief
argument was the authority of ancestral law:

      'Our ancestors were wiser than we. I have often abstained
      from resisting proposals to dispense with their laws, when
      I felt that the change would be for the worse, lest I
      should seem to be carried away by love of my profession.
      To-day I cannot abstain. They suspected the disposition of
      their slaves, even when they had been born in the same
      lands and houses, and bred up in affection for their lords.
      But since we have begun to have in our families whole
      nations who have different customs, different religious
      rites, or none at all, this confused sediment of all
      peoples can be mastered only by terror.'

His arguments prevailed, and the whole four hundred, men, women, and
children, were sent to execution. The indignation of the populace was
overawed by soldiers supplied by the Emperor.

We have only indicated, not described the hideous state of Roman
society; what is really important is to observe, that man being what
he is, this monstrous system of blood and pollution must not be
regarded as any accidental evil; it was the natural, we do not
hesitate to say, the certain consequence of a high state of wealth,
civilization, and refinement in a heathen society. So far as we are
aware, there is no record of any heathen nation which has ever
attained to such a condition, in which moral corruption has not
overflowed all bounds, and in the end destroyed the nation itself.
Wealth, leisure, luxury, are of necessity temptations to an easy,
indulgent life. To this the experience of Christian nations forbids us
to shut our eyes. But in them, however far they may have fallen below
the practical standard of Christianity, unless all faith in the
supernatural, in the unseen world, in God, and in Christ is wholly
extinct, there are always fixed recognised principles upon which to
fall back; and there is a part at least of every nation resolved to
act on these principles, at all cost and all sacrifice. These are they
to whom our blessed Lord said, 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' In a
heathen society, on the contrary, when corruption once breaks loose,
where is the salt? There may be men like Cato the censor, who believe
that the fall of states is usually to be traced, not so much to
political as to moral and social causes, and foresee in the decay of
morals the ruin of their country. But what are they to do? They may
remonstrate, they may argue; but the evil they have to encounter is
not in the intellect, but in the will; and the will is exactly that
which they have no means of affecting. At Rome, for instance, the
danger and evil was not that men denied or doubted that it was only by
the stern and self-denying virtues that a State could be preserved, it
was that each man for himself preferred indulgence and ease, and
despaired of doing anything effectual for the public good, for he
felt, very truly, that even if he were, in his own person, to revive
all the simplicity and hardness of life of Cincinnatus or Fabricius,
he would not be able to change the national habits, or restore to the
standard of times gone by. Each, therefore, preferred to praise the
rigid virtues of former ages, and to practise the laxity of his own.
No man wrote more strongly or more eloquently in praise of ancient
manners and in condemnation of modern corruption than Sallust, the
historian. Yet no Roman palace equalled in luxury the gardens of
Sallust, the man. Nor was any Roman less scrupulous either in getting
money or in spending it. What, then, was to be done? The power of
passion was real and overpowering; virtue could only oppose to it
common-places and fine words, without being able to appeal to any
fixed principles or practical sanctions. It was a lamentable state of
things, but, as the ancients themselves believed, one which, in the
heathen world, followed by a necessary law, whenever any brave, hardy,
self-denying, and virtuous race of men, by the natural operation of
these virtues, rose to empire, and attained wealth, and the means of
luxury. The later Romans held up their own ancestors of early days as
the brightest example of virtue. Among them the gods were honoured and
worshipped, and the rules which had come down from their fathers were
strictly observed. Men were frugal, laborious, content with little,
valuing right and honour far above wealth and pleasure, and ever ready
to suffer or die for their country; women were chaste, modest,
retiring, preferring their honour to their life. That the men and
women of their own day were in all respects the opposite, was
self-evident; but it is to be observed, that they were so far from
considering this to be any special fault or misery of Rome, that even
those who most bitterly complained of the change were wont to boast
that no other nation had so long resisted the universal law, by which
wealth generated luxury, and luxury the desire of increased gain; and
this again made money, not honour and virtue, the national standard of
right and wrong, until at last, things getting ever worse and worse,
society itself was dissolved, and the national life perished. This
they considered to be the natural, nay inevitable course of things.[8]

This was a melancholy view of human affairs, but it seems certain that
with regard to a heathen state (and they knew of no other) it was
true. For to take the case of Rome itself, what sanction was there
even in the purest times of the Republic for those rules of right and
wrong--those great moral principles, which to a very considerable
extent were actually preserved; although, no doubt, men in later times
dreamed of a golden age which had never really existed. The only
religion they knew was silent about moral virtues. It taught men to
honour and worship the gods of their fathers, and to ask and hope from
them such worldly blessings as long life, health, &c. But that a man
of moral purity, justice, and mercy was a more acceptable worshipper
than one who was impure, unjust, and cruel, they never imagined, and
indeed, as long as they in any degree believed the traditions which
they had received as to the character of the gods they worshipped, it
was simply impossible that they should imagine it. There was nothing
contrary to the national religion, however men's consciences might
tell them that there was something immoral, in the prayer which Horace
attributes to one of his contemporaries--'Grant that I may succeed in
wearing a mask, that I may be supposed to be just and good. Throw a
cloud and darkness over my cheats and frauds.'

Religion, then, gave no moral rule, or at least none to individuals.
M. de Champagny ('Les Césars,' iii. p. 4) remarks, with great truth,
that so far as it had a moral code at all, that code and its sanctions
touched, not the individual man, but the State. Its morality was that
of the family, and through the family that of the city. Its object was
the prosperity, the glory, the aggrandisement of the public welfare.
The Roman virtues--courage in war, moderation in peace, economy in
private life, fidelity in marriage, these were patriotic virtues,
taught and practised as such.' What, then, was the moral code of the
early Romans? It was, as this passage suggests, the fundamental and
original law of the Roman people. Arnold well points out[9] that this
and this alone was the real moral law of the heathen nations in
general. In this sense their only standard of right and wrong was
human law; but not exactly what we mean when we speak of human law,
because we live in a state of society in which new laws are
continually passed; and to imagine that the 'statutes at large' could
be the real rule and measure of right and wrong, would go beyond the
possible limits of human credulity. But among the ancient nations new
laws were comparatively very rare. The Romans themselves had a great
system of what Jeremy Bentham used to call 'judge-made law.' This grew
to its perfection at rather a late period of the Empire, and still
forms the foundation of most of the systems of law existing in
Europe. It is not of this, however, that we are speaking. Of what we
should call statutes, there were passed in the whole of their history
very few. Only 207 in all are recorded as having been enacted in the
whole period of the Republic, and of these no less than 133 were
passed just at the latest period of its decay.[10] Their greater
frequency at this period was considered one of the signs of national
degeneracy, for it was a proverb, _corruptissimâ republicâ plurimæ
leges_. In fact, at Rome in its best days there can hardly be said to
have existed any machinery for making new statutes. There was, as we
understand the word, no legislative assembly. The judicial system out
of which grew the code of law to which we have referred already
existed; and when it was necessary, one of those grave changes which
are known among our kindred on the other side of the Atlantic as
'amendments of the constitution,' could be made by a vote of the whole
Roman people. To get one of these passed was often, during the best
periods of the Republic, a matter requiring years of furious struggle.

It is not, then, of statutes such as are passed year by year in our
Parliament that we are speaking, when we say that the law of the land
was the chief code of morals existing in heathen States. Quite
distinct from anything of this kind, and more answering to our 'common
law,' there were certain great principles of the constitution which
had come down to the Romans of the historical period by an immemorial
tradition, and which all men believed to have in them something
sacred. To touch them was to touch the very life of the Roman people.
Such principles there were in all the ancient heathen States, and
their sacredness was in each State a fundamental principle as long as
it retained any fundamental principles at all. This was, in fact, a
necessary part of heathenism itself; for the very essence of
polytheism is the belief that each people has its own gods, and,
therefore, springing from them, its own traditions of right and wrong.
From its own gods each people hoped for blessings and prosperity in
its national and corporate capacity. To offend or alienate them was to
risk the existence of the civil community, and what was the will of
the gods of any particular nation was to be learned from the primitive
original tradition of that nation.

Thus, the great principles of the ancient Roman morality, such for
instance as the sanctity of marriage, parental authority, and the
like, were, in the earlier days of the Republic, so mingled in the
notions of a Roman with patriotism, that it was impossible to separate
them. Adultery in a Roman matron, incontinence in a vestal virgin, was
an act of high treason against the common weal of the Roman people. As
such, it was monstrous and terrible to the whole people. Every man,
every woman, every child, felt it as much a personal injury, as each
would have felt the violation of the temples of their country's gods,
or the taking away of the palladium or the ancilia. The instance we
have selected was that upon which the Romans themselves felt that the
whole stability of their country rested. The sanctity of marriage was
the principle of the life of the Roman State. In the worst times a
poet, himself licentious, recognised corruption on that point as the
main cause of the ruin of the country--

      'Fecunda culpæ sæcula nuptias
      Primùm inquinavere, et genus, et domos
      Hoc fonte derivata clades
      In patriam populumque fluxit.'

But it would have been easy to mention other moral offences which in
their judgment directly threatened the safety of the common country.
Such, for instance, was the breach of a treaty, any outrage offered to
the sacred person of an ambassador, or even the removal of ancient
landmarks.

Thus it was that, in the earlier state of Roman society, the most
important moral principles--not to add that, from their nature,
conscience confirmed and enforced the national law and feeling--really
had an authority as strong as any human sanction can give. To violate
them involved loss of caste, and a great deal more. The offenders were
regarded as traitors against their country; the very mention of their
names would be the most deadly insult to those who had the misfortune
to be allied to them by blood or marriage. They became a proverb of
reproach. So terrible was this punishment that the law which gave to a
husband power of life or death over a guilty wife, and the feeling of
the nation which not only justified him in executing it, but required
it of him, hardly added to its severity. The virtues which tends to
success in war were also enforced by the circumstances of Rome. A
State contained within the walls of a single city and surrounded by
cities, many of which were as powerful as itself, and with each of
which it was liable to be at war, depended for its very existence upon
the courage, bodily strength, and military training of all its
citizens; and if the city was overcome in war, each of them was likely
enough to be sold as a slave, or at the very best to be reduced to a
position something like that of a serf. No wonder that under such
circumstances consuls and dictators were content to hold the plough,
and esteemed the success and victory of their country far more
important to each of them than their possessions or their life.

But when Rome became the head of a widespread empire, the preservation
of her early traditions became simply impossible. The contemporaries
of Augustus well knew that from war (except, indeed, civil war) they
had nothing to fear. The men of a generation earlier were no doubt
vexed and provoked by the disastrous defeat of Crassus and the
destruction of his army; but their personal comfort, nay, their very
pride of superiority to all the world, was no way affected by it. How
was it possible that they should really feel like their forefathers,

      'When Romans in Rome's quarrel
        Spared neither land nor gold,
      Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
        In the brave days of old?'

And, as for the more strictly moral traditions of the early
Republicans, they were, from their nature, from the very first, of
very limited application. Men who had never learned those glorious
truths,

      'Which sages would have died to learn,
        Now taught by cottage dames,'

that 'God hath made of one blood all nations of men on the face of the
whole earth,' and (as the corollary from this) that 'God is no
respecter of persons, but that in every nation, he that feareth Him
and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him,' were by no means
offended at the supposition that there was a different rule of
morality for men of different nations. Why not, as they had different
gods? The virtues, then, on which they insisted, were duties, not of
man as man to his Creator, but of Romans to Rome. They prized, not the
virtue of chastity, but the honour of the Roman matron; not truth and
good faith, but the oath to which the gods of Rome were invoked as
witnesses. The chastity of a slave or a freedwoman or even a
foreigner, was of no value. Men, to whom the Roman was not bound by an
oath taken before the gods of his country, had no rights. It was an
essential part of this system that men could not, if they would,
transplant themselves at will from the allegiance of the gods and of
the moral traditions of their fathers to those of another nation. It
was on this principle that in the earliest times marriages between
citizens of different cities were forbidden, and for the same reason
even those between a patrician of Rome and a plebeian.

Now, when many nations were welded together into a single empire, the
whole of this tradition broke down. Arnold remarks it as one great
political benefit of Christianity, that by 'providing a fixed moral
standard independent of human law, it allows human law to be altered,
as circumstances may require, without destroying thereby the greatest
sanction of human conduct.' What, then, was the situation of a Roman,
when the mingling together of all nations had effectually destroyed
all idea of the sanctity of the original traditions of any--his own
included--and yet he had found no 'moral standard independent' of
them. It is not too much to say that he was left without moral
standard at all. Patriotism and the tradition of their fathers had
become a name to men who could hardly be said to have any
'fatherland,' and whose country was the civilized world, and they had
no higher principle to supply their place.

In this utter break-down of all fixed principles which, in a heathen
age, necessarily resulted from the substitution of one great empire
for a multitude of minute republics; and in the complete isolation in
which it left every individual, when he lost the idea of that duty to
his country and his country's traditions which had been the moral law
of his ancestors, M. de Champagny sees the explanation of the fact, so
hard to account for, that men whose fathers had been proud nobles of
free and lordly Rome should have submitted as they did to such a
tyranny as that of Tiberius. For his was not one of those which are
supported by the sword. In Italy he had only about 9,000 men under
arms, and even they were scattered in the neighbourhood of the city.
Yet the Senate allowed itself to be decimated, its chief members cut
off day by day. It seems as if each man thought only of himself, and
calculated that although, of course, none could be safe, he was safer
by remaining quiet, and taking his chance, than he would be by boldly
appealing to the Senate and people to put an end to the protracted
massacre, by depriving the tyrant of his power.

