sooner is it felt that these topics require abstinence from indulgence than contrivances are at hand to take duty out of the domain of morality, and transfer it to the observance of ecclesiastical action and the payment of a money tribute. To the priest meanwhile is relegated the arena of speculative dogma, and a pretty thing he makes of it. It is now his turn to mount the rostrum. He assures the people that by this felicitous arrangement they have made the best of both worlds; and the people like to believe it, for their favourite enjoyments and occupations are in no way interfered with; while even the very forms and ceremonies which are to constitute their passport to eternal life are so skilfully adapted to domestic and social instincts as to become mere episodes in fashionable life. Thus it comes to pass, as Mr. Froude has recently observed, "Religion, which ought to have been a restraint, becomes a fresh instrument of evil; to the imaginative and the weak, a contemptible superstition; to the educated, a mockery; to knaves and hypocrites, a cloke of iniquity; to all alike, to those who suffer and to those who seem to profit by it, a lie so palpable as to be worse than atheism itself."-[Calvinism. An address delivered before the University of St. Andrews, p. 17.] It is in full accordance with utterances such as this that an English Cathedral Canon has recently been exposing his own Order by Essays bearing the following titles, "Modern Christianity a Civilised Heathenism," and "Everlasting Punishment. Do our Clergy believe in it?" Such is the result of the reign of priests and the practice of human proxy. Reader,-our one great and glorious Proxy, who has passed into the heavens, is also our Exemplar. If we follow him, his Spirit will infallibly guide us into all truth. J. WAYLEN.

FAITH AND HOPE.

OD'S Lamb-was on the altar laid!
God's love declares my ransom paid!

And now within the veil with God
The Lamb has entered with his blood.

The book of life lies open there
With names of sinners crimsoned o'er :
With tints of earth? Nay! blood Divine !
And underneath the blood lies mine.

Now looking upward without fear
Hope often whispers Christ is near;
And when the sunlight gilds a cloud
I ask, "Does it my Saviour shroud?”
And thus I wait and watch each day :-
Would watching dream my nights away;
Impatient for his nearer care,

But certain, mercy keeps him there.

H. BURNETT.

UNCONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY.

WHAT satisfactory proof-if any-can be adduced, in support of the popular assumption that man is, essentially and by creation, an immortal being? The object of the following paper is to give a concise, candid, and yet tolerably comprehensive answer to this profoundly interesting and important question, a question which has ever seemed to us to underlie the whole controversy on "Conditional Immortality" in its scriptural aspect. And we have been the rather led to take it up at the present time, by observing that neither at the recent Conference on Conditional Immortality at the Cannon Street Hotel, nor in some of the publications on the general question which have of late issued from the press, such as Dr. Petavel's excellent little volume, "The Struggle for Eternal Life," and the very candid and judicious pamphlet on "Everlasting Punishment" by Mr. J. J. Hobbs, of Blandford, has this all-important question received more than very cursory notice.

We do not hesitate to call it an all-important question, because we must maintain and have ever done so since this subject first engaged our attention that until it is answered, neither a true psychology nor a scriptural eschatology can possibly be constructed. We cannot even admit that we are quite prepared to say, with Mr. Minton, that "we are willing to rest our whole cause on the natural prima facie meanings of the words, life' and 'death,' immortality' and destruction,' as found in those inspired Scriptures to which we make our final appeal, at least till this previous question has been settled. For if it could be demonstrated, either from reason or from Scripture, that man is, essentially and by creation, an immortal being; then, we apprehend, we may be constrained to interpret these and similar words and phrases in a non-natural, or, shall we say, in a metaphorical and spiritual sense; but if, on the other hand, as we contend and shall endeavour to show, no such proof can be adduced, then assuredly we are not only at liberty but bound to understand them in their natural and prima facie meanings.

