how far these conclusions are warranted. That would be a very interesting and important inquiry. But it is not the task which I have now in hand. Besides, in a volume which has been somewhat widely read and discussed, I have considered whether the achievements of Modern Thought are, in truth, so incompatible as is often alleged with the teachings of Ancient Religion, and, in particular, with the doctrines of Christianity as taught by the Catholic Church. I am far from saying that the replies to specific objections which satisfy me do not admit of plausible rejoinders. Even if they did not, it does not follow that others would find them conclusive. There are, as Hume tells us, 'arguments which admit of no answer and produce no conviction.' And I cannot conceal from myself that there is a great and growing multitude of cultivated and virtuous men and women, earnestly desirous to follow truth, who, in the increased capacities for doubting which this new age confers, are unable-honestly unable to use the old religious symbols. Yet they feel acutely 'that unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man.' They suffer from what George Sand called 'the remorse of religion and the recklessness of thinking.' It is of no avail to say to them, with a vigorous disputant of the present day: A man who cannot occupy his mind with love, friendship, ambition, science, literature, art, politics, trade, and a thousand other matters, must be a poor kind of creature.' This truculent dictum-happily an extra-judicial utterance of the learned judge who has delivered himself of it-does not in the least touch them. They feel that it is as though a deaf man should revile the portentous folly of all who are moved with concord of sweet sounds: as though a blind man should proscribe the pictorial art as idle daubing. They feel that the exact contrary is true; that a man who can wholly occupy his mind with such things -even though he put money in his purse thereby-must be 'a poor kind of creature;' because precisely in proportion to our elevation in the scale of being is our inability to appease with finite husks the infinite hunger that is in us. To such I especially address myself in what I am about to write. I shall endeavour to put myself in their place, to see with their eyes, to feel with their sentiments. I say to them, Setting aside altogether the stock arguments—if I may so speak-usually relied upon by Christian apologists, prescinding from the evidences' usually adduced in favour of what is called 'revealed' religion—arguments and evidences which you ex hypothesi find insufficient-let us consider what is left of Christianity. Does it necessarily collapse without these props? Or do its essential verities rest upon a basis of adamant, against which the dynamite of physicists, historians, and critics is powerless?

Now what do we mean by Christianity? I suppose we may say with Dr. Johnson that it means the religion of Christians. But there are so many kinds of Christians! Not to speak of the

ephemeral sects which every day brings forth in England and America:

Unfinished things, one knows not what to call,
Their generation's so equivocal!

-there are, let us say, Catholic Christians, Greek Christians, Anglican Christians, there are Nestorians and Monophysites, Wesleyan Methodists, and Congregationalists. What have all these in common? They have this, at all events, in common with one another, and with most other varieties of the Christian religion,-that they regard baptism as a solemn initiation into Christianity--baptism administered, according to Christ's injunction, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Christianity is primarily Theism. It is, in its simplest reduction, the doctrine concerning God summed up in the baptismal formula the most ancient and, in a sense, the most authoritative, of all its formulas-the acceptance of which has, from the first, been required as a condition of admission into the Christian Society. Let us consider then, in the first place, what is left of Christian Theism.

It cannot be denied that, in the present day, Theism is very widely called in question. I say advisedly called in question.' There are, of course, those who proclaim dogmatically, 'There is no God.' But they are found usually, if not exclusively, in the dregs of the intellectual world. Atheism, in the proper sense, is not very widespread, nor intellectually very considerable. Agnosticism, certainly, is both. It may be aggressive or reticent, developed or inchoate. It may be the result of thought, or a mere manifestation of what George Eliot calls that unlimited right of private haziness,' which many persons apparently consider the most precious portion of their intellectual heritage. I remember that the late Dr. Ward upon one occasion, when arguing upon some point of theology, thought well, according to his excellent practice, to begin with the beginning, and so proposed to his opponent the question: "By the way, to start with, do you believe in God?' The answer was, 'What God? The God of your Catholic teachers? Certainly not. But I don't deny that behind phenomena there may be something of which we know, and can know nothing. Phenomena and their relations would seem to imply as much.' It would be an error to suppose that such a way of thinking is confined to the learned. I believe that the general mind is largely clouded with this doubt. It darkens the dim intellects, and thwarts the dull lives of millions who could give no coherent account of it. At the beginning of the century Rivarol pronounced impiety the greatest of indiscretions. Now society' not only tolerates, but even relishes, its most fullflavoured manifestations. Fifty years ago, Emerson noted 'polite bows to God in the newspapers' as an English trait. Now, the one thing which our journals, delivering their 'brawling judgments un

ashamed, on all things, all day long,' are agreed upon, is to ignore the Judge of all the earth. Sir Robert Peel said, upon a well-known occasion, 'Take my word for it, it is not prudent to trust yourself to a man who does not believe in God and in a future life after death.' What would Mr. Gladstone now say to such a sentiment? Nay, is there any member of either House of Parliament, not excepting the Right Reverend Bench, who would endorse it? But I need not dwell further upon what must be plain to every competent observer. Let me rather go on to inquire what are the special causes of this movement of contemporary thought.

They seem to me to be mainly two-one physical and the other metaphysical. I cannot doubt that the abounding Agnosticism of the day is largely due to that stupendous advance of the experimental sciences, usually and justly reckoned a distinctive glory of the nineteenth century, and to the absorbing devotion to them so generally displayed. And this is natural enough. For these sciences dwell in the sphere of physical uniformity. They are nothing but a know ledge of the relative. Hence the tendency of professors of physicsthe faculty of thought being, like the dyer's hand, subdued to what it works into shut out the idea of a First Cause; a tendency described with equal vigour and accuracy by the great English poet of the last century, in words breathing true prophetic inspiration :—

upon

Make Nature still encroach
His plan,
And shove Him off as far as e'er we can,
Thrust some mechanic cause into His place,
Or bind in matter and diffuse in space,
Or, at one bound, o'erleaping all His laws,
Make God man's image: man the final cause.