The circumstance which, perhaps, is most revolting to our feelings as
Englishmen in the tyranny of the bad Emperor is, that it was hardly
possible to draw a line between an execution and an assassination. A
great man, untried, nay, so far as he knew, unaccused, was suddenly
roused from his sleep by the arrival of half a dozen soldiers, who
came to put him to death on the spot, or, perhaps, as a great favour,
to bring him the commands of the Emperor that he should kill himself.
How does this differ from an assassination, except in the assured
impunity of the murderers? Yet, so common was it, that when the
Emperor Pertinax was suddenly awakened on the night in which Commodus
had been slain, by those who brought him the offer of the purple, he
took for granted that he was to die. The feelings with which we regard
such proceedings have been formed by the immemorial law of our country
(which not even Henry VIII., in his wildest excess of tyranny, ever
dared to violate, except in a few cases, in which he obtained an Act
of Parliament, to authorize its violation)--that no man can be
condemned without trial. The Roman law, during the best days of the
Republic, carried the notion of 'strong government' farther than even
our neighbours in France would like. Within the walls of Rome there
was an appeal to the people from the sentence of any magistrate;
everywhere else, a consul or other officer holding the 'imperium'
might order whom he pleased to be beheaded by his lictors, without
trial. This, no doubt, was because, outside the city, the office of a
Roman consul was purely military. But this 'martial law' prepared
men's minds for the abuse of the same discretion within the city
itself by the Cæsars, whose position, as everybody knows, was,
legally, only that they were servants of the Republic, privileged to
hold a number of offices at the same time, and for years together.
They, therefore, naturally inherited and abused the discretion of the
old magistrates.

When such power fell into the hands of a Caligula or a Commodus, who
would not take the trouble of governing, it was really little more
than an entire exemption of the Cæsars from all law and all
restraints. The government seems to have gone on throughout the Roman
Empire much as usual. But there was in Rome itself one miserable
youth, mad with absolute licence, who could with impunity order the
murder of any one whom it struck his fancy to destroy, for any cause,
or for no cause, or because he was in want of money, and might take
the property of any one he was pleased to murder.

It was but for a time comparatively short that this state of things
lasted. Still, under the best reigns, one can hardly doubt, that there
must have been an uneasy feeling in the mind of the Emperor, as well
as of his subjects, that his successor might renew the times of
Caligula or Nero. Under the Antonines, perhaps, when there was a long
succession of good governors for more than eighty years without
interruption, men may have learned to look back on such things as
belonging exclusively to a by-gone age. But they were too soon
undeceived, after the death of Marcus Aurelius had left the succession
open to his unworthy son. Yet the crimes even of the worst of the
Cæsars affected Rome, not the world, and, indeed, in Rome itself,
almost exclusively a single class--the senators and the rich. They
seem, therefore, hardly to have been considered as an interruption of
the general felicity of the Pax Romana; any more than an epidemic of
cholera in our own days, which for a moment strikes terror upon the
city which it attacks, but is forgotten almost as soon as it passes
away.

Nothing so effectually blinds even the naturally clearest sight as
moral perversion. Over the very soul of Gibbon, strange to say, this
Egyptian darkness brooded so thick, that after intelligently studying
this vast, pathetic, and most instructive history, the only practical
lesson he drew from it was, that the great corruptor of human society
is--_Peace_. He says, 'It was scarcely possible that the eyes of
contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent
causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform
government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the
vitals of the Empire,' and the effects of this poison he traces in the
'decline of courage and genius, and in general degeneracy.' Strange
that he could imagine that war and bloodshed are the only conceivable
prophylactics against self-indulgence, luxury, and unmanly sloth.
Within the last few months we have had a remarkable proof of the
contrary. For fifty years after Waterloo, Prussia enjoyed profound
peace. France, to mention no other wars, had a continual school of war
in Algeria. Yet, though the French are as brave as the Germans, they
have been unable to stand against them for an hour in the present war;
because the tone of the governing class and of the army had been
undermined by the moral corruption of the Second Empire. Even if war
was indispensable, no man knew better than Gibbon that the Roman
frontiers were always in a chronic state of war. The lessons really
taught by the history of the Roman Empire during the first century and
a half, are so plain that one would hardly have thought they could be
missed. Here was a great Empire upon which all the best gifts of God,
in the purely natural order, had been poured with a lavish hand. It
occupied all the fairest, most fruitful, and most illustrious regions
of the globe, to which the climate and situation can never fail to
attract intelligent travellers from all less favoured countries. The
presiding races of that Empire, which gave their character to all the
rest, were those whom God had made His instruments to convey to all
nations the best gifts of Nature--the Greek, in whom were stored and
preserved the richest powers of genius, art, eloquence and philosophy;
the Roman, who has been the example and teacher of all nations, in the
great principles of stability, law, and order. For the use and
enjoyment of this Empire were stored all the accumulated wealth of
literature, poetry, learning, philosophy and art, which all ages of
the world had produced and treasured up. To complete the whole, it was
exempted for generations together from the scourge of war. In one
word, it had everything that God could give to man, except the
supernatural gifts of Faith, Hope, and Charity. And the result showed,
that, without these, all gifts of the natural order, however precious,
were unavailing to preserve human society from utter decay and
dissolution. It was not broken in pieces by the blows of foreign
enemies, but died of its own inherent corruption. The most prominent
visible effect of this corruption, which struck the eyes even of
heathens, was that man's vices made void the primeval blessing, 'Be
fruitful and multiply.' Plutarch, a Greek of the age of Trajan,
lamented that all Greece in his day could not supply as many men as
one of its smaller cities sent out to war four hundred years earlier.
The decline of population in Rome itself was no less rapid and steady.
And men died out, not because they were wasted by war, by pestilence,
by famine, or by grinding tyranny, but because unrestrained
self-indulgence dried up the very sources of increase. If there had
been no barbarians to rush in and fill up the void, the Empire would
have fallen in pieces for want of life enough to hold it together. Its
history proved that the real causes of the ruin of States are not
political, but moral and social, and that in nations, as in
individuals, the words of the poet are most strictly fulfilled:--

      'Thou art the source and centre of all minds,
      Their only point of rest, Eternal Word.
      From Thee departing they are lost, and rove
      At random, without honour, hope, or peace;
      From Thee is all that soothes the life of man--
      His high endeavour, and his glad success,
      His strength to suffer, and his will to serve.
      But oh! Thou bounteous Giver of all good,
      Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown;
      Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor,
      And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away.'


FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'Lectures on Modern History.'

[2] A native of Barcelona, who was made head of the French police in
1759, and retired in 1780.

[3] Vol. iii., p. 196. We borrow the translation of a living author.

[4] Details are necessarily omitted, for want of space, in this
extract, as well as in the last, the loss of which weakens its force.

[5] See Salvian 'De Gubernatione Dei.'

[6] See a curious collection of passages in the notes to M. de
Champagny's chapter on Slavery. ('Les Césars,' vol. iii.)

[7] See Champagny's 'Cæsars,' vol. iii. p. 122.

[8] Thus Livy: 'Ad illa mihi pro se quisque intendat animum, quæ vita
qui mores fuerint; per quos viros, quibusque artibus, domi militiæque,
et partum et auctum imperium sit. Labente deinde paullatim disciplinâ,
velut desidentes primo mores sequatur animo, deinde ut magis magisque
lapsi sint; tum ire coeperint præcipites; donec ad hæc tempora,
quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus perventum est;' and
yet he is so far from considering this an evil peculiar to Rome, that
he adds, 'Nulla unquam respublica nec major nec sanctior nec bonis
exemplis ditior fuit; nec in quam civitatem tam seræ avaritia
luxuriaque immigraverint, nec ubi tantus et tam diu paupertati ac
parsimoniæ honos fuerit.'--(_Præfatio._)

[9] 'Roman History,' vol. ii. chap. xxvi.

[10] See Champagny, Appendix, 'Les Césars,' vol. i.




ART. II.--_Theism_--_Desiderata in the Theistic Argument._


It is a philosophical commonplace that all human questioning leads
back to ultimate truths which cannot be further analysed, and of which
no other explanation can be given than that _they exist_. Every
explanation of the universe rests and must rest on the inexplicable.
The borders of the known and the knowable are fringed with mystery,
and all the data of knowledge recede into it by longer or shorter
pathways. Thus, while it is the very mystery of the universe that has
given rise to human knowledge, by quickening the curiosity of man, it
is the same mystery which prescribes a limit to his insight, which
continues to overshadow him in his researches, and to girdle him, in
his latest discoveries, with its veil. In wonder all philosophy is
born; in wonder it always ends: and, to adopt a well-known
illustration, our human knowledge is a stream of which the source is
hid, and the destination unknown, although we may surmise regarding
both.

But the mystery which thus envelopes the origin and the destination of
the universe is not absolutely overpowering; nor does it lay an arrest
on the human faculties in their efforts to understand that universe as
a whole. Man strives to penetrate farther and farther into the shrine
of nature, and records in the several sciences the stages of his
progress. These sciences are of necessity inter-related and dependent.
Each section of human knowledge has a doorway leading into these on
either side, and one which opens behind into the region of first
principles. Separate inquirers may content themselves with their
special region of phenomena and its laws, which they seek to
understand more perfectly and to interpret more clearly, and never so
beyond their own domain. It is by such division of labour and
concentration of aim that the achievements of modern science have been
won. But it is only by forsaking the narrow region, and, without
entering the borderland of some new science, receding behind it, and
contemplating it from a distance, that its value as a contribution to
our knowledge of the universe can be discerned. Each of the sciences
has its own ideal, but the goal of universal science is the discovery
of one ultimate principle which will be explanatory of all observed
phenomenon.

And the speculative thinker has a similar aim. The perennial question
of philosophy is the discovery of the central principle of Existence,
its haunting problem is the ultimate explanation of the universe of
being. The universe--what is it? whence is it? whither is it tending?
can we know anything beyond the fleeting phenomena of its ever
unfolding and ever varying history? Is its source, and therefore its
central principle, accessible to our faculties of knowledge?

And this is the distinctive problem of rational theology. Philosophy
and science both lead up to theology as the apex of human knowledge.
The latter may be fitly called the _scientia scientiarum_. Questions
as to the nature and origin of Life upon our planet, the nature of
Force or energy, the problems of Substance and of Cause, the questions
of the Absolute and Infinite, all centre in this, are all the several
ways of expressing it from the point of view which the questioner
occupies, 'What is the ultimate principle of the universe, the ἀρχὴ
of all existence?' Speculative philosophy and science deal
proximately, it is true, with the problems of finite existence,
existence as presented to us in the surrounding universe, and the laws
which regulate it; but they covertly imply and remotely lead up to the
question we have stated. They are the several approaches to that
science which sits enthroned on the very summit of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, the science of speculative theology is as yet lamentably
incomplete. We have scores of treatises devoted to the subject, and
numerous professed solutions of the problem. But we have not, in the
English language, a single treatise which even contemplates a
philosophical arrangement and classification of the various theories,
actual and possible, upon the subject. It is otherwise with the great
questions of intellectual and ethical philosophy. We have elaborate
and almost exhaustive schemes of theories on the nature of perception,
or our knowledge of the external world, the laws of association, the
problem of causality, and the nature of conscience. But we look in
vain for any similar attempt to classify the several lines of
argument, or possible modes of theistic proof, so as to present a
tabular view of the various doctrines on this subject. We are limited
to the well-known but precarious scheme of proofs _à priori_ and _à
posteriori_,[11] and to the more accurate classification of Kant, the
ontological, the cosmological, and the physico-theological proofs,
with his own argument from the moral faculty or practical reason. In
addition, we are not aware of any English treatise specially devoted
to the history of this branch of philosophical literature, with the
exception of a brief essay by Dr. Waterland, in which he traverses a
small section of the whole area; and that not as the historian of
philosophical opinion, but in the interest of a special theory.[12]

The present condition of 'natural theology' in England is scarcely
creditable to the critical insight of the British mind. There has been
little earnest grappling with the problem in the light of the past
history of opinions; and traditionary stock-proofs have been relied
upon with a perilous complacency. The majority of theologians trust to
an utterly futile and treacherous argument, from what has long been
termed 'final causes,' and when beaten from that field, at once by the
rigour of speculative thought and the march of the inductive sciences,
the refuge that is taken in the region of our moral nature is scarcely
less secure, while the character of the theistic argument from
conscience is suffered to remain in the obscurity which still shrouds
it.

In the following pages we propose to show the invalidity of some of
the popular modes of proof, and to suggest a few desiderata in the
future working out of the problem.