The question, then, is fundamental; and as it is finally determined, so, as it seems to us, must--alike for the individual Christian and for Christendom-be the whole controversy. But such being the case, it is surely a most reasonable and reverent conclusion, that if man is naturally and unconditionally immortal,-that is, destined to continue in conscious .existence as long as God himself,-clear and sufficient evidence of the momentous fact will have been vouchsafed by a just and gracious Creator to the beings whom he has, of his own will, dowered with so awful andas events have proved-so disastrous a gift. Nay, we do not hesitate to say, that having regard to the unspeakable importance of the knowledge of such a fact to those to whom it is supposed to relate, and the tremendous issues involved in it, there rests a moral obligation on the Most High to supply the most ample evidence, not to say demonstrative proof, thereof. Again, then, we ask,-Is any such evidence to be found? The sources from whence it might conceivably be drawn are four, and only four, in number: (1.) Science; (2.) Reason; (3.) Inspiration, and (4.) ScripLet us briefly interrogate these oracles in their order.

ture.

. Speech at Cannon Street Conference.

I. SCIENCE. That the testimony of this great ruling power of the modern world, of which it may be said with a deeper emphasis than that of Job, "its eye seeth every precious thing, and that which is hid bringeth it forth to light," is altogether adverse not only to the idea of an absolutely eternal existence, but even, so far as its proper province extends, to the hope and expectation of any existence whatever for man after death, will be admitted by those who are at all acquainted with its latest conclusions in the department of biology: the great doctrine of Evolution, now established on so vast an induction of the most varied phenomena that he who rejects it, as at least a provisional hypothesis, does little more than display either his ignorance of the subject or his theological prejudice,*- having dealt a death-blow to all hopes of human immortality not resting on the operation of spiritual laws.

"The animal races are produced by a generative process of which every step is wonderful, but in which there is no ascertainable distinction between the vital and organic elements of their constitution. In each creature produced under these processes there is a living germ which has power to build up the organisation with all its members, faculties, and mental or sensitive capacities. No one can separate even in thought the life from the organism in which it coheres. The faculty is the effect of the development. When the organism dissolves, the life dissolves with it.

"Mankind, say these biologists, is produced by processes not merely analogous but identical. There is absolutely no difference, as an ancient philosopher observed, between the process through which is born the wild ass's colt,' and that by which man is brought forth upon the earth. What we call mind in man is created under universal laws of the brain-producing energy of nature. We trace up sensation, instinct, thought, developed in constant connection with nervous and cerebral systems, from the lowest to the highest organisms. There is steady progress in the organisation, but in all cases alike the productive process is one. With brain and ganglia there is mind, without them none. The laws which govern the hereditary transmission of qualities and powers are the same for all. If a common mode of origination may furnish any indication of destiny, comparative physiology holds out no hope of survival for the human intelligence in that death, common to animals and mankind, which seems to swallow up organism and faculty in one abyss of destruction."†

Nor is this negative evidence by any means confined to the department of comparative physiology; the wider study of the physical universe does but deepen and confirm it; for not only man himself, but the whole material system of which he forms a part, seems destined to

44

The well-known American preacher, Dr. Talmage,-who will hardly be accused of being too liberal in his theological opinions,-recently wrote in his own paper: It is by no means impossible that Evolution may take its place as a great scientific fact; it is beyond all question that there is no line in the Bible against it, nor any truth embodied in it which the Christian may not gratefully accept and cherish."

:

"Life in Christ," by the Rev. Edward White, p. 7 by far the most profound, exhaustive and scholarly work which this controversy has yet produced. It is the book par excellence on the whole subject.

ultimate destruction. The distinguished authors of that very remarkable book, "The Unseen Universe," Christians as well as philosophers, thus write" The tendency of heat is towards equalisation; heat is par excellence the communist of our universe, and it will, no doubt, ultimately bring the system to an end. This universe may in truth be compared to a vast heat engine. The sun is the furnace or source of hightemperature heat of our system, just as the stars are for other systems, and the energy which is essential to our existence is derived from the heat which the sun radiates, and represents only a small portion of that heat. But while the sun thus supplies us with energy he is himself getting colder, and must ultimately, by means of radiation into space, part with the life-sustaining power which he at present possesses. Besides the cooling of the sun we must also suppose that owing to something analogous to ethereal friction the earth and the other planets of our system will at length be engulfed in his mass. In each such case there will be, as the result of the collision, the conversion of visible energy into heat, and a partial and temporary restoration of the power of the sun. At length, however, this process will have come to an end. . . . Not much further need we dilate on this. It is absolutely certain that life, so far as it is physical, depends essentially upon transformation of energy; it is also absolutely certain that age after age the possibility of such transformation is becoming less and less; and, so far as we yet know, the final state of the present universe must be an aggregation (into one mass) of all the matter it contains, i.e. the potential energy gone, and a practically useless state of kinetic energy, i.e. uniform temperature throughout that mass.