Existence presents two problems-the how and the why. To explain the how of things, we must discover these uniformities of sequence or co-ordination which we call their laws. That is the province of physics. And with all that is beyond that, physical science, as such, is not concerned. It traces for us links-more or fewer in the chains of phenomena. But it cannot go farther than that uniform succession of antecedents and consequents. It cannot reach the innermost foundation of things, nor confer upon us a knowledge of their essence, or of their origin. It can no more reveal to us the source of the movement innate in the molecule, than it can explain the dialectic evolution of thought. These problems belong to a different order. Now unquestionably, as I had occasion to insist at length some time ago, in controversy with Professor Huxley, the masters of physical science often display a desire, and more than a desire, to bring everything within its boundaries. Perhaps no one has exhibited this characteristic more signally than Mr. Herbert Spencer, who excludes free spontaneity from all spheres of life, and imposes everywhere the same mechanical necessity--what he is VOL. XXIV.-No. 138.

U

pleased to call necessity-which rules in the domain of physical or chemical forces. No one acquainted with my writings will suppose me likely to contravene the authority of experimental science within its proper department. But it seems to me that one of the most crying needs of the day is to repel the aggressions of its professors upon provinces of thought absolutely beyond their jurisdiction.

Physics is wholly the science of the senses. It is not in the least concerned with what the late Mr. Lewes called the metempirical. The chemist who denies that the Ultimate Reality can be known because he does not find it in his crucibles and retorts, the astronomer who preaches the same gospel of nescience, because when he sweeps the heavens with his telescope he sees no God there, are really like deaf men who should question the fact of sound because they cannot smell it. I must be permitted to say that the naturalism, the positivism, the materialism so confidently preached in the name of science,' appear to me merely an insurrection against reason. The theory of the universe which reduces universal causation to the pullings and pushings of the final particles of matter, and which we are so often called upon to believe-under pain, as it were, of intellectual reprobation-offers unspeakably greater difficulties to the intellect than any form of Theism with which I am acquainted. It seems to me that Mr. Carlyle was well warranted in ranking the cult of the new deity, Mechanism, below the superstitions of medieval sorcery. Surely if any fact stands out as beyond question, it is this: that every part of the objective universe, when examined, is found to be intelligible. Reason everywhere-in the microcosm of the leaf and the macrocosm of the fixed stars, and in the mind of manthat is the lesson of every page of Nature's book. And does not this point to the Supreme Cause as Objective Reason? Does not the intelligibility of the world imply an intelligent Author of the world? Is it not against reason to believe that the unintelligible is the primary source of the intelligible? He that formed the eye shall He not see?' asked the Hebrew poet. But now we are told that the eye formed itself; that this most exquisite piece of mechanism has insensibly developed from a sensitive membrane. Natural selection, we are assured, has transformed a simple apparatus, formed of an optic nerve, clothed with pigment, and covered with a transparent tissue, to that admirable instrument of vision called the eye. Well, let us suppose that this is so, as I, for my part, have no difficulty in believing. And pray, how does it tell against the Divine induction? May we not rather apply to it the words which Geoffroy St.-Hilaire used of the succession of species, and see in it 'one of the most glorious manifestations of creative power and a fresh motive for admiration and love'? Surely this is a more reasonable hypothesis than that which explains so marvellous a development by chance or blind necessity.

Natural selection! Let me say another word upon that topic before I pass on. Who that has given attention to the great question of evolution, so much discussed of late years, does not remember the unbounded confidence with which the mechanical theory of species was advanced by ultra-Darwinians? I mean the theory which explained the type as a sort of mosaic put together by the hazard of external circumstances, as a fortuitous aggregation of characteristics, produced in isolation, one after another, by selection or habit. But it was pointed out that the very facts-experience itself-force us to recognise the regular correlation of the characteristics appertaining to the type of a species, and that this is absolutely fatal to the mechanical principle of explanation. Recognise-and you cannot help recognising, unless you are theory-blind-recognise the law of correlation, and you must also recognise the fact that every individual modification of importance is directly linked to a system of correlative modifications. And such recognition makes an end of that hypothesis of indeterminate variability, resting upon purely fortuitous influences, which furnishes a basis for the merely mechanical concept of the two forms of selection. Is it reasonable to ask us to regard as fortuitous a totality of correlative modifications producing themselves in the most different parts of the organism and preserving among themselves the same relation? It is unreasonable. The only rational explanation is to be found in the doctrines of Final Causes and Directive Intelligence. And if this be so, St. Paul was right when he talked of τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ—that which is known of God -and declared that the visible universe manifests His power and Godhead and our modern physicists are wrong when they preach agnosticism.

But here we are met by a metaphysical argument, which has obtained wide currency. Its source is in the philosophy of Kant; or rather in a section of that philosophy taken apart from the totality. Kant, unquestionably, was a Theist. As unquestionably he insists that no unity of thought and being is knowable save the unity of experience, and that this is the sole realisation, cognisable by the speculative reason, of the ideal to which men have ascribed the name of God. This is the principle which, filtrated through Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, serves as the foundation for the agnosticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Now is it true that the principle of causality cannot take us beyond the limits of experience? that it is of purely subjective value? It would be out of place for me here to enter upon a metaphysical discussion. And, indeed, the subject would demand a dissertation, or rather a volume, for its adequate treatment. I must content myself with indicating in the fewest words how the argument seems to me to lie. I admit, then, that the subject imposes its own form on knowledge and makes it subjective. I deny that subjectivism necessarily follows from this.