It may be useful to preface our criticism by a classification of the
various theistic theories, rather as a provisional chart of opinion,
than as an exhaustive summary of all the arguments which have been
advanced, or of all possible varieties in the mode of proof. Many
thinkers, perhaps the majority, and notably the mediæval schoolmen,
have combined several distinct lines of evidence; and have
occasionally borrowed from a doctrine which they explicitly reject
some of the very elements of their argument. They have often forsaken
their own theory at a crisis, and not observed their departure from
the data on which they profess exclusively to build.

The first class of theories are strictly _ontological_ or
_ontotheological_. They attempt to prove the objective existence of
Deity from the subjective notion of necessary existence in the human
mind, or from the assumed objectivity of space and time which they
interpret as the attributes of a necessary substance.

The second are the _cosmological_ or _cosmo-theological_ proofs. They
essay to prove the existence of a supreme self-existent cause from the
mere fact of the existence of the world, by the application of the
principle of causality. Starting with the postulate of any single
existence whatsoever, the world or anything in the world, and
proceeding to argue backwards or upwards, the existence of one supreme
cause is held to be 'a regressive inference' from the existence of
these effects. As there cannot be, it is alleged, an infinite series
of derived or dependent effects, we at length reach the infinite or
uncaused cause. This has been termed the proof from contingency, as it
rises from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the
absolute. But the cosmological proof may have a threefold character,
according as it is argued: 1. That the necessary is the antithesis of
the contingent; or, 2. That because some being now exists, some being
must have always existed; or, 3. That because we now exist and have
not caused ourselves, some cause adequate to produce us, must also now
exist.

A third class of proofs are somewhat inaccurately termed
_physico-theological_, a phrase equally descriptive of them and of
those last mentioned. They are rather _teleological_ or
_teleotheological_. The former proof started from any finite
existence. It did not scrutinise its character, but rose from it to an
absolute cause, by a direct mental leap or inference. This scrutinises
the effect, and finds traces of intelligence within it. It detects the
presence or the vestiges of mind in the particular effect it examines,
viz., the phenomena of the world, and from them it infers the
existence of Deity. One branch of it is the popular argument from
design, or adaptation in nature, the fitness of means to ends
implying, it is said, an architect or designer. It may be called
_techno-theology_, and is variously treated according as the
technologist (α) starts from human contrivance and reasons to nature,
or (β) starts from nature's products and reasons toward man. Another
branch is the argument from the order of the universe, from the types
or laws of nature, indicating, it is said, an orderer or law-giver,
whose intelligence we thus discern. It is not, in this case, that the
adjustment of means to ends proves the presence of a mind that has
adjusted these. But the law itself, in its regularity and continuity,
implies a mind behind it, an intelligence animating the otherwise
soulless universe. It might be termed _nomo-theology_ or
_typo-theology_. Under the same general category may be placed the
argument from animal instinct, which is distinct at once from the
evidence of design and that of law or typical order. To take one
instance: The bee forms its cells, following unconsciously, and by
what we term 'instinct,' the most intricate, mathematical, laws. There
is mind, there is thought in the process; but whose mind, whose
thought? Not the animal's, because it is not guided by experience. The
result arrived at is a result which could be attained by man only
through the exercise of reason of the very highest order. And the
question arises, are we not warranted in supposing that a hidden pilot
guides the bee, concealed behind what we call its instinct. We do not,
meanwhile, discuss the merit of this argument; but merely indicate the
difference between it and the argument from design, and that from law
and order. It is not a question of the adjustment of phenomena. It is
the demand of the intellect for a cause adequate to account for a
unique phenomenon. It approaches the cosmo-theological argument as
closely as it approaches the techno-theological one; yet it is
different from both. The cosmo-theological rises from any particular
effect, and by a backward mental bound reaches an infinite first
cause. The techno-theological attempts to rise from the adjustment of
means to ends, to an adjuster or contriver. This simply asks, whence
comes the mind that is here in operation, perceived by its effects?

The next class of arguments are based upon the moral nature of man.
They may be termed in general _ethico-theological_; and there are, at
least, two main branches in this line of proof. The former is the
argument from conscience as a moral law, pointing to Another above it;
the law that is 'in us, yet not of us'--not the 'autonomy' of Kant,
but a _theonomy_--bearing witness to a legislator above. It is the
moral echo within the soul of a Voice louder and vaster without. And,
as evidence, it is direct and intuitive, not inferential. The latter
is the argument of Kant, (in which he was anticipated by several,
notably by Raimund of Sabunde.) It is indirect and inferential, based
upon the present phenomena of our moral nature. The moral law declares
that evil is punishable and to be punished, that virtue is rewardable
and to be rewarded; but in this life they are not so: therefore, said
Kant, there must be a futurity in which the rectification will take
place, and a moral arbiter by whom it will be effected.

Finally, there is the argument, which, when philosophically unfolded,
is the only unassailable stronghold of theism, its impregnable
fortress, that of _intuition_. As it is simply the utterance or
attestation of the soul in the presence of the Object which it does
not so much discover by searching, as _apprehend in the art of
revealing itself_, it may be called (keeping to the analogy of our
former terms) _eso-theological_ or _esoterico-theological_. It is not
an argument, an inference, a conclusion. It is an attestation, the
glimpse of a reality which is apprehended by the instinct of the
worshipper, and through the poet's vision, as much as by the gaze of
the speculative reason. It is not the verdict of one part of human
nature, of reason, or the conscience, the feelings, or the affections;
but of the whole being, when thrown into the poise or attitude of
recognition, before the presence of the self-revealing object. There
are several phases of this, which we term the eso-theological proof.
We see its most rudimental traces in the polytheism of the savage
mind, and its unconscious _personification_ of nature's forces. When
this crude conception of diverse powers in partial antagonism gives
place to the notion of one central power, the instinct asserts itself
in the common verdict of the common mind as to One above, yet kindred
to it. It is attested by the feeling of dependence, and by the
instinct of worship, which witnesses to some outward object
corresponding to the inward impulse, in analogy with all the other
instincts of our nature. It is farther attested by the poet's
interpretation of nature, the verdict of the great seers, that the
universe is pervaded by a supreme Spirit, 'haunted for ever by the
eternal mind.' We find its highest attestation in that consciousness
of the Infinite itself which is man's highest prerogative as a
rational creature. We have thus the following chart of theistic
theories.

      I. Onto-theological--
        1. From necessary notion to reality.
          (α) Anselm's proof.
          (β) Descartes' first argument.
        2. From space and time, as attributes to their substance.

      II. Cosmo-theological--
        1. Antithetic.
        2. Causal.
        3. 'Sufficient reason.' (Leibnitz.)

      III. Teleo-theological--
        1. Techno-theology.
        2. Typo-theology.
        3. (Animal instinct.)

      IV. Ethico-theological--
        1. Deonto-theological. (direct.)
        2. Indirect and inferential. (Kant.)

      V. Eso-theological--
        1. The infinite. (Fenelon. Cousin.)
        2. The world soul.
        3. The instinct of worship.

In addition, we might mention several subsidiary or sporadic proofs
which have little or no philosophical relevancy, but which have some
theological suggestiveness, viz., 1. The historical consensus. 2. The
felicity of the theist. 3. The testimony of revelation.

It is unnecessary to discuss all these alleged proofs at length; but
the powerlessness of the most of them to establish the transcendent
fact they profess to reach, demands much more serious thought than it
has yet received.

The ontological proof has always possessed a singular fascination for
the speculative mind. It promises, and would accomplish so much, if
only it were valid. It would be so powerful, if only it were
conclusive. But had demonstration been possible, the theistic
argument, like the proofs of mathematics, would have carried
conviction to the majority of thinkers long ago. The historical
failure is signal. Whether in the form in which it was originally cast
by Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, or in the more elaborate theory of
Descartes, or as presented by the ponderous English minds of Cudworth,
Henry More, and Dr. Samuel Clarke, it is altogether a _petitio
principii_. Under all its modifications, it reasons from the necessary
notion of God, to his necessary existence; or from the necessary
existence of space and time, which are assumed to be the properties or
attributes of a substance, to the necessary existence of that
substance. A purely subjective necessity of the reason is carried from
within, and held conclusive in the realm of objective reality. But the
very essence of the problem is the discovery of a valid pathway by
which to pass from the notions of the intellect to the realities of
the universe beyond it; we may not, therefore, summarily identify the
two, and at the outset take the existence of the one as demonstrative
of the other. In the affirmation of real existence we pass from the
notion that has entered the mind (or is innate), to the realm of
objective being, which exists independently of us who affirm it; and
how to pass warrantably from the ideal world within to the real world
without is the very problem to be solved. To be valid at its
starting-point, the ontological argument ought to prove that the
notion of God is so fixed in the very root of our intelligent nature
that it cannot be dislodged from the mind; and this some thinkers,
such as Clark, have had the hardihood to affirm. To be valid as it
proceeds, it ought to prove that the notion thus necessary in thought,
has a real counterpart in the realm of things, in order to vindicate
the step it so quietly takes from the ideal notion to the world of
real existence. It passes from thought to things, as it passes from
logical premiss to conclusion. But to be logical, it must rest
contented with an ideal conclusion deduced from its ideal premises.
And thus, the only valid issue of the ontological argument is a system
of absolute idealism, of which the theological corollary is pantheism.
But as this is not the Deity the argument essays to reach, it must be
pronounced illogical throughout.

Thus the ontological argument identifies the logical and the real. But
the illicit procedure in which it indulges would be more apparent than
it is to _à priori_ theorists, if the object they imagine they have
reached were visible in nature, and apprehensible by the senses. To
pass from the ideal to the real sphere by a transcendant act of
thought is seen at once to be unwarrantable in the case of
sense-perception. In this case, it is the presence of the object that
alone warrants the transition, else we should have as much right to
believe in the real existence of the hippogriff as in the reality of
the horse. But when the object is invisible, and is at the same time
the supreme being in the universe, the speculative thinker is more
easily deceived. We must, therefore, in every instance ask him, where
is the bridge from the notion to the reality? What is the plank thrown
across the chasm which separates these two regions, (to use an old
philosophical phrase) 'by the whole diameter of being?' We can never,
by any vault of logic pass from the one to the other. We are
imprisoned within the region of mere subjectivity in all _à priori_
demonstration, and how to escape from it, is (as we said before) the
very problem to be solved.

Anselm, who was the first to formulate the ontological proof, argued
that our idea of God is the idea of a being than whom we can conceive
nothing greater. But inasmuch as real existence is greater than mere
thought, the existence of God is guaranteed in the very idea of the
most perfect being; otherwise the contradiction of one still more
perfect would emerge. The error of Anselm was the error of his age,
the main blot in the whole mediæval philosophy. It first seemed to him
that reason and instinctive faith were separated by a wide interval.
He then wished to have a reason for his faith, cast in the form of a
syllogism. And he failed to see, or adequately to understand, that all
demonstrative reasoning hangs upon axiomatic truths which cannot be
demonstrated, not because they are inferior to reason, but because
they are superior to reasoning--the pillars upon which all
ratiocination rests. This was his first mistake. Dissatisfied with the
data upon which all reasoning hangs, he preferred the stream to the
fountain-head, while he thought (contradictory as it is) that _by
going down the stream_ he could reach the fountain! But his second
mistake was the greater of the two. He confounded the necessities of
thought with the necessities of the universe. He passed _without a
warrant_ from his own subjective thought to the region of objective
reality. And it has been the same with all who have since followed him
in this ambitious path. But after witnessing the elaborate tortures to
which the mediæval theologians subjected their intellects in the
process, we see their powers fail, and the chasm still yawning between
the abstract notions of the mind and the concrete facts of the
universe. It is remarkable that any of them were satisfied with the
accuracy of their reasonings. We can explain it only by the
intellectual habit of the age, and the (misread) traditions of the
Stagyrite. They made use, unconsciously, of that intuition which
carries us across the gulf, and they misread the process by which they
reached the other side. They set down to the credit of their intellect
what was due to the necessities of the moral nature, and the voice of
the heart.

Descartes was the most illustrious thinker, who, at the dawn of modern
philosophy, developed the scholastic theism. While inaugurating a new
method of experimental research, he nevertheless retained the most
characteristic doctrine of mediæval ontology. He argues that necessary
existence is as essential to the idea of an all-perfect being, as the
equality of its three angles to two right angles is essential to the
idea of a triangle. But though he admits that his 'thought imposes no
necessity on things,' he contradicts his own admission by adding, 'I
cannot conceive God except as existing, and hence it follows that
existence is inseparable from him.' In his 'Principles of Philosophy'
we find the following argument:--

      'As the equality of its three angles to two right angles is
      necessarily comprised in the idea of the triangle, the mind
      is firmly persuaded that the three angles of a triangle
      _are_ equal to two right angles; _so_ from its perceiving
      necessary and external existence to be comprised in the
      idea which it has of an all-perfect being, it ought
      manifestly to conclude that this all-perfect being
      exists.'--(Pt. i. sec. 14.)

This argument is more formally expounded in his 'Reply to Objections
to the Meditations,' thus:--

      'Proposition I. The existence of God is known from the
      consideration of His nature alone. Demonstration: To say
      that an attribute is contained in the nature or in the
      concept of a thing, is the same as to say that this
      attribute is true of this thing, and that it may be
      affirmed to be in it. But necessary existence is contained
      in the nature or the concept of God. Hence, it may be with
      truth affirmed that necessary existence is in God, or that
      God exists.'