"The study of the necessary future has prepared us for an inquiry into the long remote past. Just as the present discrete stellar systems must finally come together, so the materials which now form them must have originally been widely separate. Our modern knowledge enables us to look back with almost certitude to the time when there was nothing but gravitating matter and its potential energy throughout the expanse of space-ready, as slight local differences of distribution predisposed it, to break up into portions, each converging to one or more nuclei of its own, and thus forming in time separate solar or stellar systems. We have thus reached the beginning as well as the end of the present visible universe, and have come to the conclusion that it began in time and will in time come to an end. IMMORTALITY IS THEREFORE IMPOSSIBLE IN SUCH A UNIVERSE.

Such is the last word of science, and it is a word of doom. Science brings man to the grave, and having brought him there it can explain to us the chemical laws by which the organism-apart from which it knows nothing either of consciousness or personality-is sooner or later broken up and utterly dissolved: but it has no instruments delicate enough to detect a spiritual presence, if such there be; no light powerful enough to penetrate the solid darkness which lies beyond.

II. And this darkness, absolute on the physical side, has cast its awful shadow over the metaphysical region also, and for ever eclipsed those glimmering and uncertain lights by which men long endeavoured

to grope their way to the hope of immortality. For foremost among the arguments for immortality which REASON has been supposed to supply, stands that derived from the assumed simplicity and immateriality of the soul or principle of thought. This argument, adduced by Bishop Butler in his celebrated work, "The Analogy of Religion," and elaborated by Samuel Drew in his well known treatise, is now, by the confession of Dr. Angus, "generally abandoned as inconclusive." And well it may be; for apart from the fact that it involves a conception of "soul" or " spirit" of which neither the Scriptures nor the older philosophies know anything; which is not only incapable of proof but opposed to such evidence as comparative physiology can afford, and is. manifestly a mere Deus ex machina invented for the purpose it is supposed to serve ;† Kant showed, long ago, that even if this immateriality of the human soul could be demonstrated, its immortality would not necessarily follow, since though "the soul could not perish by any diminution of its extensive quality, the argument from its simplicity did not exclude the possibility of its extinction through the gradual weakening of its forces and the successive relaxation of its intensive quantity." In other words, though the soul could not "melt like a streak of morning cloud into the infinite azure of the past," there would yet be nothing to prevent its dying like a vision of the night in the unconsciousness of a deeper slumber. Moreover, reason itself might. surely teach us that nothing which has had a beginning can necessarily be unending. Spiritual or ethereal, if the soul began to be, so it mayperhaps must-cease to be, save by the will of God: necessary existence being predicable of One only. This ought," it has been well said, "to be so obvious as to convince us that there must be a fallacy, whether we can detect it or not, in all such attempts to prove the immortality of the creature."

But this argument lies open to another objection which is at once very obvious and practically conclusive. The best authorities in comparative psychology are now sufficiently agreed that the mind of animals differs from the human mind not in quality but only in quantity; and it is impossible candidly to read such books as Watson's "Reasoning Power in Animals," and Wood's "Man and Beast, Here and Hereafter," as well as some very remarkable articles which have recently appeared in the "Quarterly Journal of Science," without being convinced that powers of reason, and even of conscience, are sometimes manifested by the nobler animals, such as the dog, the horse, and the elephant, in an astonishing manner. Hence, as Mr. White truly observes, "A few misquoted texts of Scripture can no longer avail to conceal the fact that a science of comparative psychology has sprung up, which shatters the metaphysical arguments on which hitherto theologians have rested their hope of life eternal. For if man's prospects in the future depend on the possession

*Notes on Butler's Analogy. R. T. S.

↑ KNAPP, in his "Christian Theology" writes:-"The fine-spun theories of immateriality were never resorted to by theologians to prove the immortality of the soul, or ascribed by them to the Bible, until Hobbes, Toland, De la Mettrie, and other materialists, had so perverted the doctrine of materialism as to deduce from it the destructibility of the soul, or its annihilation at the death of the body."