A slight amount of thought will suffice to show that in this elaborate
array of argumentation, Descartes is the victim of a subtle fallacy.
Our conception of necessary existence cannot include the fact of
necessary existence, for (to repeat what we have already said) the one
is an ideal concept of the mind, the other is a fact of real
existence. The one demands an object beyond the mind conceiving it,
the other does not. All that the Cartesian argument could prove would
be that the mental concept was necessary, not that the concept had a
counterpart in the outer universe. It is, indeed, a necessary judgment
that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles,
because this is _an identical proposition_; the subject and the
predicate are the same, the one being only an expansion of the other.
We cannot, therefore, destroy the predicate and leave the subject
intact. But it is otherwise when we affirm that any triangular object
_exists_, we may then destroy the predicate 'existence,' and yet leave
the subject (the notion of the triangle) intact in the mind.

It is true that Descartes has not limited himself to this futile _à
priori_ demonstration. He has buttressed his formal ontology by a much
more suggestive though logically as inconclusive an argument. He again
reasons thus in his 'Principles:' We have the idea of an all-perfect
being in the mind, but whence do we derive it? It is impossible that
we can have an idea of anything, unless there be an original somewhere
in the universe whence we derive it, as the shadow is the sign of a
substance that casts it. But it is manifest that the more perfect
cannot arise from the less perfect, and that which knows something
more perfect than itself is not the cause of its own being. Since,
therefore, we ourselves are not so perfect as the idea of perfection
which we find within us, we are forced to believe that this idea in us
is derived from a more perfect being above us, and consequently that
such a being exists.

It will be observed that this second argument of Descartes is partly
cosmological,--though ultimately it merges in the ontological, and
falls back upon it for support. Hence, Descartes himself called it an
_à posteriori_ argument. And it may therefore serve as a link of
connection and transition to the second class of arguments.

But before passing to these, we may observe that all the _à priori_
theorists, professing to conduct us to the desired conclusion on the
level road of demonstration (while they all contradict their own
principles, and furtively introduce the contingent facts of
experience), have but a faint conception of the magnitude of the
question at issue. To work out a demonstration as with algebraic
formulæ, to contemplate the problem as one of mathematical science,
under the light and guidance of the reason alone, and unaided by the
moral intuitions, betokens a lack of insight into the very problem in
question. The object of which we are in search is not a blank
colourless abstraction, or necessary entity. Suppose that a supreme
existence were demonstrable, that bare entity is not the God of
theism, the infinite Intelligence and Personality, of whose existence
the human spirit desires some assurance, if it can be had. And a
formal demonstration of a primitive source of existence (_more
geometrico_) is of no theological value. It is an absolute zero,
inaccessible alike to the reason and to the heart, before which the
human spirit freezes; and as a mere _ultimatum_ its existence is
conceded by every philosophic school.

The germs of the cosmological argument (as of the ontological) are
found in the scholastic philosophy, though its elaboration was left to
the first and second periods of the modern era. Diodorus of Tarsus,
John Damascenus, Hugo of St. Victor, and Peter of Poitiers, have each
contributed to the development of this mode of proof. It is the
argument _à contingentia mundi_, or _ex rerum mutabilitate_; and may
be briefly stated thus: If the contingent exists, the necessary also
exists. I myself, the world, the objects of sense, are contingent
existences, and there must be a cause of these, which cause must be
also an effect. Go back, therefore, to the cause of that cause, and to
its cause again, and you must at length pause in the regress; and by
rising to a First Clause, you escape from the contingent and reach the
necessary. From the observation of the manifold sequences of nature
you rise to the causal fountain-head, as you cannot travel backwards
for ever along an infinite line of dependent sequences.

But this argument is as illusory as the ontological one, from which,
indeed, it borrows its strength, and of which it shares the weakness.
For why should we ever pause in the regressive study of the phenomena
of the universe, of which we only observe the slow evolution through
immeasurable time? How do we reach a fountain-head at all? We are not
warranted in saying that because we cannot think out an endless
regress of infinite antecedents, _therefore_ we must assume a first
cause. For that assumption of the ἀρχὴ, of an uncaused cause, when we
have wearied ourselves in mounting the steps of the ladder of finite
agency, is to the speculative reason equally illicit as is its
assumption while we are standing on the first round of the ladder. Why
should we not assume it, step over to it at the first, if we may do
so, or are compelled to do so, at the last? The argument starts from
the concrete and works its way backward along the channel of the
concrete, till it turns round, bolts up, takes wing, and 'suddenly
scales the height.' The speculative reason at length essays to cross
over the chasm between the long series of dependent sequences, and the
original or uncreated cause; but it does so furtively. It crosses over
by an unknown path to an unknown source, supposed to be necessary.

But again, what light is cast by this ambitious regress on the nature
of the fountain-head. How is the being we are supposed to have reached
at length, the source of that series of effects which are supposed to
have sprung from his creative fiat? If we experienced a difficulty in
our regress in connecting the last link of the chain with the _causa
causans_, we experience the same or a counter-difficulty in our
descent, in connecting the first link of the chain with the creative
energy. And how, it may be asked, do we connect that supreme cause
with intelligence, or with personality? We have called the assumption
of this ἀρχὴ a leap in the dark, and we ask how can we ever
escape from the phenomenal series of effects which we perceive in
nature, to the noumenal source of which we are in search? By the
observation of what is or what has been, we merely ascend backwards in
time, through the ever-changing forms of phenomenal energy (our
effects being but developed causes, and our causes potential effects),
but we never reach a noumenal source. That is reserved for the flight
of the speculative reason vainly soaring into the empyrean, beyond the
very atmosphere of thought.

The admission that _some kind_ of being or substance must have always
existed in the universe, is the common property of all the systems of
philosophy. Materialist and idealist, theist and atheist, alike admit
it, but its admission is _theologically worthless_. 'The notion of a
God,' says Sir William Hamilton, in his admirable manner, 'is not
contained in the notion of a mere first cause; for, in the admission
of a first cause, atheist and theist are as one.' The being that is
assumed to exist is, therefore, a mere blank essence, a zero, an
'everything = nothing,' so far as this argument can carry us. Nature
remains a fathomless abyss, telling us nothing of its whence and
whither. It is still the fountain-head of inscrutable mystery, which
overshadows and overmasters us. The _natura naturata_ casts no light
on the _natura naturans_. The systole and diastole of the universe
goes on; the flux and reflux of its phenomena are endless. That
something always was, every one admits. The question between the rival
philosophic schools is as to what that something was and is. We may
choose to call it 'the first cause,' (an explanation which implies
that our notion of endless regression has broken down) and we may say
that we have reached the notion of an uncaused cause. But is that a
notion at all? Is it intelligible, conceivable? Do we not, in the very
assumption, bid farewell to reason, and fall back on some form of
faith?

Finally, the moment that supposed cause is reached, does not the
principle that was supposed to bring us to it break down? And by thus
destroying the bridge behind us, the very principle of casuality which
was valid in our progress and ascent, valid in the limited area of
experience--now emptied of all philosophical meaning when we desert
experience and rise to the transcendental--invalidates the whole
series of effects which are supposed to have sprung from it? We need
not rise above any single event, contingent and finite, to any other
event as the proximate cause of it; if, when we have essayed to carry
out the regress, we stop short, and, crying εὕρηκα, congratulate
ourselves that we have at length reached an uncaused cause.

Thus when the cosmological theorist asks: Does the universe contain
its own cause within itself? and answering in the negative, asserts
that it must therefore have sprung from a supra-mundane source, we may
validly reply, may it not have been eternal? May not its history be
but the ceaseless evolution, the endless transformation of unknown
primeval forces? So far as this argument conducts us, we affirm that
it may. And to pass from the present contingent state of the universe
to its originating source, the theorist must make use of the
ontological inference, of which we have already indicated the double
flaw. There is one point of affinity between all forms of the
cosmological and ontological arguments. They all profess to reach a
necessary conclusion. They are not satisfied with the contingent or
the probable. But the notion of necessity is a logical notion of the
intellect. It exists in thought alone. Whoever, therefore, would
escape from that ideal sphere must forego the evidence of necessity.
Real existence is not and never can be synonymous with necessary
existence. For necessary existence is always ideal. It is reached by
a formal process. It is the product of pure thought.

But the _teleological_ argument is that which has been most popular in
England. It has carried (apparent) conviction to many minds that have
seen the futility of the _à priori_ processes of proof. It is the
stock argument of British 'natural theology;' in explanation and
defence of which volume upon volume has been written. It is, as Kant
remarked, 'the oldest, the clearest, and the most adapted to the
ordinary human reason.' Nevertheless, its failure is the more signal,
considering that its reputation has been so great, and its claim so
vast. The argument has at least three branches, to which we have
already referred. We confine ourselves meanwhile to the first of the
three, the techno-theological argument, or that which reasons from the
phenomena of design.

Stated in brief compass, that argument amounts to the following
inference. We see marks of adaptation, of purpose, or of foresight in
the objects which, as we learn from experience, proceed from the
contrivance of man. We see similar marks of design or adaptation in
nature. We are therefore warranted in inferring a world-designer; and
from the indefinite number of these an infinite designer; and from
their harmony His unity. Or thus,--we see the traces of wise and
various purpose everywhere in nature. But nature could not of herself
have fortuitously produced this arrangement. It could not have fallen
into such harmony by accident. Therefore the cause of this wise order
cannot be a blind, unintelligent principle, but must be a free and
rational mind. The argument is based upon analogy (and might be termed
analogical as strictly as technological). It asserts that because mind
is concerned in the production of those objects of art which bear the
traces of design, therefore a resembling mind was concerned in the
production of nature.

The objections to this mode of proof are indeed 'legion.' In the
_first_ place, admitting its validity so far, it falls short of the
conclusion it attempts and professes to reach. For,

1. The effects it examines, and from which it infers a cause, are
finite, while the cause it assumes is infinite; but the infinity of
the cause can be no valid inference, from an indefinite number of
finite effects. The indefinite is still the finite; and we can never
perform the intellectual feat of educing the infinite from the finite
by any multiplication of the latter. It has been said by an acute
defender of the teleological argument, that the number of designed
phenomena (indefinitely vast) with which the universe is filled, is
sufficient to suggest the infinity of the designing cause. And it may
be admitted that it is by the ladder of finite designs that we rise to
some of our grandest conceptions of divine agency; but this ascent and
survey are only possible after we have discovered from some other
source that a divine being _exists_. The vastest range of design is of
no greater validity than one attested instance of it, so far as proof
is concerned. It is not accumulation, but relevancy of data that we
need. But,

2. At the most we only reach an artificer or protoplast, not a
creator,--one who arranged the phenomena of the world, not the
originator of its _substance_,--the architect of the cosmos, not the
maker of the universe. Traces of mind discoverable amid the phenomena
of the world cast no light upon the fact of its creation, or the
nature of its source. There is no analogy between a human artificer
arranging a finite mechanism, and a divine creator originating a world;
nor is there a parallel between the order, the method, and the plan of
nature, and what we see when we watch a mechanician working according
to a plan to produce a designed result. The only real parallel would
be our perception by sense of a world slowly evolving from chaos
according to a plan previously foreseen. From the product you are at
liberty to infer a producer only after having seen a similar product
formerly produced. But the product which supplies the basis of this
argument is unique and unparalleled, 'a singular effect,' in the
language of Hume, whose reasoning on this point has never been
successfully assailed. And the main difficulty which confronts the
theist, and which theism essays to remove, is precisely that which the
consideration of design does not touch, viz., the _origin_ and not the
arrangements of the universe. The teleological analogy is therefore
worthless. There is no parallel, we repeat, between the process of
manufacture, and the product of creation, between the act of a
carpenter working with his tools to construct a cabinet, and the
evolution of life in nature. On the contrary, there are many marked
and sharply defined contrasts between them. In the latter case there
is fixed and ordered regularity, no deviation from law; in the former
contingency enters, and often alters and mars the work. Again, the
artificer simply uses the materials, which he finds lying ready to
hand in nature. He _detaches_ them from their 'natural' connections.
He arranges them in a special fashion. But in nature, in the successive
evolution of her organisms there is no detachment, no displacement,
no interference or isolation. All things are linked together. Every
atom is dependent on every other atom, while the organisms seem to
grow and develop 'after their kind' by some vital force, but by no
manipulation similar to the architect's or builder's work. And yet
again, in the one case, the purpose is comprehensible--the end is
foreseen from the beginning. We know what the mechanician desires to
effect; but in the other case we have no clue to the 'thought' of the
architect. Who will presume to say that he has adequately fathomed the
purposes of nature in the adjustment of one of her phenomena to
another? But,

3. The only valid inference from the phenomena of design would be that
of a _phenomenal_ first cause. The inference of a personal Divine
Agent or substance from the observation of the mechanism of the
universe is invalid. What link connects the traces of mind which are
discerned in nature (those _vestigia animi_) with an agent who
produced them? There is no such link. And thus the divine personality
remains unattested. The same may be said of the divine _unity_. Why
should we rest in our inductive inference of one designer from the
phenomena of design, when these are so varied and complex? Or grant
that in all that we observe a subtle and pervading 'unity' is found,
and as a consequence all existing arrangements point to one designer,
why may not that Demiurgos have been at some remote period himself
designed? And so on _ad infinitum_.

But, in the _second_ place, not only is the argument defective
(admitting its validity so far as it goes), even partial validity
cannot be conceded to it. The phenomena of design not only limit us to
a finite designer, not only fail to lead us to the originator of the
world, or to a personal first cause, but they confine us within the
network of observed designs, and do not warrant faith in a being
detached from or independent of these designs, and therefore able to
modify them with a boundless reserve of power. These designs only
suggest mechanical agency, working in fixed forms, according to
prescribed law. In other words, the phenomena of the universe which
distantly resemble the operations of man, do not in the least suggest
an agent exterior to themselves. We are not intellectually constrained
to ascribe the arrangement of means to ends in nature to anything
supra-mundane. Such constraint would proceed from our projecting the
shadow of ourselves within the realm of nature, and investing _it_
with human characteristics, a procedure for which we have no warrant.
Why may not the arrangements of nature be due to a principle of life
imminent in nature, the mere endless evolution and development of the
world itself? We observe that phenomenon A fits into phenomena B, C,
and D, and we therefore infer that A was fitted to its place by an
intelligent mind. But suppose that A did not fit into B, C, or D, it
might in some way unknown fit into X, Y, or Z,--it would in any case
be related to its antecedent and consequent phenomena. But our
perception of the fitness or relationship gives us no information
beyond the _fact of fitness_. Any other (larger) conclusion is
illegitimate.

It is often asserted that the phenomenal changes which we observe in
nature, bear witness to their being _effects_. But what are effects?
Transformed causes, modified by the transformation--mere changed
appearances. We see the effects of volitional energy in the phenomena
which our consciousness forces us to trace back to our own personality
as the producing cause. But where do we see in nature, in the
universe, phenomena which we are similarly warranted in construing as
the effects of volitional energy, or of constructive intelligence? We
are not conscious of the power of creation, nor do we perceive it. We
have never witnessed the construction of a world. We only perceive the
everlasting flux and reflux of phenomena, the ceaseless pulsation of
nature's life,--evolution, transformation, birth, death, and birth
again. But nature is herself dumb as to her whence or whither. And, as
we have already hinted, could we detect a real analogy between the
two, we are not warranted in saying that the constructive intelligence
which explains the one class of phenomena is the only possible
explanation of the other.[13]

And thus it is that no study of the arrangements and disposition of
the mechanism can carry us beyond the mechanism itself. The
teleological argument professes to carry us above the chain of natural
sequence. It proclaims that those traces of intelligence everywhere
visible hint that long ago _mind_ was engaged in the construction of
the universe. It is not that the phenomena 'give forth at times a
little flash, a mystic hint' of a living will within or behind the
mechanism, a personality kindred to that of the artificer who observes
it. With that we should have no quarrel. But the teleological argument
is said to bring us authentic tidings of the origin of the universe.
If it does not carry us beyond the chain of dependent sequence it is
of no value. Its advocates are aware of this, and assert that it can
thus carry us beyond the adamantine links. But this is precisely what
it fails to do. It can never assure us that those traces of
intelligence to which it invites our study, proceeded from a
constructive mind detached from the universe; or that, if they did,
another mind did not fashion that mind, and so on _ad infinitum_. And
thus the perplexing puzzle of the origin of all things remains as
insoluble as before.

But farther, the validity of the teleological argument depends upon
the accuracy of our interpretation of those 'signs of intelligence' of
which it makes so much, and which it interprets analogically in the
light of human nature. But the 'interpreter' is ever 'one among a
thousand.' Who is to guarantee to us that we have not erred as to the
meaning of Nature's secret tracery? Who is to secure us against
inerrancy in this? Before we deduce so weighty a conclusion from data
so peculiar, we must obtain some assurance that no further insight
will disallow the interpretation we have given. But is not this
presumptuous in those who are acquainted in a very partial manner with
the significance of a few of nature's laws? Who will presume to say
that he has penetrated to the meaning of any one of these laws? And,
if he has not done so, can he validly single out a few resemblances he
has detected, and explain the nature of the infinite, by a sample of
the finite? Nature is so inscrutable that, even when a law is
discerned, the scientific explorer will not venture to say that he has
read its character, so as to be sure that the law reflects the
ultimate meaning of the several phenomena it explains. Nay, is he not
convinced that other and deeper meanings must lie within them? A law
of nature is but the generalized expression of the extent to which our
human insight has as yet extended into the secret laboratory of her
powers. But as that insight deepens, our explanations change. We say
the lower law is resolved back into a higher one, the more detailed
into the more comprehensive. But if our scientific conceptions
themselves are thus constantly changing, progressing, enlarging, how
can we venture to erect our natural theology on the surface
interpretation of the fleeting phenomena of the universe? 'Lo, these
are a part of His ways, but how little a portion is known of Him!'

And this conclusion we advance against those who as dogmatically deny
that there can be _any_ resemblance between the forces of nature as a
revelation of the Infinite, and the volitional energy of man. Both
assumptions are equally arbitrary and illegitimate. We shall shortly
endeavour to show on what grounds (remote from teleology) we are
warranted in believing that a resemblance does exist.

But, to return, if the inference from design is valid at all, it must
be valid everywhere--all the phenomena of the world must yield it
equally. No part of the universe is better made than any other part.
Every phenomenon is adjusted to every other phenomenon nearly or
remotely as means to ends. Therefore, if the few phenomena which our
teleologists single out from the many are a valid index to the
character of the source whence they have proceeded, everything that
exists must find its counterpart in the divine nature. If we are at
liberty to infer an Archetype above from the traces of mind beneath,
must not the phenomena of moral evil, malevolence, and sin be on the
same principle carried upwards by analogy?--a procedure which would
destroy the notion of Deity which the teleologists advocate. If we are
at liberty to conclude that a few phenomena which seem to us designed,
proceed from and find their counterpart in God, reason must be shown
why we should select a few and pass over other phenomena of the
universe. In other words, if the constructor of the universe designed
one result from the agency which he has established, must he not have
designed all the results that actually emerge; and if the character of
the architect be legitimately deduced from one or a few designs, must
we not take all the phenomena which exist _to help out our idea of his
character_? Look, then, at these phenomena as a whole. Consider the
elaborate contrivances for inflicting pain, and the apparatus so
exquisitely adjusted to produce a wholesale carnage of the animal
tribes. They have existed from the very dawn of geologic time. The
whole world teems with the proofs of such intended carnage. Every
organism has parasites which prey upon it; and not only do the
superior tribes feed upon the inferior (the less yielding to the
greater), but the inferior prey at the very same time no less
remorselessly upon the superior. If, therefore, the inference of
benevolence be valid, the inference of malevolence is at least equally
valid: and as equal and opposite, the one notion destroys the other.

But lastly, while we are philosophically impelled to consider all
events as designed, if we interpret one as such, nay, to believe that
the exact relation of every atom to every other atom in the universe
has been adjusted in 'a pre-established harmony,' the moment we do
thus universalize design, that moment the notion escapes us, is
emptied of all philosophical meaning or theological relevancy. Let it
be granted that phenomenon A is related to phenomenon B, as means to
an end. Carry out the principle (as philosophy and science alike
compel us to do), and consider A as related by remoter adaptation to
all the other phenomena of the universe; in short, regard every atom
as interrelated to every other atom, every change as co-related to
every other change; then the notion of design breaks down, from the
very width of the area it covers. We can understand a finite
mechanician planning that a finite phenomenon shall be related to
another finite phenomenon so as to produce a desired result; but if
the mechanician himself be a designed phenomenon, and all that he
works upon be equally so, every single atom and every individual
change being subtilly interlaced and all reciprocally dependent, then
the very notion of design vanishes. Seemingly valid on the limited
area of finite observation and of human agency, it disappears when the
whole universe is seen to be one vast network of interconnected law
and order.

Combining this objection with what may seem to be its opposite, but is
really a supplement to it, we may again say, that we, who are a part
of the universal order, cannot pronounce a verdict as to the intended
design of the parts, till able to see the whole. If elevated to a
station whence we could look down on the entire mechanism, if
_outside_ of the universe (a sheer impossibility to the creature), we
might see the exact bearing of part to part, and of link with link, so
as to pronounce with confidence as to the intention of the contriver.
If, like the wisdom of which Solomon writes, any creature had been
with the Almighty 'in the beginning of His way, before His works of
old, set up from everlasting, or even the earth was;' had a creature
been with Him 'when as yet He had not made the world, when He prepared
the heavens, and gave His decree' to the inanimate and animated worlds
as they severally arose, he might be able to understand the meaning of
their creation. And yet the moment this knowledge was gained, the
value of the perception would disappear; because 'being as God,' he
should no longer require the circuitous report or inference.

Thus the teleological argument must be pronounced fallacious. It is
illusive as well as incomplete: and were we to admit its relevancy, it
would afford no basis for worship, or the recognition of the object it
infers. The conception of deity as a workman, laying stress upon the
notion of cleverness in contrivance, and subordinating moral character
to skill, would never lead to reverence, or the adoration of the
architect.

It must be conceded, however, that there is a subsidiary value in this
as in all the other arguments, even while their failure is most
conspicuous. They prove (as Kant has shown) that if they cannot lead
us to the reality we are in search of, the phenomena of nature cannot
_discredit_ its existence. They do not turn the argument the other
way, or weight the scales on the opposite side. They are merely
negative, and indeed clear the ground for other and more valid modes
of proof.

They are of farther use (as Kant has also shown) in correcting our
conceptions of the Divine Being, when from other sources we have
learned his existence, in defining and enlarging our notions of his
attributes. They discourage and disallow some unworthy conceptions,
and enlarge the scope of others. But to leave those celebrated lines
of argument which have gathered around them so much of the
intellectual strife of rival philosophies, it is needful now to tread
warily when we are forced to come to so decided a conclusion against
them.

We do not deny that the idea of God exists in the human mind as one of
its ultimate and ineradicable notions: we only dispute the inference
which ontology has deduced from its existence there. We do not deny
that by regressive ascent from finite sequences we are at length
constrained to rest in some causal fountain-head; we only dispute the
validity of the process by which that fountain-head is identified with
the absolute source of existence, and that source of existence with a
personal God. We do not deny the presence of design in nature when by
that term is meant the signs or indices of mind in the relation of
phenomena to phenomena as means to ends; we only assert that these
designs have no theistic value, and are only intelligible after we
have discovered the existence of a supreme mind within the universe,
from another and independent source. Till then the book of nature
presents us only with blank, unilluminated pages. Thereafter it is
radiant with the light of design, full of that mystic tracery which
proclaims the presence of a living will behind it. To a mind that has
attained to the knowledge or belief in God, it becomes the 'garment it
thereafter sees Him by,' as one might see a pattern issuing from a
loom while the weaver was concealed, and infer some of the designs of
the workman from the characteristics of his work.

The remaining lines of proof, followed, though not worked out in the
past, are the _intuitional_ and the _moral_. And it is by a
combination of the data from which they spring and a readjustment of
their respective parts and harmonies, that the foundations of theism
can alone be securely laid. As the evidence of intuition is of
greatest value, and is also most generally disesteemed, we shall take
its testimony first, and examine the moral evidence of conscience
afterwards.

The modern spirit is suspicious of the evidence of intuition. It is
loudly proclaimed on all sides by the teachers of positive science
that instinct is a dubious guide, liable to the accidents of chance
interpretation, variously understood by various minds; that in
following it we may be pursuing an _ignis fatuus_; that it is at best
only valid for the individual who may happen to feel its force; that
it is not a universal endowment (as it should be if trustworthy), but
often altogether wanting; and that it can never yield us _certainty_,
because its root is a subjective feeling or conviction, which cannot
be verified by external test. These charges cannot be ignored, or
lightly passed over. And for the theist merely to proclaim, as an
ultimate fact, that the human soul has an intuition of God, that we
are endowed with a faculty of apprehension of which the correlative
object is divine, will carry no conviction to the atheist. Suppose
that he replies, 'This intuition may be valid evidence for you, but I
have no such irrepressible instinct; I see no evidence in favour of
innate ideas in the soul, or of a substance underneath the phenomena
of nature of which we can have any adequate knowledge;' we may close
the argument by simple re-assertion, and vindicate our procedure on
the ground that in the region of first principles there can be no
farther proof. We may also affirm that the instinct being a sacred
endowment, and delicate in proportion to the stupendous nature of the
object it attests, it may, like every other function of the human
spirit, collapse from mere disuse. But if we are to succeed in even
suggesting a doubt in the mind of our opponent as to the accuracy of
his analysis, we must verify our primary belief, and exhibit its
credentials so far as that is possible. We must show why we cannot
trace its genealogy farther back, or resolve it into simpler elements,
and we must not keep its nature shrouded in darkness, but disclose it
so far as may be. This, then, is our task.

The instinct to which we make our ultimate appeal is in its first rise
in the soul, crude, dim, and inarticulate. Gradually it shapes itself
into greater clearness, aided, in the case of most men, by the myriad
influences of religious thought and of historical tradition,--heightening
and refining it when educed, but not creating it; separating the real
gold from any spurious alloy it may have contracted. Like all our
innate instincts this one is at first infantile, and, when it begins
to assert itself, it prattles rather than speaks coherently. We do not
here raise the general question of the existence of _à priori_
principles. We assume that the mind is not originally an _abrasa
tabula_, but the endowments with which it starts are all gifts in
embryo. They are not full-formed powers, so much as the capacities and
potentialities of mental life. Their growth to maturity is most
gradual, and the difference between their adult and their rudimentary
phases is as wide as is the interval between a mature organization and
the egg from which it springs. It is therefore no evidence against the
reality or the trustworthiness of the intuition to which we appeal,
that its manifestations are not uniform, or that it sometimes seems
absent in the abnormal states of consciousness, or among the ruder
civilizations of the world. We admit that it is difficult for the
uninitiated to trace any affinity between its normal and its abnormal
manifestations, when it is modified by circumstances to any extent. We
farther admit that while never entirely absent, it may sometimes seem
to slumber not only in stray individuals, but in a race or an era, and
be transmitted from generation to generation in a latent state. It may
hybernate, and then awake as from the sleep of years, arising against
the will of its possessor and refusing to be silenced. Almost any
phenomenon may call it forth, and no single phenomenon can quench it.
It is the spontaneous utterance of the soul in presence of the object
whose existence it attests, and as such it is necessarily prior to any
act of reflection upon its character, validity, or significance.
Reflex thought, which is the product of experience, cannot in any case
originate an intuition, or account for those phenomena which we may
call by that name, supposing them to be delusive. Nothing in us, from
the simplest instinct to the loftiest intuition, could in any sense
create the object it attests, or after which it seeks and feels. And
all our ultimate principles, irreducible by analysis, simply attest
and assert.

The very existence of the intuition of which we now speak is itself a
revelation, because pointing to a Revealer within or behind itself.
And however crude in its elementary forms, it manifests itself in its
highest and purest state at once as an act of intelligence and of
faith. It may be most fitly described as a direct gaze by the inner
eye of the spirit, into a region over which mists usually brood. The
great and transcendant Reality it apprehends lies evermore behind the
veil of phenomena. It does not see far into that reality, yet it
grasps it, and recognises in it 'the open secret' of the universe.
This, then, is the main characteristic of the theistic intuition. It
proclaims a supreme Existence without and beyond the mind, which it
apprehends _in the act of revealing itself_. It perceives through the
vistas of phenomenal sequence, as through breaks in the cloud, the
glimpses of a _Presence_ which it can know only in part, but which it
does not follow in the dark, or merely infer from its obscure and
vanishing footprints. Unlike the 'necessary notion' of the Cartesian
school, unlike the space and time which are but subjective forms of
thought, unlike the 'regressive inference' from the phenomena of the
world, the conclusion it reaches is not the creation of its own
subjectivity. The God of the logical understanding, whose existence is
supposed to be attested by the necessary laws of the mind, is the mere
projected shadow of self. It has no more than an ideal significance.
The same may be said, with some abatements, of the being whose
existence is inferred from the phenomena of design. The ontologist and
the teleologist unconsciously draw their own portrait, and by an
effort of thought project it outwards on the canvass of infinity. The
intuitionalist, on the other hand, perceives that a revelation has
been made to him, descending as through an opened cloud, which closes
again. It is 'a moment seen, then gone;' for while we are always
conscious of our contact with the natural, we are less frequently
aware of the presence of the supernatural.

The difference between the evidence of intuition and the supposed
warrant of the other proofs we have reviewed is apparent. It is one
thing to create or evolve (even unconsciously) a mental image of
ourselves which we vainly attempt to magnify to infinity, and
thereafter worship the image that our minds have framed; it is another
to discern for a moment an august Presence, _other than the human_,
through a break in the clouds which usually veil Him from our eyes.
And it is to the inward recognition of this self-revealing object that
the theist makes appeal. What he discerns is at least not a 'form of
his mind's own throwing;' while his knowledge is due not to the
penetration of his own finite spirit, but to the condescension of the
infinite.

But we admit that this intuition is _not naturally luminous_. It is
the presence of the transcendant Object which makes it luminous.[14]
Its light is therefore fitful. It is itself rather an eye than a
light; (a passive organ, rather than an active power); and when not
lit up by light strictly supra-natural,--because emanating from the
object it discerns,--it is dull and lustreless. The varying
intelligence it reports of that object, corresponds to the changing
perceptions of the human eye in a day of alternate gloom and sunlight.
It is itself a human trust which ripens gradually into a matured
belief, rather than a clear perception, self-luminous from the first.

It may be needful, however, as the evidence of our intuitions is so
generally suspected, to examine a little more fully into the
credentials of this one, in common with all its allies.

Our knowledge of the object which intuition discloses is at first, in
all cases, necessarily unreflective. In the presence of that object,
the mind does not double back upon itself, to scrutinise the origin
and test the accuracy of the report that has reached it. And thus the
truth which it apprehends is at first only presumptive. It remains to
be afterwards tested by reflection, that no illusion be mistaken for
reality. What, then, are the tests of our intuitions?[15]

The following seem sufficient criteria of their validity and
truthworthiness. 1. The persistence with which they appear and
reappear after experimental reflection upon them, the obstinacy with
which they reassert themselves when silenced, the tenacity with which
they cling to us. 2. Their historical permanence; the confirmation of
ages and of generations. The hold they have upon the general mind of
the race is the sign of some 'root of endurance' planted firmly in the
soil of human nature. If 'deep in the general heart of men, their
power survives,' we may accept them as true, or interpret them as a
phase of some deeper yet kindred truth, of which they are the popular
distortion. 3. The interior harmony which they exhibit with each
other, and with the rest of our psychological nature; each of the
intuitions being in harmony with the entire circle, and with the
whole realm of knowledge. If any alleged intuition should come into
collision with any other and disturb it, there would be good reason
for suspecting its genuineness; and in that case the lower and less
authenticated must always yield to the higher and better attested. But
if the critical intellect carrying our intuition (if we may so speak
in a figure) round the circle of our nature, and in turn placing it in
juxtaposition with the rest, finds that no collision ensues, we may
safely conclude that the witness of that intuition is true. 4. If the
results of its action and influence are such as to elevate and
etherealize our nature, its validity may be assumed. This is no test
by itself, for an erroneous belief might for a time even elevate the
mind that held it; as the intellectual life evoked by many of the
erroneous theories and exploded hypotheses of the past has been great.
But no error could do so permanently. No illusion could survive as an
educative and elevating power over humanity; and no alleged instinct
could sustain its claim, and vindicate its presumptive title, if it
could not stand the test we mention. A theoretic error is seen to be
such when we attempt to reduce it to practice; as a hidden crack or
fissure in a metal becomes visible when a strain is applied, or the
folly of an ideal Utopia is seen in the actual life of a mixed
commonwealth. Many of those scientific guesses which have served as
good provisional hypotheses, have been abandoned in the actual working
of them out, and so the flaw that lurks within an alleged intuition,
(if there be a flaw) will become apparent when we try to apply it in
actual life, and take it as a regulative principle in action. Thus,
take the belief in the Divine existence, attested, as we affirm, by
intuition, and apply it in the act of worship or adoration. Does that
belief (which fulfils the conditions of our previous tests,--for it
appears everywhere and clings tenaciously to man, and comes into
collision with no other normal tendency of our nature, or defrauds any
instinct of its due) does it elevate the nature of him who holds it?
The reply of history is conclusive, and its attestation is abundantly
clear. The power of the theistic faith over the rest of human nature
is such that it has quickened the other faculties into a more vigorous
life. Its moral leverage has been vast, while it has sharpened the
æsthetic sense to some of its most delicate perceptions, and in some
instances brought a new accession of intellectual power. The intuition
which men trust in the dark, gradually leads the whole nature towards
the light. Its dimness and its dumbness are exchanged for clearness
and an intelligible voice; and while it thus grows luminous, it gains
new power, and our confidence in its verdict strengthens.

We have now stated what seems to us the general nature of the theistic
intuition, and added one or two criteria by which all intuitions must
be tested. It remains that we indicate more precisely the phases which
it assumes; and the channels in which it works. Though ultimate and
insusceptible of analysis, it has a triple character. It manifests
itself in the consciousness which the human mind has of the Infinite
(an intellectual phase); in its perception of the world-soul, which is
Nature's 'open secret' revealed to the poet (an æsthetic phase); and
in the act of worship, in which an object correlative to the
worshipper is revealed in his very sense of dependence (a moral and
religious phase).

It is not only essential to the validity of the theistic intuition
that the human mind has a positive though imperfect knowledge of the
infinite, but the assertion of this is involved in the very intuition
itself. If we had no positive knowledge of the source it seeks to
reach, the instinct, benumbed as by an intellectual frost, and unable
to rise, would be fatally paralysed; or if it could move along its
finite area, it would wander helplessly, feeling after its object, 'if
haply it might find it.' And it will be found that all who deny the
validity of our intuition, either limit us to the knowledge of
phenomena, or while admitting that we have a certain knowledge of
finite substance adopt the cold theory of nescience. From the earliest
Greek schools, or from the earlier speculation of the Chinese mind, a
powerful band of thinkers have denied to man the knowledge of aught
beyond phenomena, and from Confucius to Comte the list is an ample
one. In our own day this school includes some of the clearest and
subtilest minds devoted to philosophy. Comte, Lewes, Mill, Mr. Bain,
Herbert Spencer, and the majority of our best scientific guides
(however they differ in detail) agree in the common postulate that all
that man can know, and intelligibly reason about, are phenomena, and
the laws of these phenomena, 'that which doth appear.' There is,
however, a positivist 'religion,' which consists now in the worship of
phenomena, and again in homage paid to mystery, to the unknown and the
unknowable which lies beyond the known. Comte deified man and nature,
in their phenomenal aspects, without becoming pantheist; and the
instinct of worship though outlawed from his philosophy (which denies
the existence of its object), asserted itself within his nature--at
least in the second period of his intellectual career--and led him
not only to deify humanity, but to prescribe a minute and cumbrous
ritual, as puerile as it is inconsistent. It is true that worship is
philosophically an excrescence on his system. The advanced secularist
who disowns it is logically more consistent with the first principle
of positivism. To adore the _grande être_ as personified in woman is
as great a mimicry of worship as to offer homage to the law of
gravitation. Comte, says his acutest critic, 'forgot that the wine of
the real Presence was poured out, and adored the empty cup.' But we
may note in this latter graft upon his earlier system a testimony to
the operation of that very intuition which positivism disowns; its
uncouth form, when distorted by an alien philosophy, being a more
expressive witness to its irrepressible character.

Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, with some of our scientific teachers,
bids us bow down before the unknown and unknowable power which
subsists in the universe. The highest triumph of the human spirit,
according to him, is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, and then to
worship the dark abyss of the inscrutable beyond them. But there is
surely neither humility nor sanity in worshipping darkness, any more
than there would be in erecting an altar to chaos: and the advice
seems strange coming from those who claim to be the special teachers
of clear knowledge and comprehensible law. If we must at length erect
an altar at all, we must have some knowledge of the existence to whom
it is erected, and have some better reason for doing so than the blank
and bland confession that we have not the smallest idea of its nature!
Mr. Spencer undertakes to 'reconcile' the claims of science and
religion; and he finds the rallying-point to be the recognition of
mystery, into which all knowledge recedes. But if religion has any
function, and a reconciliation between her and science be possible,
the harmony cannot be effected by first denying the postulate from
which religion starts, and quietly sweeping her into the background of
the inconceivable, consigning her to the realm of the unknowable, and
then proclaiming that the conciliation is complete. This is to silence
or annihilate one of the two powers which the philosopher undertook to
reconcile. It is annexation accomplished by conquest, the cessation of
strife, effected by the destruction of one opposing force, not by an
armistice, or the ratification of articles of peace. Mr. Spencer does
not come between two combatants who are wounding each other
needlessly, and bid each put his sword into its sheath, for they are
brethren; but he turns round and (to his own satisfaction) slays one
of them, and then informs the other that the reconciliation is
effected.

We must therefore ask the positivist for his warrant, on the one hand,
in denying the existence of a world of substance, underneath the
fleeting phenomena of being, _out of which a revelation may emerge_,
apprehensible by man; and on the other, in denying to man positive
knowledge of the infinite as a substance. We must remind him that
infinite and finite, absolute and relative, substance and phenomena,
are terms of a relation: while we ask him for his warrant in
differentiating these terms, and proclaiming that the one set are
knowable and known, the others unknown and unknowable. He arbitrarily
singles out one of the two factors which together constitute a
relation, and are only known as complementary terms, and he bestows
upon it a spurious honour, by proclaiming that it alone is
intelligible, while he relegates the other term to the region of
darkness. We ask him on what ground he does so? and whether the law of
contrast does not render phenomena as unintelligible, without
substance, as substance without phenomena? Can we pronounce the one to
be known and the other unknown, merely because the former reaches us
through the five gateways of sense, and the latter through the avenue
of intuition? Now, no wise theist ever asserted that God was
phenomenally known. God is no phenomenon, but the noumenal essence
underlying all phenomena. We have admitted and contended that no study
of the laws of the universe can give us direct information as to the
first cause; for a first cause could never be revealed to the senses,
nor be an inference deduced from the data which sense supplies. The
assertion therefore, that nature (of which the physical sciences are
the interpretation) does not reveal God by its phenomena, is as
strongly asserted by the theist as by the positivist. It may reveal
his footprints, but we only know whose foot has left its mark on
nature when we have learned _from another source_ that He _is_. As
little, however, can the laws of nature discredit faith in a first
cause, which springs from a region at once beneath, above, and beyond
phenomena. And our theistic faith is not an _inference_; it is a
_postulate_: an axiomatic truth, affirmed on the report of that
intuition, of which the root is planted so firmly in the soil of
consciousness, that no form of the positivist philosophy can tear it
thence. Let science, therefore, march as it will, and where it will,
being hemmed in by the very laws of the universe which give rise to
it, and of which it is the exposition, it cannot interfere with or
encroach upon the theistic intuition. If there be a region behind
phenomena and their laws, accessible to knowledge or to philosophic
faith, no conclusion gathered from the scientific survey can touch it,
whether to discredit or attest.

The fundamental doctrine of both the schools of nescience is the
relativity of human knowledge, and that doctrine as taught by the
Scottish psychologists (and notably by Scotland's greatest
metaphysician since Hume, Sir William Hamilton) has been wrested out
of their hands, and turned against the theism they also advocate. Mr.
Spencer would exhibit them all as 'hoist with their own petard.' It is
necessary, therefore, to enquire whether this doctrine of relativity
favours a theory of nescience, or warrants a counter-doctrine of the
knowledge of the infinite, or is indifferent to both.

With us the relativity of knowledge is a first principle in
philosophy. But to affirm it, is merely to assert that all that is
known occupies a fixed relation to the knower. It is to affirm nothing
as to the character or contents of his knowledge. As regards the
objects known we further maintain that they are apprehended only in
their differences and contrasts. We know self only in its contrast
with what is not self, a particular portion of matter only in its
relation to other portions which surround and transcend it. So also
and for the same reason, with the finite and the infinite. The one is
not a positive notion, and the other negative; the one clear, and the
other obscure. Both are equally clear, both sharply defined, so far as
they are given us in relation. If the one notion suffers, the other
suffers with it. In short, if we discharge any notion from all
relation with its opposite or contrary, it ceases to be a notion at
all. The finite, if we take it alone, is as inconceivable as the
infinite, if we take it alone; phenomena by themselves are as
incogitable as substance by itself: and the relative as a notion cut
off from the absolute which antithetically bounds it, is not more
intelligible than the absolute as an essence absolved from all
relations. And thus the entire fabric of our knowledge being founded
on contrasts, and arising out of differences, involving in its every
datum another element hidden in the background, may be said to be a
vast double chain of relatives mutually complementary. It looks ever
in two directions, without and within, above and beneath, before and
after.

We maintain, therefore, that we have positive knowledge of the
infinite. Whosoever says that the infinite cannot be known contradicts
himself. For he must possess a notion of it before he can deny that he
has a positive knowledge of it, before he can predict aught regarding
it. And so he says he cannot know what he says, though in another
fashion, that he does know. It could never have come within the
horizon of hypothetical knowledge, never have become the subject of
discussion, unless positively (though inadequately) known; and thus
the infinite stands as the antithetic background of the finite. Sir
William Hamilton's and Dr. Mansel's doctrine of nescience, no less
than Mr. Spencer's, we regard as absolute intellectual suicide. It
implies that we have no knowledge of that which we are compelled to
conceive in order to know that it is unknowable. We could not compare
the two notions, if the one were unthinkable. For if all knowledge is
a relation, in each act of knowing I must know both the terms related.
The one term causes us no difficulty, being admitted on both sides.
But the other which so perplexes our teachers of nescience, is, it
must be owned, as to its contents a somewhat vague residuum. It is
without an outline. It is not given us with the luminous clearness
that its correlative is given. Nevertheless, it is a real term in a
real relation. The moment we proceed to analyse our consciousness of
the relative, we find it as the penumbra of the notion, its shadowy
complement. We may never obtain more than a vague, and what we might
call a moonlight view of it: nevertheless behold it we do; apprehend
it we must.

But it is objected that as human knowledge is always finite, we can
never have a positive apprehension of an infinite object; that as the
subject of knowledge is necessarily finite, its object must be the
same. Let us sift this objection.

I may know an object in itself as related to me the knower, or I may
know it in its relation to other objects also known by me the knower.
But in both and in all cases, knowledge is limited by the power of the
knower, therefore it is always finite knowledge. But it may be finite
knowledge of an infinite object, incomplete knowledge of a complete
object, partial knowledge of a transcendent object. The boundary or
fence may be within the faculty of the knower, while the object he
imperfectly grasps may not only be infinite, but be known to transcend
his faculties in the very act of conscious knowledge. For example, I
may know that a line is infinite while I have only a finite knowledge
of the points along which that line extends. And similarly my
knowledge of the Infinite Mind is partial and incomplete, but it is
clear and defined. It is definite knowledge of an indefinite object.
We may have a partial knowledge not only of a part, but of the whole.
Thus, I have a partial knowledge of a circle, because I know only a
few of its properties; but it is not to a part of the circle that my
partial knowledge extends, but to the whole which I know in part. In
like manner as the Infinite Object has no parts, it is not of a
portion of His being that we possess a partial knowledge, but of the
whole. We know Him as we know the circle, inadequately yet directly,
immediately, though in part. He is dark to us by excess of light.
Thus, although our knowledge of the infinite may be _vivified_, it is
not really _enlarged_ by goading our thought to wider and wider
imaginings, or spurring our faculties onwards over areas of space, or
intervals of time. That knowledge is directly revealed while we are
apprehending any finite object, as its correlative and complementary
antithesis.

Again it is said that to know the infinite is to know the sum of all
reality, and as that would include the universe and its source
together, it must necessarily include on the one hand the knower along
with his knowledge, and on the other all the possibilities of
existence. The possibility of our knowing the Infinite Being as
distinct from the universe is denied, since infinite existence is said
to be coextensive with the whole universe of things. But that the
source of the universe must necessarily exhaust existence and contain
within himself all actual being is a mere theoretic assumption. The
presence of the finite does not limit the infinite as if the area of
the latter were contracted by so much of the former as exists within
it. For the relation of the infinite being to the finite is not
similar to the relation between infinite space and a segment of it. It
is true that so much of finite space is so much cut out of the whole
area of infinite space--though, if the remainder is infinite, the
portion removed will not really limit it. But as our intuition of the
infinite has no resemblance to our knowledge of space, we believe that
the relations which their respective objects sustain have no affinity
with each other. The intuition of God is a purely spiritual
revelation, informing us not of the quantity but of the quality of the
supreme being in the universe. And to affirm that the finite spirit of
man standing in a fixed relation to the infinite spirit of God limits
it, by virtue of that relation, is covertly to introduce a spatial
concept into a region to which it is utterly foreign, and which it has
no right to enter.[16]

We therefore maintain, in opposition to the teachers of nescience,
that a positive knowledge of the Infinite is competent to man, because
involved in his very consciousness of the finite. And when
psychologically analysed, this intuition explains and vindicates
itself.

But there is another aspect, no less important, in which it may be
regarded. To say that the infinite is wholly inscrutable by man, is to
limit not man's faculty only, but the possibilities of the divine
nature itself. If God cannot unveil himself to man through the
openings of those clouds which ordinarily conceal His presence, can
His resources be illimitable, can He be the infinitely perfect? It is
said, on the one hand, that the unknown Force reveals itself in the
laws of nature, but cannot disclose its essence; and, on the other,
that the infinite being reveals His handiwork, from which He permits
us to infer His existence, but cannot reveal Himself. Such assertions
are either subtle instances of verbal jugglery or manifest
contradictions in terms. All revelation of whatever kind, presupposes
some knowledge of the revealer. That knowledge may be imparted the
moment the revelation is made, or prior to it, and from an independent
source; but no revelation could be made, were the being to whom it was
addressed ignorant of the source whence it came. Is there really any
special difficulty in supposing that the infinite intelligence can
directly disclose His nature to a creature fashioned in His image, the
disclosure quickening the latent power of intuition, which, thus
touched from above, springs forth to meet its source and object?

The question between the theist and the positivist is brought to its
real issue when the latter is forced to recognise that the God of
theism is no inference from phenomena, but if we may so speak, a
_postulate of intuition_. And hence it is so necessary to concede
frankly the failure of the teleological argument from final causes, as
well as the ontological argument from the necessary notions of the
intellect. We not only admit, we are forward to proclaim that by
inductive science we can never rise higher than phenomena; and hence
at the end of our researches we should be no nearer God than at the
outset. But though we cannot reach Him by induction, we may do so
before we begin our induction, by simply giving the intuition of the
soul free scope to rise towards its source. And to dislodge the theist
from his position, his opponent must succeed in proving that this
intuition, whose root springs from a region beneath phenomena, and
which in its flight outsoars phenomena, is as baseless and
unauthenticated as a dream.

There are two principles, one of them metaphysical, and the other
scientific, which are helpful at this point in our inquiry. These are
the principle of causality, and the doctrine of the correlation of
forces, or the conservation of energy. We cannot discuss them at any
length, but we shall briefly state their nature, and their relation to
the theistic intuition.

The phenomena of nature (using that term in its widest sense) are not
only a series of sequences, they are also the revelation of a
mysterious Power or living Force. All that we perceive by the senses,
and, inductively register in nature, is a series of phenomena, of
which the laws of nature are the generalized expression and
interpretation. But every change is a revelation not only of
succession, but of causal power. No matter where we take our stand
along the line of sequence, mental or material, always and at every
point this conviction is flashed in upon the mind, 'there is a hidden
Power behind.' But we instinctively ask, 'what is this power or force
determining the changes of the universe?' Is it material or spiritual?
Can the force which moves the particles of matter be material? We do
not perceive it by the senses, which take note only of the modified
phenomena of matter. It is neither visible, nor audible, nor tangible.
It is invisible; must we not therefore believe it to be incorporeal?
We cannot reach it by analysis. We conclude that it is not physical
but hyper-physical, not natural but supranatural. We have an
intellectual intuition of it. It announces its presence in every
change that occurs, but it nowhere shows its face as a material
entity. It is a mystic agency endlessly revealing its existence,
everywhere concealing its source. We watch its evolutions, but it
escapes our scrutiny; we try to detain it, and we find that it is
gone; yet it reappears in the next thing we examine, and in the very
phenomena of our search for it; the agency is manifest, but it is the
Agent we wish to discover. Must it be, like the sangreal of mediæval
legend, sought for in many lands, but nowhere found by any wanderer in
quest of it?

Before attempting an answer, we shall state the scientific principle
referred to, which is entitled to rank as one of the greatest of
modern discoveries. All the forms of force are convertible amongst
themselves. They are all ultimately identical, and are endlessly
passing and repassing into each other: the mechanical, the chemical,
the vital, are all one. 'The many' _are_ 'the one,' its varying
phrases, its protean raiment. In short, there is but a single supreme
force, ubiquitous and plastic, the fountain of all change. It now
evolves itself in heat, now masks itself in light, reveals itself in
electricity, or sleeps in the law of gravitation: one solitary pulse
within Nature's vast machine, and behind the barrier of her laws. This
force, thus endlessly changing, is neither diminished nor replenished;
it is not added to, nor subtracted from; it is perennial, and is its
own conservator. It is not synthesis, but analysis that has resolved
it into unity. But can synthesis combine its manifold phases under one
regulative notion? In realizing its general character we cannot
discharge from our minds in turn all the known features of particular
forces, so as to leave a vague resultant common to all, yet especially
identified with none. The diverse types must have an _archetype_. What
is that archetype?

It seems to us self-evident that we must seek for it, not in nature,
but in man; not in the lower plane of the cosmical forces, but in the
human _will_, the root of our personality. Comte begins with the
lowermost grade of force (to wit, the mechanical), and ascends with
it, bringing all the finer and more subtle forms under its sway, and
interpreting the higher by the lower. We, on the contrary, begin with
the highest known type, that which lies nearest ourselves, with which
we are earliest acquainted, and whence we derive our notion of force
beyond ourselves; and we descend with it as a light to guide our
footsteps amongst the lower. This we hold to be the correct, to be
indeed the only admissible philosophical procedure. If it is only
through the consciousness of force within ourselves that we have any
intelligible notion of it in nature (and are thus first initiated into
the idea), we must come back to the will for an explanation of what
the one force external to us is. Our own personality supplies us with
the archetype of which we are in search. We thus throw the plank
across the chasm between man and nature; we interpret the latter by
the former (not the reverse); and the discovery of the correlation of
forces, and the conservation of energy, becomes the scientific
equivalent of the doctrine of philosophical theology, that one supreme
Will pervades the universe, that in nature lives and moves and has
its being.

If we can vindicate this procedure, and prove our right to interpret
the forces, if not the phenomena of nature, as the outcome of a living
will, the energy of a nature like our own, our goal is reached. But,
say the Comtists, that is a mere imagination of theology, the creation
of a superstitious mind, 'transcendant audacity,' 'a form of the
mind's own throwing,' just as much as the teleological explanation of
nature. It has been spoken of as presumptuous, as well as fanciful,
betokening a lack of humility and philosophic caution; it being sheer
egotism to interpret nature by what we are, and a return to the
Protagorean doctrine that 'man is the measure of all things.' In
reply, we give only hints and suggestions, for the region is high, and
the atmosphere rarefied.

In the first place, it is to be observed that we do not take one class
of phenomena to explain the inner nature of another class; the
phenomena of will to explain, say those of electricity, in outward
nature; for in that case we might as well, with just as much reason
and plausibility, with just as much authority, take the latter class
of phenomena to explain the former; and we should learn quite as much,
that is to say, we should learn nothing at all. But we take a certain
special _noumenal_ force, one that is transcendant but revealed in our
innermost life and consciousness, in the will's _autocracy_, and by
the help and suggestion of this known force we explain (not the
phenomena of Nature nor her laws), but the darker, the unknown
noumenal Force, the pulse of nature.

In the next place, it is also to be observed that as the human will,
while noumenally free, is phenomenally under law and governed most
rigidly by motives, so the force which we interpret as the expression
of personal will in nature, acts in perfect conformity to law. The
laws of nature are the expression of its bondage. The minor scattered
forces, which may be spoken of as the messengers and servitors of the
supreme will, are no more fitful but no less capricious than is the
human will, in which the causal nexus is not broken while it remains
free. The supernatural reveals itself in an orderly fashion through
the natural. Its will is expressed by law.

In the third place, so far as bridging the chasm between the two
orders of phenomena, it is not accomplished by the poetic intuition (to
which we shall immediately refer), but by the human intellect, it
seems legitimated by _analogy_. In our inductive interpretation of
nature we perceive resemblances, and infer a likeness. 'Analogy is the
soul of induction.' If, therefore, it be an illicit act of the reason
which ventures to trace a parallel between nature and man, and
interpret the former by the latter, how fares it with the foundations
of human knowledge, and with the pillars of science herself? Is not
all physical science the rational interpretation of nature? If we may
not read the meaning of the great central force in the light of that
force which we carry in the will, how can we warrantably interpret the
laws of nature, in the light of that which we carry in the intellect?
Are we not left in uncertainty as to the character of the entire
fabric of our knowledge? The oracle is altogether dumb. If the way
which seems to lead from the interior of the human will into the
temple of outward nature be really a _cul-de-sac_, what warrant have
we for opening a door on the other side, and walking down the avenues
of positive science, imagining that in these pathways we shall find
the only key to nature? To bring the analogy into effect, let us take
two instances: the force with which I discharge a projectile and the
force of gravitation. The former proceeds from the will, which is the
originating power, though mechanical and physiological causes
intervene. Since, therefore, similar effects have similar or
resembling causes, it is a strictly analogical inference that as the
effects correspond, the causes will resemble each other, and the
essential part of the correspondence will not consist in the apparatus
used (the phenomena), but in the will underlying, which is
noumenal.[17]

In the fourth place, as the force of the will is both higher and
better known than the mechanical, chemical, and vital forces of
nature, we are warranted in interpreting the lower by the higher, and
not in reducing the higher to the level of the lower. As we ascend in
nature from the lowest vital forms to the highest type of
organization, we find that the higher is not only an advance upon the
lower, but that it _includes_ it; and no naturalist would describe a
vertebrated animal by that which it held in common with the mollusca.
That in which it differs from the types beneath it is held to be its
distinctive and descriptive feature. When, therefore, we reach man at
the top of the scale, separated by a distinct endowment from the
classes beneath him, yet conserving all their main characteristics in
his nature, and describe him not by what he has in common with the
lower animals, but by that in which he differs from them, we act on
the principle of selecting the highest feature we can find, and taking
it as our guide. And similarly when we are in search of the Supreme
Principle of the universe, the _causa causarum_, we interpret it by
the highest features in human nature, because that nature is the
highest with which we are experimentally acquainted. And we may
validly throw the burden of proof upon the positivist, and ask why the
great cosmical force that rules in nature should be radically
different from the volitional force which is the root of our
personality? Reverting again to the force of gravitation, why should
it not be the outcome in nature of a Will vaster than man's,
resembling, yet transcending it? To what does that force amount? The
phenomenalist cannot arrest our inquiry by simply drawing the veil of
nescience over it. He cannot slip a lid over the end of our telescope
turned skyward by merely exclaiming 'mystery of mysteries, all is
mystery.' And it seems to us that we must either divest the word
gravitation of all intelligible meaning, or while perceiving the
unlikeness at a glance, we must 'invest it with a human or
_quasi-human_ vitality.'

_Quasi_, for again in the fifth place, this all-pervasive protean
force assumes many a phase which is exceedingly unlike the operations
of a personal power. In many of her moods, Nature has the countenance
of the sphinx. She is sublimely silent as to her inmost essence. Cold,
stern, inflexible, neutral, taciturn, apathetic--all these terms seem
applicable to her at times, as we gaze across the chasm between man
and the universe. But the regulative idea, which we find in the
analogy of the human will, is not to be regarded as exhaustive or
exclusive of other notions which may unite with it. The personal force
may at the same time be more than personal. Its highest quality
becomes to us what we have called its regulative idea; but it contains
elements within the infinite compass of its nature, different from
those features of which we find the mirror in ourselves.[18] It is
sufficient if we know that the _causa causarum_, the all-pervading
life of the universe, can in any sense be described as personal, that
we can speak of 'the soul of nature,' without being the dupes of a
fanciful analogy, dealing merely with figure and hyperbole. Be it
admitted by every theist that there are myriad facets which the subtle
life of nature may present to the beholder. We not only may, we must
think of it as

      'He, they, one, all, within, without,
      The power in darkness which we guess.'

It reveals itself to us now as personal, awakening and responding to
the instinct of worship, calling forth our wonder and reverence, with
the hunger and the thirst of the human spirit in rising to its source;
now it turns its cold, impassive, silent face towards us; and as we
feel its immeasurable transcendency we are warned against the error of
construing it into a mere exaggeration of ourselves. We thus learn on
the one hand, the indefinite unlikeness between man and the Supreme
Spirit of the universe, and on the other their positive likeness or
kindredness. We escape the prevailing error of mediævalism, and the
equally fatal error of the modern scientific spirit. The tendency of
the schoolmen was to interpret all the laws of nature in the light of
_à priori_ notions of the mind. They did not search laboriously for
her own meaning, and wait patiently for her revelations; but distorted
nature by _outré_ hypotheses fetched altogether from within. It is,
however, an equal if not a greater onesidedness to do exactly the
reverse; to interpret the human spirit in the light of external nature
and organic law. The apotheosis of man was at least no worse--(we
think it rather better)--than making a fetish of nature, and
explaining the sublime mysteries of the human will by the phenomena of
molecular action. We therefore maintain that amid the many possible
manifestations of the infinite Life, they may be reduced to two
primary forms, the one impersonal and the other personal. God is
infinitely unlike the creature. He is also the archetype of which we
are the type. And we have less need to be philosophically warned
against the possible caricature of the latter doctrine (of which the
teachers of nescience remind us), than to be cautioned against the
partial truth of the former, which, in isolation, may so easily drift
into exaggeration and a lie.

The intellectual intuition of the infinite, which we have endeavoured
to vindicate, so far attests this correspondence; but the inspired
utterance of the Poet in reference to the soul of nature, no less
bears it witness. The identity or affinity of the force within him and
the forces without, is felt by the poet when the speculative thinker
perceives it not. He cannot analyse into its constituent elements the
mystic meaning of the universe which is flashed into his soul in
moments of glowing inspiration, as the chemist analyses his earths in
a crucible. But he is the

      'Mighty prophet, seer blest,
      With whom these truths do rest,
      Which we are toiling all our years to find
      In darkness lost.'

And he may be able to help the merely scientific explorer out of that
abyss of mystery in which he is speculatively lost, and to save him
from erecting an altar to 'the unknown God.' While his soul, in 'a
wise passiveness,' lies open to the visitations of the supernatural,
he sees a vision, and he hears a voice, of which he can give no
scientific explanation, but which announces to him the 'open secret.'

Perhaps the finest description of the characteristics of the soul's
intuitions is that given by Lowell, 'the prevailing poet' of America.
He writes--

      'As blind nestlings, unafraid,
      Stretch up wide-mouthed to every shade,
      By which their downy dream is stirred,
      Taking it for the mother-bird;
      So, when God's shadow, which is light,
      My wakening instincts falls across,
      Silent as sunbeams over moss,
      _In my heart's-nest half-conscious things
      Stir with a helpless sense of wings,
      Lift themselves up_, and tremble long
      With premonitions sweet of song.'

The poet may thus throw the plank for us where the psychologist or
metaphysician fails. He 'sees into the life of things.' His insight,
which comes and goes in flashes marvellous but fugitive, which dart
across the world and bring back this report of correspondence,
illumines every realm of nature. He tells us that it is 'haunted for
ever by the Eternal Mind.' He finds the whole temple of nature
exquisitely filled with symbols of his own deepest thought. She is a
storehouse of imagery expressing the subtlest gradations of his
feeling. Wherever he moves he finds that the forms and the forces
around him are an interpretation of what he _is_. They are the
symbolic language of his deepest thoughts and highest aspirations,
while his innermost life again interprets them. He explains the inner
world in terms of the outer, and the outward in terms of the inward.
In the grand vocation of the poet, we know of nothing grander than his
function to mediate between the baffled ontologist and the man of
science. He is a reconciler who presents a common truth which those
on either side may recognise, and the recognition of which may draw
them together.

This vast and varied region of our complex nature, the æsthetic or
poetic, thus comes to the aid of our theology. The great imaginative
poets, in their delineations of man and nature, do not idealise; they
_see_: or they see before they idealise. Who will affirm that
Wordsworth's 'inward eye'--by the use and cultivation of which he
became the greatest of all interpreters of the symbolism of nature--in
seeing visions, saw but the ghostly forms of his own imagination, and
was not in contact with _real existence_? Are his 'spiritual
presences' as unreal as the fawns and dryads of polytheistic legend?
And was not even the early personification of nature a cruder
testimony in the same direction,--the belief in these deities of the
wood and hill and stream being a dumb homage by the savage mind to a
divinity in nature kindred to man? Is the poet, then, _a seer_,[19] or
only the elaborator of fancies?--the mere creator of ideal shapes, or
the discerner of real existence? He tells us that nature is a luminous
veil, behind which visions are to be seen, and voices heard; that
sometimes, in a moment, he has come upon the footprints of the
supernatural; and that, in such moments, he is in contact with a
reality, which he calls 'the soul of the world.' Why should he call it
a _soul_, if he has no intuition of its analogy and correspondence
with his own nature? And what though he speaks continually in the
plural, and tells us of the myriad 'presences,' as the scientific
explorer speaks of manifold 'forces?' What though he lapses into a
semipolytheist interpretation of nature? It is but the sign of a
weight of inspiration too vast for one utterance. It indicates that
his feeling of the central life has broken up the diversity; that
nature's great soul--_the_ Presence--cannot reveal itself at once as
all-in-all and all inclusive; within the boundaries of the finite
mind. In its very wealth it reveals itself as manifold. But as the
poet and the philosopher may combine the manifold in the unity of
their own mind, why not also in the unity of the object revealing
itself to them?

It is to be observed, however, that the object which the poet's
insight attests and reveals, is not phenomenal, but substantial.
Hence no question arises as to its origin. It is only that which
enters on the theatre of phenomenal existence that demands a further
explanation. The entrance and the exit of phenomena are explained,
when we refer them to the substance out of which they have emerged,
and to which they return. But we do not ask for the origin of
substance, any more than for the origin of space, time, or number.

There is still another branch of the theistic evidence from intuition.
It is the instinct of worship. Our space admits of but a sentence
regarding it. It is seen in the mere uprise of the soul, spontaneously
doing homage to a higher than itself; in the sense of dependence, felt
by all men who 'know themselves;' in the need which the worshipper
feels of approaching One who is higher and holier than himself, and in
whom all perfection resides, who is recognisable by him, and is
interested in his state; in the workings of the filial instinct
seeking its source, and, as said St. Augustine, 'restless till it
rests in Thee;' in the suffrage of the heart rising amid the miseries
of its lot, and even against the surmises of the intellect, to the
'Rock that is higher than it;' in the soul's aspirations--its thirst
for the ideal, while it feels the necessity of an absolute centre or
ultimate standard of truth, beauty, and goodness; and even in the
passionate longings of the mystic to reach an utterly transcendent
good. All these things bear witness to an _instinct_, working often in
the dark, but always seeking its source. They are almost universal,
and they are certainly ineradicable. They show how deeply the roots of
the theistic faith are planted in the soil of the moral consciousness.
We cannot, however, pursue these several lines of proof in detail.
They form a fitting link of connection with the more strictly ethical
evidence, on which we must add a few paragraphs.

The Kantian argument is more intricate and much less satisfactory than
the common evidence from the phenomena of conscience itself. It is
founded on the moral law, with its 'categorical imperative,' asserting
that

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